就在一年多前，Facebook宣布将创建一个广告数据库，并为研究人员、记者和公众提供该数据库。在加拿大成功测试后，Facebook于今年早些时候将该档案引入美国，并计划不久在英国推出一个修改版。

在2016年大选后Facebook为提高对该平台的信任而采取的所有措施中，政治广告档案是最有效的。它让任何人都可以看到正在运行的广告，在广告上花费了多少钱，谁是他们的目标。它还要求任何想购买政治广告的人都必须使用邮寄至其地址的代码，使用**ID进行注册。

总的来说，这些广告讲述了人们如何利用Facebook影响行为，同时采取措施确保广告商是他们所说的人。

Facebook表示，它计划随着时间的推移改进档案。而在美国大选前的几周，一些重大缺陷已经出现。

在大西洋地区，Alexis Madrigal发现了一个漏洞，允许广告商通过有限责任公司将捐款传递出去，从而使他们的身份变得微不足道。他的研究对象是MotiveAI，这是一家由Facebook第一位也是唯一一位总编辑Dan Fletcher和前Verge员工Kirsten Frisina共同创建的公司。弗莱彻是在Facebook早期的新闻探索中被**的，现在他创建了一家公司，据其网站称，“与一小群客户合作传播思想。”

《每日野兽》将MotiveAI与一个名为“民主新闻”的实体联系在一起，该实体创建政治宣传广告，并利用这些广告宣传其拥有的14个页面。据Madrigal报道，到目前为止，这些广告主要针对阿肯色州55岁至64岁的**，以及44岁以下的**。

仅在9月份，该公司就花了近40万美元购买了1600多万张照片。它是Facebook上最大的政治广告商之一——如果没有记者的调查，我们根本不知道它是谁。

如果你是全民医疗的粉丝，这看起来可能没那么可怕。但凯文·鲁斯（Kevin Roose）今天有一个故事说明了这种困惑的另一面。在弗吉尼亚州第十国会选区，一个不知名人士正在购买将民主党候选人詹妮弗·韦斯顿（Jennifer Wexton）描绘成（除其他外）纳粹的政治广告：

The ads paint Ms. Wexton as an “evil socialist,” with language and imagery not typically found in even the roughest campaigns. In one ad, which began running on Monday, Ms. Wexton is pictured next to an image of Nazi soldiers, and the ad’s text refers to her supporters as “modern-day brown shirts.” In another, which first ran this month, Ms. Wexton is compared to Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused the new Supreme Court justice, Brett M. Kavanaugh, of sexual assault. The image is captioned: “What’s the difference??? Nothing!! Both are liars.”

The person or group behind the ads is known to Facebook, but a mystery to the public. The funding disclaimer attached to the ads reads, simply, “Paid for by a freedom loving American Citizen exercising my natural law right, protected by the 1st Amendment and protected by the 2nd Amendment.” There is no other identifying information on the page.

Facebook要求广告商填写一份表格，披露谁为广告付费，但广告商可以在该领域写任何他们想写的东西。因此，你在这里看到的“热爱自由的美国公民”。

当然，公司向选举注入所谓黑钱的权利得到了最高**的支持。正如Madrigal所指出的，如果这里有一个补丁，它不可能是Facebook的一个：

While Facebook requires all ad sp***ors to send them a government ID, so that they can be “verified,” Facebook shares literally no information about the company that paid for a given ad, aside from the name. Given that LLCs are opaque and can pop into and out of existence, there is no formal mechani** for figuring out who is pushing what agenda. Though Fletcher maintains that his funding comes from Americans, it’s easy to imagine a hypothetical in which it does not. Let’s say MotiveAI had substantial Chinese or European investors. That foreign involvement could very easily be laundered through an American starting an LLC. Even better, a thicket of LLCs that would make it more difficult to connect different purchases up.

我之前说过，我创办这份时事通讯的一个原因是，随着公司开始采取措施控制Facebook的运营，跟踪影响Facebook运营的方式将发生变化。这些广告背后隐藏的手代表着政治中的新黑钱，希望我们能找到更多的方式来给他们带来阳光。

民主

支持进一步研究Twitter上的信息操作

Twitter发布了自2016年以来在该服务上发现的“与潜在信息运营相关的所有账户和相关内容”。

一名退伍军人发动了一场针对社交媒体虚假信息的战争

本·凯斯林和达斯汀·沃兹介绍了克里斯·戈德史密斯（Kris Gold**ith）的个人资料，他是一名义务警员，是Facebook的版主，负责搜索针对美国退伍军人的欺诈网页：

Working from offices, coffee shops, and his apartment, he has cataloged and flagged to Facebook about 100 questionable pages that have milli*** of followers. He sits for hours and clicks links, keeping extensive notes and compiling elaborate spreadsheets on how pages are interconnected, and tracing them back, when possible, to roots in Russia, Eastern Europe or the Middle East.

“The more I look, the more patterns I see,” he said.

沙特阿拉伯威胁任何在网上传播“假新闻”的人将被判处5年监禁和巨额罚款

这个国家显然在折磨和谋杀真正的记者是不够的；他们还打着“假新闻”的旗号威胁任何持不同政见者要坐牢

Saudi Arabia is threatening to give 5-year prison terms and heavy fines to anyone caught spreading “fake news” online, a warning to those discussing the suspected murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The threat, published over the weekend in the Saudi Gazette, echoes one of President Trump’s favorite phrases to demean any journali** that he finds unfavorable to his regime.

The Saudi Gazette cited Article 6 of the Saudi Arabia’s cybercrimes regulati*** which makes it against the law to breach “public order, religious values, public morals and privacy.” The law makes no distinction between Saudi citizens and foreign nationals found to be in violation of the draconian rules.

孟加拉国骗局锁定妇女游行积极分子

下面是多尼·奥沙利文（Donie O’Sullivan）的一个引人注目的时代故事，讲述了孟加拉国人如何在Facebook上宣传假**游行以销售T恤衫(我意识到标题听起来像是妇女们在从孟加拉国逃走；事实上，骗局就是从那里开始的。）

The pages were not run by the Russian trolls who meddled in the US’ 2016 election, and have continued doing so since. They were run from Bangladesh, a CNN investigation has found — and they were designed to exploit Americans’ interest in politics and protests in order to sell t-shirts.

In all, there were 1,700 separate Facebook pages designed to look like they were run by local Women’s March organizers, a source familiar with Facebook’s investigation into the issue told CNN.

杰克·多尔西在推特上扮演****和过滤泡沫的角色

以下是本周早些时候杰克·多尔西在Wired 25采访尼古拉斯·汤普森的完整记录：

DORSEY: I think Twitter does contribute to filter bubbles. And I think that’s wrong of us. I think we need to fix it. But I don’t think it’s the chronological timeline or the ranked timeline that does it. I think it’s the fact that we only enable you to follow an account.

在别处

资助取消扎克伯格Facebook董事长职务的提议

几家持有Facebook股份的公共基金支持一项股东提议，将首席执行官马克·扎克伯格（Mark Zuckerberg）推选为董事长。

YouTube已经关闭，但现在又回来了

周二晚些时候，YouTube发生了罕见的大范围宕机。原因不明：

As with all Google-operated services, serious downtime for YouTube is pretty rare. YouTube TV did suffer service interruption at an inopportune time during this summer’s World Cup, however, and channel pages went down for a while in April. Perhaps most infamously, Pakistan’s government accidentally caused an hours-long global YouTube blackout a decade ago by attempting to censor a trailer for an anti-Islamic film.

Tumblr的“推荐博客”功能公开了用户数据

谷歌+的阴影！

A security bug that hit Tumblr’s recommended blogs module may have exposed users’ private information, according to an open letter. Information like email addresses, passwords, IP addresses, and self-reported locati*** may have become exposed due to the bug if individual accounts were hit.

It’s unclear if the bug affected individual accounts, according to the open letter, but an investigation concluded that the bug “was rarely present.”

洛根·保罗（Logan Paul）的YouTube高级电影在争议几个月后重新上映

在洛根·保罗今年早些时候拍摄了一个死人并上传到YouTube之前，他准备拍摄一部名为《变薄：新世界秩序》的电影。茱莉亚·亚历山大报道说，它关闭了，但现在又重新打开了：

Paul posted a trailer for the film on YouTube last night. There’s no release date for the YouTube Premium (formerly YouTube Red) project yet, but Paul suggests in the comments that it’ll be available for Premium subscribers “very soon.” Paul also tweeted out the news with a devil emoji, announcing the “surprise” move.

Reddit首席执行官哈夫曼将匿名用户视为伪装的祝福

Sarah Frier表示，不要指望Reddit很快上市：

Huffman has hinted previously that an IPO could be in Reddit’s future. But now, “we look at our peers and we look at what’s going on with the market – I want to make sure if we do something like that, that we can continue to maintain the courage of our convicti***,” said Huffman, who is better known as “spez” on the website he co-founded in 2005 with Alexis Ohanian.

An initial public offering is “probably 35 years out,” he joked.

出版商流量的下一波大浪潮

莎拉·菲舍尔（Sara Fischer）报告说，Facebook和Twitter使用Chartbeat的新数据向出版商发送的流量减少了：

Facebook traffic to publishers is down so much (nearly 40%) that according to Chartbeat, “a user is now more likely to find your content through your mobile website or app than from Facebook.”

Google Search on mobile has grown more than 2x, helping guide users to stories on publishers’ owned and operated channels.

谷歌关于我的档案很大。这就是为什么它不像我的Facebook数据那么令人毛骨悚然。

布莱恩X。陈比较了谷歌和Facebook收集到的关于他的数据：

Whenever I was perturbed by parts of my Google data, like a record of the Android apps I had opened over the past several years, I was relieved to find out I could delete the data. In contrast, when I downloaded my Facebook data, I found that a lot of what I saw could not be purged.

发射

Twitter将很快显示一条已报道的推文何时被删除

尼克·斯塔特（Nick Statt）报告说，Twitter正在为其报告过程带来一些急需的清晰性：

In an update outlined this morning on the company’s blog, Twitter will now clearly highlight when a reported tweet had an enforcement action taken against it. The goal, writes Twitter product manager Sam Toizer, is to help the public understand when a rule-breaking tweet was forcibly taken down and not just simply deleted by the user due to backlash.

支持和反对删除推文的理由

我最喜欢的播客之一，《你为什么要按那个按钮？》第三季又回来了，首映集给我们带来了一个及时的话题：你应该删除你的推特吗？马克斯·里德和布莱安娜·吴客串明星。

拿

假新闻正在毒害巴西政治。WhatsApp可以阻止它。

克里斯蒂娜·塔尔达拉、法布里西奥·贝内维努托和巴勃罗·奥尔特拉多是一份关于巴西错误信息的新报告的作者。它们提供了WhatsApp可以采取的一些实际步骤，以减少虚假新闻的病毒传播：

Restrict forwards. This year, after the dissemination of rumors on WhatsApp provoked lynchings in India, the company put restricti*** on the number of times that a message could be forwarded. Globally, the number of forwards was reduced to 20, while in India it was reduced to five. WhatsApp should adopt the same measure in Brazil to limit the reach of disinformation.

Restrict broadcasts. WhatsApp allows every user to send a single message to up to 256 contacts at once. This means that a **all, coordinated group can easily conduct a large-scale disinformation campaign. This could be prevented by limiting the number of contacts to whom a user could broadcast a message.

为什么很难惩罚数据泄露的公司

约瑟芬·沃尔夫（Josephine Wolff）写道，很难确定像Facebook这样的公司是如何以及在何处出错的，这使得监管面临挑战：

At first glance, the lack of c***equences that companies face for data breaches might seem to be a clear problem and something that can be easily remedied through heavy regulation like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. However, the problem turns out to be more complicated than that. Two challenges, in particular, have hindered effective legal and regulatory resp***es to breaches: determining whether a company was negligent in its security practices, and figuring out how to calculate the monetary value of stolen personal information and the harms inflicted on the people whose data was breached.

The fact that your personal information was stolen from a company does not necessarily mean that the company did a poor job of securing your data and therefore deserves to be punished. The Facebook breach, for example, was made possible by three software vulnerabilities tied to user tools for privacy and for uploading birthday videos. These vulnerabilities might seem like problems that Facebook should have caught early on, but the truth is that every company has bugs like these in its software.

跟我说

向我发送提示、评论、问题和禁用的Twitter帐户：[email protected].

更新，10/20：这篇文章已经更新，添加了MotiveAI的联合创始人。