Google Told to Rein in Profits
December 5, 2017
Google makes a lot of money with their advertising algorithms. Every quarter their profit looms higher and higher, but the San Francisco Gate reports that might change in the article, “Google Is Flying High, But Regulatory Threats Loom.” Google and Facebook are being told they need to hold back their hyper efficient advertising machines. Why? Possible Russian interference in the 2016 elections and the widespread dissemination of fake news.
New regulations would require Google and Facebook to add more human oversight into their algorithms. Congress already has a new bill on the floor with new regulations for online political ads to allow more transparency. Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook already making changes, but Google has not done anything and will not get a free pass.
It’s hard to know whether Congress or regulators will actually step up and regulate the company, but there seems to be a newfound willingness to consider such action,’ says Daniel Stevens, executive director of the Campaign for Accountability, a nonprofit watchdog that tracks Google spending on lobbyists and academics. ‘Google, like every other industry, should not be left to its own devices.’
Google has remained mostly silent, but has made a statement that they will increase “efforts to improve transparency, enhance disclosures, and reduce foreign abuse.” Google is out for profit like any other company in the world. The question is if they have the conscience to comply or will find a way around it.
Whitney Grace, December 5, 2017
Filtering: Facebook Asserts Filtering Progress
November 29, 2017
i read “Hard Questions: Are We Winning the War on Terrorism Online?” The main point is that Facebook is filtering terrorism related content. Let’s assume that the assertion is correct. Furthermore, let’s assume that private group participants are reporting terror-related content so that information not available to the general Facebook community is devoid of terror related content.
This appears to be a step forward.
My thought is that eliminating the content may squeeze those with filtered messages to seek other avenues of information dissemination. For most people, the work arounds will be unfamiliar.
But options exist, and these options are becoming more widely used and robust. I remind myself that bad actors can be every bit as intelligent, resourceful, and persistent as the professionals working at companies like Facebook.
Within the last four months, the researchers assisting me on the second edition of the Dark Web Notebook have informed me:
- Interest in certain old-school methods of online communication has increased; for example, text communication
- Encrypted apps are gaining wider use
- Peer-to-peer mechanisms show strong uptake by certain groups
- Dark Web or i2p communication methods are not perfect but some work despite the technical hassles and latency
- Burner phones and sim cards bought with untraceable forms of payment are widely available from retail outlets like Kroger and Walgreens in the US.
Those interested in information which is filtered remind me of underground movements in the 1960s. At the university I attended, the surface looked calm. Then bang, an event would occur. Everyone was surprised and wondered where that “problem” came from. Hiding the problem does not resolve the problem I learned by observing the event.
The surface is one thing. What happens below the surface is another. Squeezing in one place on a balloon filled with water moves the water to another place. When the pressure is too great, the balloon bursts. Water goes in unexpected places.
My view is that less well known methods of communication will attract more attention. I am not sure if this is good news or bad news. I know that filtering alone does not scrub certain content from digital channels.
Net net: Challenges lie ahead. Net neutrality may provide an additional lever, but there will be those who seek to circumvent controls. Most will fail, but some will succeed. Those successes may be difficult to anticipate, monitor, and address.
Facebook filtering is comparatively easy. Reacting to consequences of filtering may be more difficult. It has taken many years to to achieve the modest victory Facebook has announced. That reaction time, in itself, is a reminder that there is something called a Pyrrhic victory.
Stephen E Arnold, November 29, 2017
Stephen E Arnold, November
Facebook and Foreign Policy
November 9, 2017
I knew online was important when I became involved in the commercial database sector in 1981. At that time, the idea that accessing online information to look up citations in Pharmaceutical News Index would mature into a policy crushing machine.
After reading “Facebook Can’t Cope with the World It’s Created,” I realized that online has arrived at the big dance. The company, however, lacks the jazzy moves of a John Travolta stayin’ alive.
Foreign Policy does not do fluffy “real news” write ups. You will have to navigate to the original at the link provided or make your way to a real library where the snappy publication is available.
I noted this assertion—well, maybe “real” news—in the article about everyone’s favorite social network:
On an earnings call earlier last week, Zuckerberg told investors and reporters “how upset I am that the Russians tried to use our tools to sow mistrust,” adding that he was “dead serious” about findings ways to tackle the problem. That would be a positive step — but it must also extend to examining Facebook’s tricky impacts in the rest of the world.
But the ace statement in the article is this observation, which I assume is 100 percent on the money:
In Myanmar today, Facebook is the internet.
There are some interesting groups in Myanmar, and it is reassuring to know that Facebook has everyone’s interests in mind. Free communication flows, friends, and nifty private groups.
What could possibly be untoward with these essential, unregulated modern functions? The government authorities are probably avid Facebookers too.
Stephen E Arnold, November 9, 2017
SEO Benefits Take Time to Realize
October 30, 2017
In many (most?) fields today, it is considered essential for companies to position themselves as close to the top of potential customers’ Web search results as possible. However, search engine optimization (SEO) efforts take time. Business 2 Community explains “Why It Takes Six Months to Improve Search Rankings.” Marketers must accept that, unless they luck out with content that goes viral, they will just have to be patient for results. Writer Kent Campbell explains five reasons this is the case, and my favorite is number one—search systems were not built to aid marketers in the first place! In fact, in some ways, quite the opposite. Campbell writes:
Bing and Google Serve Their Searchers, Not You.
A search provider’s primary concern is its users, not you or any other business that’s fighting for a spot on the first page. The search engine’s goal is to provide the best user experience to its searchers; that means displaying the most relevant and high quality results for every search query. Both Bing and Google watch how people react to content before they decide how visible that content should be in results. Even when content has had a lot of SEO therapy, the content itself has to be spot-on. This is why Google evaluates every piece of content on more than 200 ranking factors and ensures that only the best quality pages make it to the top 10. The best way to make it to the first page is by aligning yourself with Google’s objective, which is to serve its users.
A company might be seeing slow results because they hesitated—Early Movers Have an Advantage is the second reason Campbell gives. On the other hand, at number three, we find that Creating Quality Content Takes Time. Then there is the fact that Link Building Is Not as Simple as Before. Finally, there’s this more recent complication—Social Media Also Impacts Rankings these days. See the article for Campbell’s explanation for each point. He concludes with a little advice: companies would do well to consider their SEO efforts an ongoing cost of doing business, rather than an extraordinary item.
Cynthia Murrell, October 30, 2017
Instagram Milestone: 800 Million Monthly Active Users
October 27, 2017
If there were any doubts that Facebook’s 2012 purchase of Instagram was a good idea, this should put them to rest—SiliconBeat reports, “Facebook-Owned Instagram Reaches 800 Million Monthly Active Users.” Reporter Queenie Wong writes:
The photo-sharing app reached 800 million monthly active users, Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s vice president of global marketing solutions, announced at an advertising event in New York Monday. That’s an uptick of 100 million monthly users since April. Instagram also grew its daily active users to 500 million and reached 2 million advertisers. Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion in cash and stock in 2012. So far, the social media giant’s purchase appears to be paying off. Analysts have noted before that Instagram was a good investment for Facebook because it gave the company an app that was popular among teens.
Wong concludes by reminding us that Instagram has recently been competing with Snapchat with its own version of temporary posts, Stories. In fact, Facebook just announced the ability to cross-post Stories between the two platforms.
Cynthia Murrell, October 27, 2017
Wave of Fake News Is Proving a Boon for the Need for Humans in Tech
October 20, 2017
We are often the first to praise the ingenious algorithms and tools that utilize big data and search muscle for good. But we are also one of the first to admit when things need to be scaled back a bit. The current news climate makes a perfect argument for that, as we discovered in a fascinating Yahoo! Finance piece, “Fake News is Still Here, Despite Efforts by Google and Facebook.”
The article lays out all the failed ways that search giants like Google and social media outlets like Facebook have failed to stop the flood of fake news. Despite the world’s sharpest algorithms and computer programs, they can’t seem to curb the onslaught of odd news.
The article wisely points out that it is not a computer problem anymore, but, instead, a human one. The solution is proving to be deceptively simple: human interaction.
Facebook said last week that it would hire an extra 1,000 people to help vet ads after it found a Russian agency bought ads meant to influence last year’s election. It’s also subjecting potentially sensitive ads , including political messages, to ‘human review.’
In July, Google revamped guidelines for human workers who help rate search results in order to limit misleading and offensive material. Earlier this year, Google also allowed users to flag so-called ‘featured snippets’ and ‘autocomplete’ suggestions if they found the content harmful.
Bravo, we say. There is a limit to what high powered search and big data can do. Sometimes it feels as if those horizons are limitless, but there is still a home for humans and that is a good thing. A balance of big data and beating human hearts seems like the best way to solve the fake news problem and perhaps many others out there.
Patrick Roland, October 20, 2017
Social Media Should Be Social News
October 18, 2017
People are reading news more than ever due to easy information access on the Internet. While literacy rates soar, where people are reading news stories has changed from traditional news outlets to something comparatively newer and quite questionable. According to Pew Research, “News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2017,” people are obtaining their news stories from social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others. The Pew Research survey discovered that 67% of Americans get some of their news from social media, which has grown from 62% in 2016. The growth comes from people who are older, nonwhite and are less educated. That is an interesting statistic about American social groups:
Furthermore, about three-quarters of nonwhites (74%) get news on social media sites, up from 64% in 2016. This growth means that nonwhites1 are now more likely than whites to get news while on social media. And social media news use also increased among those with less than a bachelor’s degree, up nine percentage points from 60% in 2016 to 69% in 2017. Alternatively, among those with at least a college degree, social media news use declined slightly.
The information is different from what Pew Research has recorded in the past and there are two ways to interpret the data: compare the share of each social media’s users that get news on that specific Web site and the total percentage of Americans that get news on social media sites. Twitter, Snapchat, and YouTube she a significant growth in user shared news and these directly correspond to investments the companies made to in developing their usability. Facebook remains the number one social media Web site that distributes news, while YouTube is a close second. The data also shows that users visit multiple social media sites to read the news, but that they also rely on traditional news platforms as well.
Social media is a major component to how people communicate with the world around them. Perhaps traditional news outlets should look at ways to incorporate themselves more into social media. Will Facebook, YouTube, and/or Twitter hire journalists in the future?
Whitney Grace, October 18, 2017
Veteran Web Researcher Speaks on Bias and Misinformation
October 10, 2017
The CTO of semantic search firm Ntent, Dr. Ricardo Baeza-Yates, has been studying the Web since its inception. In their post, “Fake News and the Power of Algorithms: Dr. Ricardo Baeza-Yates Weights In With Futurezone at the Vienna Gödel Lecture,” Ntent shares his take on biases online by reproducing an interview Baeza-Yates gave Futurezone at the Vienna Gödel Lecture 2017, where he was the featured speaker. When asked about the consequences of false information spread far and wide, the esteemed CTO cited two pivotal events from 2016, Brexit and the US presidential election.
These were manipulated by social media. I do not mean by hackers – which cannot be excluded – but by social biases. The politicians and the media are in the game together. For example, a non-Muslim attack may be less likely to make the front page or earn high viewing ratings. How can we minimize the amount of biased information that appears? It is a problem that affects us all.
One might try to make sure people get a more balanced presentation of information. Currently, it’s often the media and politicians that cry out loudest for truth. But could there be truth in this context at all? Truth should be the basis but there is usually more than one definition of truth. If 80 percent of people see yellow as blue, should we change the term? When it comes to media and politics the majority can create facts. Hence, humans are sometimes like lemmings. Universal values could be a possible common basis, but they are increasingly under pressure from politics, as Theresa May recently stated in her attempt to change the Magna Carta in the name of security. As history already tells us, politicians can be dangerous.
Indeed. The biases that concern Baeza-Yates go beyond those that spread fake news, though. He begins by describing presentation bias—the fact that one’s choices are limited to that which suppliers have, for their own reasons, made available. Online, “filter bubbles” compound this issue. Of course, Web search engines magnify any biases—their top results provide journalists with research fodder, the perceived relevance of which is compounded when that journalist’s work is published; results that appear later in the list get ignored, which pushes them yet further from common consideration.
Ntent is working on ways to bring folks with different viewpoints together on topics on which they do agree; Baeza-Yates admits the approach has its limitations, especially on the big issues. What we really need, he asserts, is journalism that is bias-neutral instead of polarized. How we get there from here, even Baeza-Yates can only speculate.
Cynthia Murrell, October 10, 2017
Addicted Teens! Facebook Help Them!
October 6, 2017
I read “Teens Rebelling Against Social Media’, Say Headteachers.” Poor social media giants, one might say. Yeah, right. Real news, real facts, real phase change.
Decide for yourself.
The main point of the write up is that teens need “detox” and are embracing a cold turkey to help with withdrawl symptoms.
I noted this passage:
Chris King, chair of the HMC and Headmaster of Leicester Grammar School, said the findings were among “the first indications of a rebellion against social media”. He said they remind us that teenagers “may need help to take breaks from [social media’s] constant demands”. Some 56% of those surveyed said they were on the edge of addiction.
Hmm. Edge of addiction.
I circled this statement which was obviously based on “facts”:
Almost two-thirds of schoolchildren would not mind if social media had never been invented, research suggests.
I wonder if BBC professionals have ripped mobile devices from the addicted clutches of their own children?
Doubtful. Who wants a teen sulking and amping up the annoyance in a modern household?
Not me. Log on. Be happy. See I am not asking questions about methodology, analysis, and statistical validity. Gotta run. I have to check my social media feeds.
Stephen E Arnold, October 6, 2017
The Future of Visual and Voice Search
October 4, 2017
From the perspective of the digital marketers they are, GeoMarketing ponders, “How Will Visual and Voice Search Evolve?” Writer David Kaplan consulted Bing Ads’ Purna Virji on what to expect going forward. For example, though companies are not yet doing much to monetize visual search, Virji says that could change as AIs continue to improve their image-recognition abilities. She also emphasizes the potential of visual search for product discovery—If, for example, someone can locate and buy a pair of shoes just by snapping a picture of a stranger’s feet, sales should benefit handsomely. Virji had this to say about traditional, voice, and image search functionalities working together:
A prediction that Andrew Ng had made when he was still with Baidu was that that ‘by 2020, 50 percent of all search will be image or voice.’ Typing will likely never go away. But now, we have more options. Just like mobile didn’t kill the desktop, apps didn’t kill the browser, the mix of visual, voice, and text will combine in ways that are natural extensions of user behavior. We’ll use those tools depending on the specific need and situation at the moment. For example, you could ‘show’ Cortana a picture of a dress in a magazine via your phone camera and say ‘Hey Cortana, I’d love to buy a dress like this,’ and she can go find where to buy it online. In this way, you used voice and images to find what you were looking for.
The interview also touches on the impact of visual search on local marketing and how its growing use in social media offers data analysts a wealth of targeted-advertising potential.
Cynthia Murrell, October 4, 2017
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