Company / division: Facebook
Facebook failed to remove sexualised images of children – BBC News (Mar 7, 2017)
Just when Facebook seems to be making progress with news organizations, it does something like this: reporting the BBC to the police for “sharing” child pornography in an effort to push Facebook to take the content down. The BBC’s reporting here is just vague enough that it’s possible that the images that weren’t taken down despite being reported really don’t contravene Facebook’s policies, but this certainly isn’t a good look for Facebook, which should be doing everything it can to stamp out child pornography and images of child abuse on the site, rather than obstructing investigations into it. And it certainly shouldn’t be doing ridiculous things like reporting journalists to the police under such circumstances.
via BBC News
Facebook is on a big listening tour for local media — and publishers are actually happy – Mashable (Mar 6, 2017)
When Facebook announced its Journalism Project a few weeks ago (and hired Campbell Brown to take a leadership role within it), it said all the right words about wanting to partner with news organizations and help them be successful. But the problem with platforms like Facebook and Google is those promising words have often rung hollow as they’ve subsequently pursued initiatives and products which ended up threatening rather than helping the media industry, and news sites in particular. It’s heartening, then, to see that Facebook seems to be engaging in a fairly genuine way with news organizations, and actually listening to them and their concerns. This article also suggests that these organizations are responding positively to some of the new ad options Facebook is introducing (though of course it remains to be seen how Facebook users respond to things like a higher ad load in Instant Articles and mid-roll video ads). It’s early days still, but there are at least some signs that Facebook means what it says about partnering in healthier ways with content partners.
via Mashable
In Rush to Live Video, Facebook Moved Fast and Broke Things – WSJ (Mar 6, 2017)
There’s some really good reporting here, and it reinforces my sense that Facebook’s live video push hasn’t panned out the way it would have wanted despite its massive investment. I continue to believe that mass market live video has very limited appeal, largely because most of us don’t spend most of our time in situations which are worthy of (or appropriate for) broadcasting to our hundreds of friends. Yes, there are occasions when user-generated live video is uniquely placed to offer something no other medium can, but those are rare and not the basis for a widely used mainstream product. It’s still intriguing to me to see Facebook push so hard for individuals to share and consume amateur video, while Twitter has balanced its Periscope investment with a focus on high quality professional live video, including sports – easily the most compelling form of live content around for most users. This is one area where Twitter’s strategy feels smarter than Facebook’s, and it’s therefore not that surprising that Facebook seems to be experimenting more with live sports video as well.
via WSJ
Facebook has started to flag fake news stories – Recode (Mar 6, 2017)
This was part of Facebook’s plan for dealing with fake news, announced back in December, so there’s no huge surprise here. But Recode picks up on several points worth noting, most importantly that because Facebook is relying on third party fact checkers, vetting fake news stories can often take quite some time, even when they come from a publication known to publish only false news stories. That’s problematic because by the time the “disputed” label is attached, many people will have seen and believed the story, and attaching it a week after it first surfaces will likely have little impact, especially on a high profile and popular story. It really feels like Facebook needs a separate label for entire fake news publications which is applied automatically to its links – that would be straightforward and far more useful, and could still be done in cooperation with fact checking organizations. But if Snopes and Politifact are going to be really useful, they have to move much faster on this stuff. Here’s hoping Facebook becomes less hesitant and pushes its partners to act more quickly, so that this tool can become really useful.
via Recode
As Messenger’s bots lose steam, Facebook pushes menus over chat – TechCrunch (Mar 3, 2017)
When Facebook and Microsoft first launched their respective chat bot strategies just under a year ago, I was skeptical – I argued that chat bots have very limited applicability and were ill-suited to the kind of broad app-replacement approach both companies were pushing. What we’ve seen since is a continued re-thinking of Facebook’s vision for bots, which has steadily pushed it in the direction of becoming very similar to interaction mechanisms we already have, whether in apps or mobile websites. As such, the unique value of a messenger-based interface is being eroded almost to zero, and the whole value proposition is being undermined. I don’t think this is the wrong way to go, necessarily – there will still be some interactions for which an app or site-like interface within messaging has some value – but this is further evidence that the original vision for chat bots in messaging apps was overblown. And of course that the idea that these bots would replace apps in a broad way was overblown too.
via TechCrunch
Oculus Drops Price of Rift and Controllers by $100 Each (Mar 1, 2017)
I’ve just had a little debate with myself (and with some others on Twitter) as to which site to link to for this news – lots provided essentially the same information in my Twitter feed at roughly the same time, and I was left with a choice of a site with a paywall, a site with egregious auto play videos, or a site with more superficial coverage. The news itself is interesting – Facebook/Oculus is reducing the price of both the Rift and the controller by $100 each for a total discount of $200 and a new combined price of $598, which puts it below the price for the $799 HTC Vive, but above the $399 price of the Playstation VR. The combined price of a console or PC plus headset is still lowest for Playstation by quite a distance, helping explain why the latter is selling so well, especially with a large installed base of consoles. Oculus insists it’s not reducing the price because of poor sales, and it’s been saying for months Oculus sales wouldn’t be material to Facebook’s overall business for years, so there’s some credibility to its claim that it’s just executing on a longer-term plan here. Even Sony’s nearly 1 million sales are still very small in the context of any other mainstream consumer electronics category, which is a useful reminder of VR’s relative immaturity. But lower prices will help accelerate things a bit, as well installment plans like the one HTC announced this week.
via Techmeme (alternatively, direct links to FT, USA Today, and Business Insider)
Facebook is starting to put ads in the middle of its videos – Recode (Feb 23, 2017)
This was reported as being on the way back in January, but now it’s official and expanding. That means Facebook is finally going to start trying to make some real money from all the video it’s been trying to get natively onto its platform, hopefully justifying all the effort it’s put into its video push over the last couple of years. For users, of course, that means you’re going to start seeing ads in yet more places on Facebook, though only on longer videos (ads can’t run until the 20 second mark on recorded videos or the 4 minute mark on live videos). Given that the vast majority of videos I see on Facebook are under a minute, I don’t imagine I’m going to be seeing that many. But that’s also why Facebook has been tweaking its algorithm to help promote longer videos. And of course all these ads can potentially go into the videos Facebook will show on its TV app.
via Recode
Inside Facebook’s AI Machine – Backchannel (Feb 23, 2017)
Backchannel (and Steven Levy in particular) seems to be becoming the default outlet (I was going to say channel) for these access-y pieces on AI and machine learning. Levy previously did something very similar for Apple last August, Amazon in November, and Google in October. And there continues to be a perceived need for this kind of thing because AI continues to be something that’s mostly talked about rather than seen by consumers. That’s not to say that it’s not in products – it clearly is, and the money quote from this article is that “Facebook today cannot exist without AI” – but that it’s not intuitively obvious to consumers that AI is behind a lot of what they use. Companies still need to tell their AI stories, particularly because narratives have emerged about Google being ahead or Apple being behind, and those narratives need to be countered. There are several interesting things in this particular article, but as that quote indicates the biggest thing that comes out of it for me is how central AI and machine learning are becoming to almost everything at Facebook. Secondarily, it’s interesting to see Facebook in some cases do complex processing on the phone itself, something Apple has pioneered but which others have largely eschewed in favor of cloud processing.
via Backchannel
How Messenger and “M” Are Shifting Gears — The Information (Feb 22, 2017)
Facebook’s M assistant in its original conception was a virtual assistant a la Siri or Cortana which lived in Messenger, but one which was being trained by humans while it was available to a very limited number of users. Over time, it became clear that the process of handing off from humans to AI for the broad set of tasks M was supposed to be able to handle wasn’t going well, and it appears Facebooks somewhat went back to the drawing board on that. At the same time, the bot strategy within Messenger hasn’t gone well either, with limited developer and user adoption. Facebook now seems to have decided to combine these two failing projects into a new one which it presumably hopes will go better – M will pop up from time to time in Messenger conversions between friends to offer to complete certain tasks based on context. That’s probably a better, narrower use case for an AI assistant, but it also has serious potential to be creepy to users having what they will perceive to be a private conversation. And herein lies one of the biggest challenges with AI and bots – in order to be useful, they need to insert themselves into private conversations, which means they need to listen in on private conversations, much like Google’s advertising within Gmail has always been context based. In theory, only computers are eavesdropping, but that doesn’t stop people from objecting. I’m not convinced yet that this is the right answer either for Facebook’s M or bot strategies.
via The Information
TransferWise launches international money transfers via Facebook – Reuters (Feb 21, 2017)
This is a fascinating confluence of a couple of different things – mobile money transfers and Facebook’s bot strategy. Facebook already offers money transfers directly through Messenger, but only in the US, while it began pushing bots in Messenger early last year without much success. It appears TransferWise, a young but successful European money transfer provider, is leveraging the bot platform in Messenger to enable mobile money transfers between multiple additional countries. As far as I can tell, the bot side of things is incidental – this is really about leveraging the network that exists on Messenger for painless payments, and a bot happens to be the mechanism. In that sense, it’s very similar to the iMessage integrations for payment providers Apple offers in iOS 10 – this is mostly about adding a financial layer to existing interactions.
via Reuters
Pirate Soccer Streams Thrive on Facebook – El Pais (Feb 21, 2017)
There have been a couple of stories recently about Facebook finding ways to detect and either crack down on or monetize pirated music on the platform, but this analysis from Spanish newspaper El Pais demonstrates that music is far from the only thing being pirated regularly on Facebook. It appears that there are massively popular streams – the article cites a recent game between Barcelona and Real Madrid where one stream alone had 700,000 viewers – which go largely unchecked on Facebook. The key to their success is that users follow Pages which post links to streams hosted by other entities – because the aggregators themselves never infringe on any copyright, they can build big audiences and merely direct them at whatever streams are available. As Facebook gets ever more serious about video on the platform, it’s going to have to get better at detecting infringing live streams in real time, especially if it wants to win the trust of traditional broadcasters.
via El Pais (in Spanish)
Facebook is giving WhatsApp the Snapchat treatment, too – Mashable (Feb 20, 2017)
Yet another use for Facebook’s very successful cloning of Snapchat’s Stories feature in Instagram, this time coming to WhatsApp. This is also another feature-level attempt to take share from Snapchat, which again seems to be what’s finally working for Facebook, in contrast to the whole-app approach it once favored. In this case, Facebook is ditching the Stories name and instead putting this feature in the Status slot in WhatsApp, but it looks like the format is very much the same.
via Mashable
Zuckerberg manifesto removes reference to Facebook monitoring ‘private channels’ – Business Insider (Feb 17, 2017)
Kudos to Mashable, which first noticed that one paragraph in a 6,000-word manifesto had been changed from the original to the final version (I covered the manifesto itself yesterday). And kudos, too, to Business Insider for following up with Facebook to find out why it was removed. The official explanation is that the paragraph talked too specifically about a capability Facebook hasn’t finalized yet, but it’s at least as likely that Facebook worried it would cause major privacy concerns. The paragraph in question talked about using AI to detect terrorists in private channels, which rather flies in the face of Facebook’s commitment to encryption and protecting privacy. As with much else in the letter, I think it was likely intended to be mostly aspirational rather than specific, but the original paragraph was rather tone deaf about how such an idea would be received even in such high-level terms.
via Business Insider
Mark Zuckerberg Pens a Personal and Facebook Manifesto (Feb 16, 2017)
Mark Zuckerberg has posted a combination personal and Facebook manifesto to the site, and has also been speaking to a variety of reporters about it over the last day or so. The manifesto is long and covers a ton of ground, some of it about the state of the world but much of it at least indirectly and often quite directly about Facebook and its role in such a world. In some ways, this builds on comments Zuckerberg made at the F8 developer conference last year, and it mostly stays at a similar high level, talking about grand ideas and issues at the 30,000 foot level rather than naming particular politicians or being more specific. To the extent that Zuckerberg is talking about how to use Facebook as a force for good in the world, this is admirable at least to a point. He clearly now both recognizes and is willing to admit to a greater extent than previously the role Facebook has played in some of the negative trends (and I believe this piece contains his first proactive use of the phrase “fake news”), and wants to help fix them, though much of his commentary on what’s going wrong spreads the blame more broadly. I’m also a little concerned that, although many of the problems Facebook creates stem from the service’s massive and increasing power over our lives, the solutions he proposes mostly seem to be about increasing Facebook’s power rather than finding ways to limit it. To some extent, that’s natural given who he is, but it suggests an ongoing unwillingness to recognize the increasing mediation of our world by big forces like Facebook and Google and the negative impact that can have. Still, it’s good to see more open communication on issues like this from a major tech leader – I’d love to see more of this kind of thing (as I wrote last summer in this piece).
via Facebook
Facebook wants you to apply for your next job on Facebook – USA Today (Feb 16, 2017)
Facebook has one of the biggest global audiences – perhaps the biggest – of any technology company, and it seems constantly tempted to try to leverage that audience for more things, with the next on the list recruiting services a la LinkedIn. I’m hugely skeptical about this – it’s one thing to know that a potential employer might scour social media accounts, but quite another to serve up your personal account directly in the application. I just don’t think most applicants want their Facebook profile to be front and center in their job hunting. In addition, even in the unlikely event Facebook were to match LinkedIn’s scale in this business, that’s a half-billion-a-quarter business, or about a tenth of Facebook’s current revenues. In other words, this is unlikely to take off, and even if it does, it won’t make a huge difference to Facebook’s business.
via USA Today
Facebook is launching an app for Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV – Recode (Feb 14, 2017)
More news out of Recode’s Code Media conference today (after Apple’s last night). This one was actually reported by the Wall Street Journal a little while ago and I commented on it then. I’m still a little skeptical about this, but there weren’t many more details in the announcement, and so we’ll have to see what the app actually looks like and how it works – I do think there’s potential for Facebook to use some of its clever technology to present people with a better feed of relevant video, but I think that’s some way off still. Also worth noting: Facebook will have apps for Amazon and Apple TV boxes as well as Samsung smart TVs, but not for Android TV. And of course Twitter already has a TV app, mostly useful for its live video, though there as here the big questions remains whether the companies can actually sell enough ads around this video to make the effort worthwhile.
via Recode
Facebook Tries to Offer Music Labels a YouTube Alternative – Bloomberg (Feb 13, 2017)
Billboard reported at the end of December that Facebook was working on a Content ID-like system for policing music rights infringement on the site, and this Bloomberg piece suggests more of the same. There are several challenges here. Firstly, most Facebook video is published privately, so it’s impossible for outsiders to truly gauge the scale of infringing content. Secondly, a lot of the music videos shared on Facebook are covers, not originals, making detection tough. And third, though Facebook wants to set itself up as a more attractive alternative to YouTube, with advertising as its business model it’s unlikely to pay out at a much higher rate, and in fact may detract from the progress being made by paid streaming services in compensating artists more adequately by creating yet another massive source of free music listening. As such, I’m not convinced that the labels should jump too quickly into bed with Facebook. And that’s tough for Facebook because it clearly wants to take share from YouTube, but music is a huge component of the latter’s popularity.
via Bloomberg
P&G Chief Brand Officer Lays Into Facebook and Google in Big Speech – Marketing Week (Feb 13, 2017)
I’ve changed the headline here to make it a bit more specific, but there’s actually quite a lot more to this speech, and although the article is a little hyperbolic, I do think this is important. Procter & Gamble is the world’s biggest advertiser, so its views and policies with regard to digital advertising are worth paying attention to. Its chief brand officer just gave a speech in which he railed against programmatic advertising and the broader opaque digital advertising supply chain, the power of Facebook and Google, inconsistent standards for measuring ad viewability, and more. Some of the very same things big ad-centric companies are constantly touting as key to their businesses are the same things that are causing consternation among major advertisers, and that’s a tension that isn’t going away anytime soon. Facebook is making strides on its metrics screwups from late last year, but programmatic – which Google talks up every quarter – is getting terrible press at the moment in relation to ads showing up on unappealing sites, and it feels like there are changes coming here. Worth reading the whole article just to see some of the big frustrations advertisers are working through and the possible impacts.
via Marketing Week
Facebook Agrees to Audit of its Metrics Following Data Controversy – WSJ (Feb 10, 2017)
This is yet another bit of damage control by Facebook in the wake of its metrics problems in late 2016, and the MRC partnership has been in the works for some time (see the full timeline on the “Facebook’s Bad Metrics” narrative page). It sounds like marketers are reassured by some of these moves, which combine better third party auditing with some new video ad buying options.
via WSJ (Facebook’s own post here)
Amazon, Apple, Google and Other Tech Companies on the Billboard Power 100 (Feb 9, 2017)
Billboard does an annual Power 100 ranking of the most important/influential execs in the music industry. Coming at this from a tech angle, there are several notable companies on the list: Spotify’s Daniel Ek takes the top spot, several Apple folks are at #4, Amazon at #12, iHeartMedia at #19, YouTube at #30, Pandora at #34, Facebook is at #54, and various others are scattered through the second 50. Amazon’s ranking is surprisingly high, but is entirely due to Billboard’s perception of Echo and Alexa’s role in transforming music, as illustrated by Billboard’s interview with Jeff Bezos and Amazon Music head Steve Boom. I think the take here is a little overblown, but there’s no doubt Echo and Alexa are changing the experience of music for the small minority of people who use them. YouTube’s relatively low ranking is surprising given how important a channel the site is for the music industry, but of course its relationship with the labels and artists is complicated. This kind of ranking exercise is always somewhat arbitrary, but it’s interesting to get a music industry take on the tech companies and their relative importance here.
via Billboard Bezos Interview (see also Power 100 rankings)