Mike Isaac

Meta Calls for Industry Effort to Label AI-Generated Content

In January at the World Economic Forum, Nick Clegg, president of global affairs at Meta, called a nascent effort to detect artificially generated content “the most urgent task” facing the tech industry today. Now, Mr. Clegg has proposed a solution.

Silicon Valley Ditches News, Shaking an Unstable Industry

The major online platforms are breaking up with news. Some executives of the largest tech companies, like Adam Mosseri at Instagram, have said in no uncertain terms that hosting news on their sites can often be more trouble than it is worth because it generates polarized debates. Others, like Elon Musk, the owner of X, have expressed disdain for the mainstream press. Publishers seem resigned to the idea that traffic from the big tech companies will not return to what it once was.

The Silent Partner Cleaning Up Facebook for $500 Million a Year

Facebook has constructed a vast infrastructure to keep toxic material off its platform. At the center of it is Accenture, the blue-chip consulting firm. The two companies have rarely talked about their arrangement or even acknowledged that they work with each other, but their secretive relationship lies at the heart of an effort by the world’s largest social media company to distance itself from its content moderation practices.

Facebook Moves to Limit Election Chaos in November

Facebook moved to clamp down on any confusion about the November 2020 election on its service, rolling out a series of changes to limit voter misinformation and to prevent interference from President Donald Trump and other politicians. The social network, in one of its most sweeping sets of election actions, said it planned to bar any new political ads on its site in the week before Election Day. It said it would also strengthen measures against posts that try to dissuade people from voting.

The Economy Is Reeling. The Tech Giants Spy Opportunity.

Even with the global economy reeling from a pandemic-induced recession and dozens of businesses filing for bankruptcy, tech’s largest companies — still wildly profitable and flush with billions of dollars from years of corporate dominance — are deliberately laying the groundwork for a future where they will be bigger and more powerful than ever.

Defying President Trump, Twitter Doubles Down on Labeling Tweets

Twitter continued to add new fact-checking labels to hundreds of tweets, even as the Trump administration issued an executive order to curtail the legal protections that shield social media companies from liability for the content posted on their platforms. Twitter’s move escalated the confrontation between the company and President Donald Trump, who has fulminated over actions taken by his favorite social media service.

Don’t Tilt Scales Against President Trump, Facebook Executive Warns

On Dec. 30, Andrew Bosworth, the head of Facebook’s virtual and augmented reality division, wrote on his internal Facebook page that, as a liberal, he found himself wanting to use the social network’s powerful platform against President Donald Trump. But citing the “Lord of the Rings” franchise and the philosopher John Rawls, Mr. Bosworth said that doing so would eventually backfire. “So what stays my hand?

How Facebook Is Changing to Deal With Scrutiny of Its Power

Facebook has started to modify its behavior — in both pre-emptive and defensive ways — to deal with threats of regulation. Facebook has its eye particularly on the Federal Trade Commission, the agency that is now investigating it for anticompetitive practices.

Facebook Antitrust Inquiry Shows Big Tech’s Freewheeling Era Is Past

The new reality for big tech companies: Scrutiny from regulators and lawmakers has become a constant. For the past few years, American regulators appeared to be lagging as authorities around the world have stepped up their actions to crimp the power of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. The contrast was starkest with European officials, who have passed laws and imposed a series of large penalties against big tech companies. But in recent months, American lawmakers and regulators have also ramped up their activity.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Plans to Integrate WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to integrate the social network’s messaging services — WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger — asserting his control over the company’s sprawling divisions at a time when its business has been battered by scandals. The move requires thousands of Facebook employees to reconfigure how WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger function at their most basic levels.

Saudis’ Image Makers: A Troll Army and a Twitter Insider

The murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for The Washington Post, has focused the world’s attention on the kingdom’s intimidation campaign against influential voices raising questions about the darker side of the crown prince. The young royal has tightened his grip on the kingdom while presenting himself in Western capitals as the man to reform the hidebound Saudi state. Saudi operatives have mobilized to harass critics on Twitter, a wildly popular platform for news in the kingdom since the Arab Spring uprisings began in 2010.

Facebook Is Breached, Putting 50 Million Users’ Data at Risk

Facebook said that an attack on its computer network had exposed the personal information of nearly 50 million users. The company said it discovered the breach this week, finding that attackers had exploited a feature in Facebook’s code that allowed them to take over user accounts. The company said it fixed the vulnerability and notified law enforcement officials. “We’re taking it really seriously,” said Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive. “We have a major security effort at the company that hardens all of our surfaces.” He added: “I’m glad we found this.

Inside Facebook’s Election ‘War Room’

Although it is not much to look at now, as of the week of Sept 24 the "War Room" will be Facebook’s headquarters for safeguarding elections.

Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share

Facebook has introduced sweeping changes to the kinds of posts, videos and photos that its more than two billion members will see most often, saying that it would prioritize what their friends and family share and comment on while de-emphasizing content from publishers and brands. The shift is the most significant overhaul in years to Facebook’s News Feed, the cascading screen of content that people see when they log into the social network. Over the next few weeks, users will begin seeing fewer viral videos and news articles shared by media companies.

Net Neutrality Protests Move Online, Yet Big Tech Is Quiet

Protests to preserve network neutrality, or rules that ensure equal access to the internet, migrated online on Dec 12, with numerous online companies posting calls on their sites for action to stop a vote later this week. Reddit, Etsy and Kickstarter were among the sites warning that the proposal at the Federal Communications Commission to roll back so-called net neutrality rules would fundamentally change the way the internet is experienced.

Facebook Has a New Messaging App Aimed at Those 13 and Under

More than 1 billion people — mostly adults — use Facebook’s Messenger app to communicate every month. Now, the future of Messenger is set to become much younger. 

Tech Executives Are Contrite About Election Meddling, but Make Few Promises on Capitol Hill

Executives from Facebook, Google and Twitter appeared on Capitol Hill for the first time on Oct 31 to publicly acknowledge their role in Russia’s influence on the presidential campaign, but offered little more than promises to do better. Their reluctance frustrated lawmakers who sought stronger evidence that American elections will be protected from foreign powers. The hearing, the first of three in two days for company executives, served as an initial public reckoning for the internet giants.

Uber’s CEO Plays With Fire

A blindness to boundaries is not uncommon for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. But in Travis Kalanick, that led to a pattern of repeatedly going too far at Uber, including the duplicity with Apple, sabotaging competitors and allowing the company to use a secret tool called Greyball to trick some law enforcement agencies. To develop its own business, Uber sidestepped the authorities. Some employees started using a tool called Greyball to deceive officials trying to shut down Uber’s service. The tool, developed to aid driver safety and to trick fraudsters, essentially showed a fake version of Uber’s app to some people to disguise the locations of cars and drivers. It soon became a way for Uber drivers to evade capture by law enforcement in places where the service was deemed illegal.

Uber engineers assigned a persistent identity to iPhones with a small piece of code, a practice called “fingerprinting.” Uber could then identify an iPhone and prevent itself from being fooled even after the device was erased of its contents. There was one problem: Fingerprinting iPhones broke Apple’s rules. Apple CEO Tim Cook believed that wiping an iPhone should ensure that no trace of the owner’s identity remained on the device. So Kalanick told his engineers to “geofence” Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino (CA) a way to digitally identify people reviewing Uber’s software in a specific location. Uber would then obfuscate its code for people within that geofenced area, essentially drawing a digital lasso around those it wanted to keep in the dark. Apple employees at its headquarters were unable to see Uber’s fingerprinting.

How Uber Used Secret Greyball Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide

Uber has for years engaged in a worldwide program to deceive the authorities in markets where its low-cost ride-hailing service was being resisted by law enforcement or, in some instances, had been outright banned. The program, involving a tool called Greyball, uses data collected from the Uber app and other techniques to identify and circumvent officials. Uber used these methods to evade the authorities in cities such as Boston, Paris and Las Vegas, and in countries like Australia, China, Italy and South Korea. Greyball was part of a broader program called VTOS, short for “violation of terms of service,” which Uber created to root out people it thought were using or targeting its service improperly. The VTOS program, including the Greyball tool, began as early as 2014 and remains in use, predominantly outside the United States. Greyball was approved by Uber’s legal team.

Facebook, Nodding to Its Role in Media, Starts a Journalism Project

Facebook is increasingly owning up to its role as one of the world’s largest distributors of information by taking more responsibility for the millions of stories that flow through its site. On Jan 11, the social network made its latest move to acknowledge that role by announcing the Facebook Journalism Project.

The effort calls for the company to forge deeper ties with publishers by collaborating on publishing tools and features before they are released. Facebook will also develop training programs and tools for journalists to teach them how to better search its site to report on news and events. And Facebook wants to help train members of the public to find news sources they trust, while fighting the spread of fake news across its site. The project will begin in coming weeks in partnership with publishers including The Washington Post and Vox.

Facebook and Other Tech Companies Seek to Curb Flow of Terrorist Content

For all the good that has come from the internet, the online world has also served as a powerful device for recruiting terrorists and spreading their propaganda. A coalition of top technology companies is now trying to change that.

Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft announced that they have teamed up to fight the spread of terrorist content over the web by sharing technology and information to reduce the flow of terrorist propaganda across their services. The group plans to create a kind of shared digital database, “fingerprinting” all of the terrorist content that is flagged. By collectively tracking that information, the companies said they could make sure a video posted on Twitter, for instance, did not appear later on Facebook. Through the coalition, technology companies will use “hashes,” or what they describe as “unique digital fingerprints,” to identify terrorist imagery and videos uploaded to their services.

CNN Brings In the Social App Beme to Cultivate a Millennial Audience

With millions of people regularly tuning in to his YouTube video blogs every morning, Casey Neistat has a millennial fan base coveted by both marketers and media companies. Now, one of those big media outlets is bringing Neistat — and, it hopes, his youthful audience — in-house. CNN announced that it had agreed to acquire the technology and talent behind Beme, the social media app built and started by Neistat and Matt Hackett, a former vice president of engineering at Tumblr. Beme’s 12 employees will join CNN as part of the deal, the terms of which were not publicly disclosed.

Beme was intended to be a social sharing application that Neistat described as “more authentic,” a way of putting four-second bursts of video out into the social sphere without giving users the ability to edit or tweak the content. Taking video was as simple as holding a smartphone’s front-facing sensor to one’s body, as if the camera were an extension of one’s chest. Neistat hopes to bring that idea of authenticity to a news and media environment to draw in a younger audience largely untapped by the cable news network. CNN will shut down the Beme app, which had 1.2 million downloads before losing steam.

Facebook Considering Ways to Combat Fake News, Mark Zuckerberg Says

After more than a week of accusations that the spread of fake news on Facebook may have affected the outcome of the presidential election, Mark Zuckerberg published a detailed post describing ways the company was considering dealing with the problem.

Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chairman and chief executive, broadly outlined some of the options he said the company’s news feed team was looking into, including third-party verification services, better automated detection tools and simpler ways for users to flag suspicious content. “The problems here are complex, both technically and philosophically,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We believe in giving people a voice, which means erring on the side of letting people share what they want whenever possible.” The post was perhaps the most detailed glimpse into Zuckerberg’s thinking on the issue since Donald Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton in the Nov. 8 election. Within hours of his victory being declared, Facebook was accused of affecting the election’s outcome by failing to stop bogus news stories, many of them favorable to Trump, from proliferating on its social network. Executives and employees at all levels of the company have since been debating its role and responsibilities.

Google and Facebook Take Aim at Fake News Sites

Google and Facebook have faced mounting criticism over how fake news on their sites may have influenced the presidential election’s outcome. Those companies responded by making it clear that they would not tolerate such misinformation by taking pointed aim at fake news sites’ revenue sources. Google kicked off the action saying it will ban websites that peddle fake news from using its online advertising service. Facebook updated the language in its Facebook Audience Network policy, which already says it will not display ads in sites that show misleading or illegal content, to include fake news sites. Taken together, the decisions were a clear signal that the tech behemoths could no longer ignore the growing outcry over their power in distributing information to the American electorate.