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When Trolls and Crybullies Rule the Earth
How technology reshapes consciousness.
Over the past several years, teenage suicide rates have spiked horrifically. Depression rates are surging and America's mental health over all is deteriorating. What's going on?
My answer starts with technology but is really about the sort of consciousness online life induces.
When communication styles change, so do people. In 1982, the scholar Walter Ong described the way, centuries ago, a shift from an oral to a printed culture transformed human consciousness. Once, storytelling was a shared experience, with emphasis on proverb, parable and myth. With the onset of the printing press it become a more private experience, the content of that storytelling more realistic and linear.
As L.M. Sacasas argues in the latest issue of The New Atlantis, the shift from printed to electronic communication is similarly consequential. I would say the big difference is this: Attention and affection have gone from being private bonds to being publicly traded goods.
That is, up until recently most of the attention a person received came from family and friends and was pretty stable. But now most of the attention a person receives can come from far and wide and is tremendously volatile.
Sometimes your online post can go viral and get massively admired or ridiculed, while other times your post can leave you alone and completely ignored. Communication itself, once mostly collaborative, is now often competitive, with bids for affection and attention. It is also more manipulative — gestures designed to generate a response.
People ensconced in social media are more likely to be on perpetual alert: How are my ratings this moment? They are also more likely to feel that the amount of attention they are receiving is inadequate.
As David Foster Wallace put it in that famous Kenyon commencement address, if you orient your life around money, you will never feel you have enough. Similarly, if you orient your life around attention, you will always feel slighted. You will always feel emotionally unsafe.
New social types emerge in such a communications regime. The most prominent new type is the troll, and in fact, Americans have elected a troll as the commander in chief.
Trolls bid for attention by trying to make others feel bad. Studies of people who troll find that they score high on measures of psychopathy, sadism and narcissism. Online media hasn't made them vicious; they're just vicious. Online has given them a platform to use viciousness to full effect.
Trolls also score high on cognitive empathy. Intellectually, they understand other people's emotions and how to make them suffer. But they score low on affective empathy. They don't feel others' pain, so when they hurt you, they don't care.
Trolling is a very effective way to generate attention in a competitive, volatile attention economy. It's a way to feel righteous and important, especially if you claim to be trolling on behalf of some marginalized group.
Another prominent personality type in this economy is the crybully. This is the person who takes his or her own pain and victimization and uses it to make sure every conversation revolves around himself or herself. "This is the age of the Cry-Bully, a hideous hybrid of victim and victor, weeper and walloper," Julie Burchill wrote in The Spectator a few years ago.
The crybully starts with a genuine trauma. The terrible thing that happened naturally makes the crybully feel unsafe, self-protective and self-conscious to the point of self-absorption. The trauma makes that person intensely concerned about self-image.
The problem comes from the subsequent need to control any situation, the failure to see the big picture, the tendency to lash out in fear and anger as a way to fixate attention on oneself and obliterate others. Crybullying is at the heart of many of our campus de-platforming and censorship outrages.
Trolling, crybullying and other attention-grabbing tactics emerge out of a feeling of weakness, and create a climate that causes more pain, in which it is not safe to lead with vulnerability, not safe to test out ideas or do the things that create genuine companionship.
The internet has become a place where people communicate out of their competitive ego: I'm more fabulous than you (a lot of Instagram). You're dumber than me (much of Twitter). It's not a place where people share from their hearts and souls.
Of course, people enmeshed in such a climate are more likely to feel depressed, to suffer from mental health problems. Of course, they are more likely to see human relationship through the abuser/victim frame, and to be acutely sensitive to any power imbalance. Imagine you're 17 and people you barely know are saying nice or nasty things about your unformed self. It creates existential anxiety and hence fanaticism.
Two words loom large in this moment: trauma and equity. Trauma is living with the aftershocks of a bad event — or, more important, it is having no place to go where the aftershocks can be healed because the public conversation is unsafe. Equity is the dream of a world in which all are given equal attention and dignity. The dream is still out there, but it's receding with every vicious attack done in its name.
Source: www.nytimes.com
Tags: academia-censorship, affective-empathy, attention, attention-competition, concern-troll, crybully, david-brooks, empathy, feel-others-pain, instagram, manipulaiton, narcissism, psychopathy, sadism, social-media, trauma, twitter, vicious, victim-playing, victimization, weakness-feeling-of
It's Time to Break Up Facebook (Chris Hughes)
Mark's influence is staggering, far beyond that of anyone else in the private sector or in government. He controls three core communications platforms — Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — that billions of people use every day. Facebook's board works more like an advisory committee than an overseer, because Mark controls around 60 percent of voting shares. Mark alone can decide how to configure Facebook's algorithms to determine what people see in their News Feeds, what privacy settings they can use and even which messages get delivered. He sets the rules for how to distinguish violent and incendiary speech from the merely offensive, and he can choose to shut down a competitor by acquiring, blocking or copying it.
Mark is a good, kind person. But I'm angry that his focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks. I'm disappointed in myself and the early Facebook team for not thinking more about how the News Feed algorithm could change our culture, influence elections and empower nationalist leaders. And I'm worried that Mark has surrounded himself with a team that reinforces his beliefs instead of challenging them.
The government must hold Mark accountable. For too long, lawmakers have marveled at Facebook's explosive growth and overlooked their responsibility to ensure that Americans are protected and markets are competitive. Any day now, the Federal Trade Commission is expected to impose a $5 billion fine on the company, but that is not enough; nor is Facebook's offer to appoint some kind of privacy czar. After Mark's congressional testimony last year, there should have been calls for him to truly reckon with his mistakes. Instead the legislators who questioned him were derided as too old and out of touch to understand how tech works. That's the impression Mark wanted Americans to have, because it means little will change.
We are a nation with a tradition of reining in monopolies, no matter how well intentioned the leaders of these companies may be. Mark's power is unprecedented and un-American.
It is time to break up Facebook.
We already have the tools we need to check the domination of Facebook. We just seem to have forgotten about them.
America was built on the idea that power should not be concentrated in any one person, because we are all fallible. That's why the founders created a system of checks and balances. They didn't need to foresee the rise of Facebook to understand the threat that gargantuan companies would pose to democracy. Jefferson and Madison were voracious readers of Adam Smith, who believed that monopolies prevent the competition that spurs innovation and leads to economic growth.
A century later, in response to the rise of the oil, railroad and banking trusts of the Gilded Age, the Ohio Republican John Sherman said on the floor of Congress: "If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation and sale of any of the necessities of life. If we would not submit to an emperor, we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity." The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 outlawed monopolies. More legislation followed in the 20th century, creating legal and regulatory structures to promote competition and hold the biggest companies accountable. The Department of Justice broke up monopolies like Standard Oil and AT&T.
For many people today, it's hard to imagine government doing much of anything right, let alone breaking up a company like Facebook. This isn't by coincidence.
Starting in the 1970s, a small but dedicated group of economists, lawyers and policymakers sowed the seeds of our cynicism. Over the next 40 years, they financed a network of think tanks, journals, social clubs, academic centers and media outlets to teach an emerging generation that private interests should take precedence over public ones. Their gospel was simple: "Free" markets are dynamic and productive, while government is bureaucratic and ineffective. By the mid-1980s, they had largely managed to relegate energetic antitrust enforcement to the history books.
This shift, combined with business-friendly tax and regulatory policy, ushered in a period of mergers and acquisitions that created megacorporations. In the past 20 years, more than 75 percent of American industries, from airlines to pharmaceuticals, have experienced increased concentration, and the average size of public companies has tripled. The results are a decline in entrepreneurship, stalled productivity growth, and higher prices and fewer choices for consumers.
The same thing is happening in social media and digital communications. Because Facebook so dominates social networking, it faces no market-based accountability. This means that every time Facebook messes up, we repeat an exhausting pattern: first outrage, then disappointment and, finally, resignation.
In 2005, I was in Facebook's first office, on Emerson Street in downtown Palo Alto, when I read the news that Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation was acquiring the social networking site Myspace for $580 million. The overhead lights were off, and a group of us were pecking away on our keyboards, our 21-year-old faces half-illuminated by the glow of our screens. I heard a "whoa," and the news then ricocheted silently through the room, delivered by AOL Instant Messenger. My eyes widened. Really, $580 million?
Facebook was competing with Myspace, albeit obliquely. We were focused on college students at that point, but we had real identities while Myspace had fictions. Our users were more engaged, visiting daily, if not hourly. We believed Facebook surpassed Myspace in quality and would easily displace it given enough time and money. If Myspace was worth $580 million, Facebook could be worth at least double.
From our earliest days, Mark used the word "domination" to describe our ambitions, with no hint of irony or humility. Back then, we competed with a whole host of social networks, not just Myspace, but also Friendster, Twitter, Tumblr, LiveJournal and others. The pressure to beat them spurred innovation and led to many of the features that distinguish Facebook: simple, beautiful interfaces, the News Feed, a tie to real-world identities and more.
It was this drive to compete that led Mark to acquire, over the years, dozens of other companies, including Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014. There was nothing unethical or suspicious, in my view, in these moves.
One night during the summer of the Myspace sale, I remember driving home from work with Mark, back to the house we shared with several engineers and designers. I was in the passenger seat of the Infiniti S.U.V. that our investor Peter Thiel had bought for Mark to replace the unreliable used Jeep that he had been driving.
As we turned right off Valparaiso Avenue, Mark confessed the immense pressure he felt. "Now that we employ so many people …" he said, trailing off. "We just really can't fail."
Facebook had gone from a project developed in our dorm room and chaotic summer houses to a serious company with lawyers and a human resources department. We had around 50 employees, and their families relied on Facebook to put food on the table. I gazed out the window and thought to myself, It's never going to stop. The bigger we get, the harder we'll have to work to keep growing.
.. Over a decade later, Facebook has earned the prize of domination. It is worth half a trillion dollars and commands, by my estimate, more than 80 percent of the world's social networking revenue. It is a powerful monopoly, eclipsing all of its rivals and erasing competition from the social networking category. This explains why, even during the annus horribilis of 2018, Facebook's earnings per share increased by an astounding 40 percent compared with the year before. (I liquidated my Facebook shares in 2012, and I don't invest directly in any social media companies.)
Facebook's monopoly is also visible in its usage statistics.About 70 percent of American adults use social media, and a vast majority are on Facebook products. Over two-thirds use the core site, a third use Instagram, and a fifth use WhatsApp. By contrast, fewer than a third report using Pinterest, LinkedIn or Snapchat. What started out as lighthearted entertainment has become the primary way that people of all ages communicate online.
Even when people want to quit Facebook, they don't have any meaningful alternative, as we saw in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Worried about their privacy and lacking confidence in Facebook's good faith, users across the world started a "Delete Facebook" movement. According to the Pew Research Center, a quarter deleted their accounts from their phones, but many did so only temporarily. I heard more than one friend say, "I'm getting off Facebook altogether — thank God for Instagram," not realizing that Instagram was a Facebook subsidiary. In the end people did not leave the company's platforms en masse. After all, where would they go?
Facebook's dominance is not an accident of history. The company's strategy was to beat every competitor in plain view, and regulators and the government tacitly — and at times explicitly — approved. In one of the government's few attempts to rein in the company, the F.T.C. in 2011 issued a consent decree that Facebook not share any private information beyond what users already agreed to. Facebook largely ignored the decree. Last month, the day after the company predicted in an earnings call that it would need to pay up to $5 billion as a penalty for its negligence — a slap on the wrist — Facebook's shares surged 7 percent, adding $30 billion to its value, six times the size of the fine.
The F.T.C.'s biggest mistake was to allow Facebook to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp. In 2012, the newer platforms were nipping at Facebook's heels because they had been built for the smartphone, where Facebook was still struggling to gain traction. Mark responded by buying them, and the F.T.C. approved.
Neither Instagram nor WhatsApp had any meaningful revenue, but both were incredibly popular. The Instagram acquisition guaranteed Facebook would preserve its dominance in photo networking, and WhatsApp gave it a new entry into mobile real-time messaging. Now, the founders of Instagram and WhatsApp have left the company after clashing with Mark over his management of their platforms. But their former properties remain Facebook's, driving much of its recent growth.
.. When it hasn't acquired its way to dominance, Facebook has used its monopoly position to shut out competing companies or has copied their technology.
The News Feed algorithm reportedly prioritized videos created through Facebook over videos from competitors, like YouTube and Vimeo. In 2012, Twitter introduced a video network called Vine that featured six-second videos. That same day, Facebook blocked Vine from hosting a tool that let its users search for their Facebook friends while on the new network. The decision hobbled Vine, which shut down four years later.
Snapchat posed a different threat. Snapchat's Stories and impermanent messaging options made it an attractive alternative to Facebook and Instagram. And unlike Vine, Snapchat wasn't interfacing with the Facebook ecosystem; there was no obvious way to handicap the company or shut it out. So Facebook simply copied it.
Facebook's version of Snapchat's stories and disappearing messages proved wildly successful, at Snapchat's expense. At an all-hands meeting in 2016, Mark told Facebook employees not to let their pride get in the way of giving users what they want. According to Wired magazine, "Zuckerberg's message became an informal slogan at Facebook: 'Don't be too proud to copy.'"
(There is little regulators can do about this tactic: Snapchat patented its "ephemeral message galleries," but copyright law does not extend to the abstract concept itself.)
As a result of all this, would-be competitors can't raise the money to take on Facebook. Investors realize that if a company gets traction, Facebook will copy its innovations, shut it down or acquire it for a relatively modest sum. So despite an extended economic expansion, increasing interest in high-tech start-ups, an explosion of venture capital and growing public distaste for Facebook, no major social networking company has been founded since the fall of 2011.
As markets become more concentrated, the number of new start-up businesses declines. This holds true in other high-tech areas dominated by single companies, like search (controlled by Google) and e-commerce (taken over by Amazon). Meanwhile, there has been plenty of innovation in areas where there is no monopolistic domination, such as in workplace productivity (Slack, Trello, Asana), urban transportation (Lyft, Uber, Lime, Bird) and cryptocurrency exchanges (Ripple, Coinbase, Circle).
I don't blame Mark for his quest for domination. He has demonstrated nothing more nefarious than the virtuous hustle of a talented entrepreneur. Yet he has created a leviathan that crowds out entrepreneurship and restricts consumer choice. It's on our government to ensure that we never lose the magic of the invisiblehand. How did we allow this to happen?
Since the 1970s, courts have become increasingly hesitant to break up companies or block mergers unless consumers are paying inflated prices that would be lower in a competitive market. But a narrow reliance on whether or not consumers have experienced price gouging fails to take into account the full cost of market domination. It doesn't recognize that we also want markets to be competitive to encourage innovation and to hold power in check. And it is out of step with the history of antitrust law. Two of the last major antitrust suits, against AT&T and IBM in the 1980s, were grounded in the argument that they had used their size to stifle innovation and crush competition.
As the Columbia law professor Tim Wu writes, "It is a disservice to the laws and their intent to retain such a laserlike focus on price effects as the measure of all that antitrust was meant to do."
Facebook is the perfect case on which to reverse course, precisely because Facebook makes its money from targeted advertising, meaning users do not pay to use the service. But it is not actually free, and it certainly isn't harmless.
Facebook's business model is built on capturing as much of our attention as possible to encourage people to create and share more information about who they are and who they want to be. We pay for Facebook with our data and our attention, and by either measure it doesn't come cheap.
I was on the original News Feed team (my name is on the patent), and that product now gets billions of hours of attention and pulls in unknowable amounts of data each year. The average Facebook user spends an hour a day on the platform; Instagram users spend 53 minutes a day scrolling through pictures and videos. They create immense amounts of data — not just likes and dislikes, but how many seconds they watch a particular video — that Facebook uses to refine its targeted advertising. Facebook also collects data from partner companies and apps, without most users knowing about it, according to testing by The Wall Street Journal.
Some days, lying on the floor next to my 1-year-old son as he plays with his dinosaurs, I catch myself scrolling through Instagram, waiting to see if the next image will be more beautiful than the last. What am I doing? I know it's not good for me, or for my son, and yet I do it anyway.
The choice is mine, but it doesn't feel like a choice. Facebook seeps into every corner of our lives to capture as much of our attention and data as possible and, without any alternative, we make the trade.
The vibrant marketplace that once drove Facebook and other social media companies to compete to come up with better products has virtually disappeared. This means there's less chance of start-ups developing healthier, less exploitative social media platforms. It also means less accountability on issues like privacy.
Just last month, Facebook seemingly tried to bury news that it had stored tens of millions of user passwords in plain text format, which thousands of Facebook employees could see. Competition alone wouldn't necessarily spur privacy protection — regulation is required to ensure accountability — but Facebook's lock on the market guarantees that users can't protest by moving to alternative platforms.
The most problematic aspect of Facebook's power is Mark's unilateral control over speech. There is no precedent for his ability to monitor, organize and even censor the conversations of two billion people.
Facebook engineers write algorithms that select which users' comments or experiences end up displayed in the News Feeds of friends and family. These rules are proprietary and so complex that many Facebook employees themselves don't understand them.
In 2014, the rules favored curiosity-inducing "clickbait" headlines. In 2016, they enabled the spread of fringe political views and fake news, which made it easier for Russian actors to manipulate the American electorate. In January 2018, Mark announced that the algorithms would favor non-news content shared by friends and news from "trustworthy" sources, which his engineers interpreted — to the confusion of many — as a boost for anything in the category of "politics, crime, tragedy."
Facebook has responded to many of the criticisms of how it manages speech by hiring thousands of contractors to enforce the rules that Mark and senior executives develop. After a few weeks of training, these contractors decide which videos count as hate speech or free speech, which images are erotic and which are simply artistic, and which live streams are too violent to be broadcast. (The Verge reported that some of these moderators, working through a vendor in Arizona, were paid $28,800 a year, got limited breaks and faced significant mental health risks.)
As if Facebook's opaque algorithms weren't enough, last year we learned that Facebook executives had permanently deleted their own messages from the platform, erasing them from the inboxes of recipients; the justification was corporate security concerns. When I look at my years of Facebook messages with Mark now, it's just a long stream of my own light-blue comments, clearly written in response to words he had once sent me. (Facebook now offers a limited version of this feature to all users.)
The most extreme example of Facebook manipulating speech happened in Myanmar in late 2017. Mark said in a Vox interview that he personally made the decision to delete the private messages of Facebook users who were encouraging genocide there. "I remember, one Saturday morning, I got a phone call," he said, "and we detected that people were trying to spread sensational messages through — it was Facebook Messenger in this case — to each side of the conflict, basically telling the Muslims, 'Hey, there's about to be an uprising of the Buddhists, so make sure that you are armed and go to this place.' And then the same thing on the other side."
Mark made a call: "We stop those messages from going through." Most people would agree with his decision, but it's deeply troubling that he made it with no accountability to any independent authority or government. Facebook could, in theory, delete en masse the messages of Americans, too, if its leadership decided it didn't like them.
Mark used to insist that Facebook was just a "social utility," a neutral platform for people to communicate what they wished. Now he recognizes that Facebook is both a platform and a publisher and that it is inevitably making decisions about values. The company's own lawyers have argued in court that Facebook is a publisher and thus entitled to First Amendment protection.
No one at Facebook headquarters is choosing what single news story everyone in America wakes up to, of course. But they do decide whether it will be an article from a reputable outlet or a clip from "The Daily Show," a photo from a friend's wedding or an incendiary call to kill others.
Mark knows that this is too much power and is pursuing a twofold strategy to mitigate it.
He is pivoting Facebook's focus toward encouraging more private, encrypted messaging that Facebook's employees can't see, let alone control.
Second, he is hoping for friendly oversight from regulators and other industry executives.
Late last year, he proposed an independent commission to handle difficult content moderation decisions by social media platforms. It would afford an independent check, Mark argued, on Facebook's decisions, and users could appeal to it if they disagreed. But its decisions would not have the force of law, since companies would voluntarily participate.
In an op-ed essay in The Washington Post in March, he wrote, "Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and I agree." And he went even further than before, calling for more government regulation — not just on speech, but also on privacy and interoperability, the ability of consumers to seamlessly leave one network and transfer their profiles, friend connections, photos and other data to another.
I don't think these proposals were made in bad faith. But I do think they're an attempt to head off the argument that regulators need to go further and break up the company. Facebook isn't afraid of a few more rules. It's afraid of an antitrust case and of the kind of accountability that real government oversight would bring.
We don't expect calcified rules or voluntary commissions to work to regulate drug companies, health care companies, car manufacturers or credit card providers. Agencies oversee these industries to ensure that the private market works for the public good. In these cases, we all understand that government isn't an external force meddling in an organic market; it's what makes a dynamic and fair market possible in the first place. This should be just as true for social networking as it is for air travel or pharmaceuticals.
In the summer of 2006, Yahoo offered us $1 billion for Facebook. I desperately wanted Mark to say yes. Even my small slice of the company would have made me a millionaire several times over. For a 22-year-old scholarship kid from small-town North Carolina, that kind of money was unimaginable. I wasn't alone — just about every other person at the company wanted the same.
It was taboo to talk about it openly, but I finally asked Mark when we had a moment alone, "How are you feeling about Yahoo?" I got a shrug and a one-line answer: "I just don't know if I want to work for Terry Semel," Yahoo's chief executive.
Outside of a couple of gigs in college, Mark had never had a real boss and seemed entirely uninterested in the prospect. I didn't like the idea much myself, but I would have traded having a boss for several million dollars any day of the week. Mark's drive was infinitely stronger. Domination meant domination, and the hustle was just too delicious.
Mark may never have a boss, but he needs to have some check on his power. The American government needs to do two things: break up Facebook's monopoly and regulate the company to make it more accountable to the American people.
First, Facebook should be separated into multiple companies. The F.T.C., in conjunction with the Justice Department, should enforce antitrust laws by undoing the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions and banning future acquisitions for several years. The F.T.C. should have blocked these mergers, but it's not too late to act. There is precedent for correcting bad decisions — as recently as 2009, Whole Foods settled antitrust complaints by selling off the Wild Oats brand and stores that it had bought a few years earlier.
There is some evidence that we may be headed in this direction. Senator Elizabeth Warren has called for reversing the Facebook mergers, and in February, the F.T.C. announced the creation of a task force to monitor competition among tech companies and review previous mergers.
How would a breakup work? Facebook would have a brief period to spin off the Instagram and WhatsApp businesses, and the three would become distinct companies, most likely publicly traded. Facebook shareholders would initially hold stock in the new companies, although Mark and other executives would probably be required to divest their management shares.
Until recently, WhatsApp and Instagram were administered as independent platforms inside the parent company, so that should make the process easier. But time is of the essence: Facebook is working quickly to integrate the three, which would make it harder for the F.T.C. to split them up.
Some economists are skeptical that breaking up Facebook would spur that much competition, because Facebook, they say, is a "natural" monopoly. Natural monopolies have emerged in areas like water systems and the electrical grid, where the price of entering the business is very high — because you have to lay pipes or electrical lines — but it gets cheaper and cheaper to add each additional customer. In other words, the monopoly arises naturally from the circumstances of the business, rather than a company's illegal maneuvering. In addition, defenders of natural monopolies often make the case that they benefit consumers because they are able to provide services more cheaply than anyone else.
Facebook is indeed more valuable when there are more people on it: There are more connections for a user to make and more content to be shared. But the cost of entering the social network business is not that high. And unlike with pipes and electricity, there is no good argument that the country benefits from having only one dominant social networking company.
Still others worry that the breakup of Facebook or other American tech companies could be a national security problem. Because advancements in artificial intelligence require immense amounts of data and computing power, only large companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon can afford these investments, they say. If American companies become smaller, the Chinese will outpace us.
While serious, these concerns do not justify inaction. Even after a breakup, Facebook would be a hugely profitable business with billions to invest in new technologies — and a more competitive market would only encourage those investments. If the Chinese did pull ahead, our government could invest in research and development and pursue tactical trade policy, just as it is doing today to hold China's 5G technology at bay.
The cost of breaking up Facebook would be next to zero for the government, and lots of people stand to gain economically. A ban on short-term acquisitions would ensure that competitors, and the investors who take a bet on them, would have the space to flourish. Digital advertisers would suddenly have multiple companies vying for their dollars.
Even Facebook shareholders would probably benefit, as shareholders often do in the years after a company's split. The value of the companies that made up Standard Oil doubled within a year of its being dismantled and had increased by fivefold a few years later. Ten years after the 1984 breakup of AT&T, the value of its successor companies had tripled.
But the biggest winners would be the American people. Imagine a competitive market in which they could choose among one network that
offered higher privacy standards, another that
cost a fee to join but had little advertising and another that would allow users to
customize and tweak their feeds as they saw fit.
No one knows exactly what Facebook's competitors would offer to differentiate themselves. That's exactly the point.
The Justice Department faced similar questions of social costs and benefits with AT&T in the 1950s. AT&T had a monopoly on phone services and telecommunications equipment. The government filed suit under antitrust laws, and the case ended with a consent decree that required AT&T to release its patents and refrain from expanding into the nascent computer industry. This resulted in an explosion of innovation, greatly increasing follow-on patents and leading to the development of the semiconductor and modern computing. We would most likely not have iPhones or laptops without the competitive markets that antitrust action ushered in.
Adam Smith was right: Competition spurs growth and innovation.
Just breaking up Facebook is not enough. We need a new agency, empowered by Congress to regulate tech companies. Its first mandate should be to protect privacy.
The Europeans have made headway on privacy with the General Data Protection Regulation, a law that guarantees users a minimal level of protection. A landmark privacy bill in the United States should specify exactly what control Americans have over their digital information, require clearer disclosure to users and provide enough flexibility to the agency to exercise effective oversight over time. The agency should also be charged with guaranteeing basic interoperability across platforms.
Finally, the agency should create guidelines for acceptable speech on social media. This idea may seem un-American — we would never stand for a government agency censoring speech. But we already have limits on
yelling "fire" in a crowded theater,
child pornography,
speech intended to provoke violence and false statements to manipulate stock prices.
We will have to create similar standards that tech companies can use. These standards should of course be subject to the review of the courts, just as any other limits on speech are. But there is no constitutional right to harass others or live-stream violence.
These are difficult challenges. I worry that government regulators will not be able to keep up with the pace of digital innovation. I worry that more competition in social networking might lead to a conservative Facebook and a liberal one, or that newer social networks might be less secure if government regulation is weak. But sticking with the status quo would be worse: If we don't have public servants shaping these policies, corporations will.
Some people doubt that an effort to break up Facebook would win in the courts, given the hostility on the federal bench to antitrust action, or that this divided Congress would ever be able to muster enough consensus to create a regulatory agency for social media.
But even if breakup and regulation aren't immediately successful, simply pushing for them will bring more oversight. The government's case against Microsoft — that it illegally used its market power in operating systems to force its customers to use its web browser, Internet Explorer — ended in 2001 when George W. Bush's administration abandoned its effort to break up the company. Yet that prosecution helped rein in Microsoft's ambitions to dominate the early web.
Similarly, the Justice Department's 1970s suit accusing IBM of illegally maintaining its monopoly on computer sales ended in a stalemate. But along the way, IBM changed many of its behaviors. It stopped bundling its hardware and software, chose an extremely open design for the operating system in its personal computers and did not exercise undue control over its suppliers. Professor Wu has written that this "policeman at the elbow" led IBM to steer clear "of anything close to anticompetitive conduct, for fear of adding to the case against it."
We can expect the same from even an unsuccessful suit against Facebook.
Finally, an aggressive case against Facebook would persuade other behemoths like Google and Amazon to think twice about stifling competition in their own sectors, out of fear that they could be next. If the government were to use this moment to resurrect an effective competition standard that takes a broader view of the full cost of "free" products, it could affect a whole host of industries.
The alternative is bleak. If we do not take action, Facebook's monopoly will become even more entrenched. With much of the world's personal communications in hand, it can mine that data for patterns and trends, giving it an advantage over competitors for decades to come.
I take responsibility for not sounding the alarm earlier. Don Graham, a former Facebook board member, has accused those who criticize the company now as having "all the courage of the last man leaping on the pile at a football game." The financial rewards I reaped from working at Facebook radically changed the trajectory of my life, and even after I cashed out, I watched in awe as the company grew. It took the 2016 election fallout and Cambridge Analytica to awaken me to the dangers of Facebook's monopoly. But anyone suggesting that Facebook is akin to a pinned football player misrepresents its resilience and power.
An era of accountability for Facebook and other monopolies may be beginning. Collective anger is growing, and a new cohort of leaders has begun to emerge. On Capitol Hill, Representative David Cicilline has taken a special interest in checking the power of monopolies, and Senators Amy Klobuchar and Ted Cruz have joined Senator Warren in calling for more oversight. Economists like Jason Furman, a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, are speaking out about monopolies, and a host of legal scholars like Lina Khan, Barry Lynn and Ganesh Sitaraman are plotting a way forward.
This movement of public servants, scholars and activists deserves our support. Mark Zuckerberg cannot fix Facebook, but our government can.
Tags: academics, accountability, activists, ambition, amy-klobuchar, anti-accountability, anti-trust, anti-trust-att, anti-trust-microsoft, attention, attention-merchants, barry-lynn, cambridge-analytica, child-pornography, chris-hughes, competition, concentration, congress-old-un-tech-savy, copy, corporations, david-cicilline, democracy-threat-to, domination, elizabeth-warren, facebook, facebook-breakup, facebook-chris-hughes, facebook-growth, facebook-news-feed, facebook-snapchat-copy, free-speech, ganesh-sitaraman, gargantuan, growth, growth-compromises-for, hate-speech, imitation, innovation, instagram, jason-furman, john-sherman, lina-kahn, mark-zuckerberg, monopoly, myanmar, myanmar-genocide, myspace, power, power-concentration, privacy, public-servants, smartphone-centric, snapchat, social-networking, ted-cruz, too-big-to-fail, whatsapp
Zuckerberg Plans to Integrate WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger
Knitting together Facebook's apps is a stark reversal of Mr. Zuckerberg's previous stance toward WhatsApp and Instagram, which were independent companies that Facebook acquired. At the time of the acquisitions, Mr. Zuckerberg promised WhatsApp and Instagram plenty of autonomy from their new parent company. (Facebook Messenger is a homegrown service spun off the main Facebook app in 2014.)
WhatsApp and Instagram have grown tremendously since then, prompting Mr. Zuckerberg to change his thinking, one of the people said. He now believes integrating the services more tightly will benefit Facebook's entire "family of apps" in the long term by making them more useful, the person said. Mr. Zuckerberg floated the idea for months and began to promote it to employees more heavily toward the end of 2018, the people said.
.. The effort has caused strife within Facebook. Instagram's founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, left the company abruptly last fallafter Mr. Zuckerberg began weighing in more. WhatsApp's founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, departed for similar reasons. More recently, dozens of WhatsApp employees clashed with Mr. Zuckerberg over the integration plan on internal message boards and during a contentious staff meeting in December, according to four people who attended or were briefed on the event.
The integration plan raises privacy questions because of how users' data may be shared between services. WhatsApp currently requires only a phone number when new users sign up. By contrast, Facebook and Facebook Messenger ask users to provide their true identities. Matching Facebook and Instagram users to their WhatsApp handles could give pause to those who prefer to keep their use of each app separate.
Tags: brian-acton, facebook, instagram, jan-koum, kevin-systrom, mark-zuckerberg, mark-zuckerberg-deceit, messaging-app, mike-krieger, whatsapp
With Facebook at 'War,' Zuckerberg Adopts More Aggressive Style
New approach causes turmoil, driving several key executives from the company and creating tensions with longtime Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg
Mark Zuckerberg gathered about 50 of his top lieutenants earlier this year and told them that Facebook Inc. FB -5.72% was at war and he planned to lead the company accordingly.
During times of peace, executives can move more slowly and ensure that everybody is on board with key decisions, he said during the June meeting, according to people familiar with the remarks. But with Facebook under siege from lawmakers, investors and angry users, he needed to act more decisively, the people said.
.. The 34-year-old CEO believes Facebook didn't move quickly enough at key moments this year and increasingly is pressing senior executives to "make progress faster" on resolving problems such as slowing user growth and securing the platform, said people familiar with the matter. Mr. Zuckerberg also at times has expressed frustration at how the company managed the waves of criticism it faced this year.
.. On Friday, that tension was on display when, during a question-and-answer session with employees at Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., he blasted a fresh round of critical news coverage as "bullshit," according to the people familiar with the remarks.
One employee at the session asked if Facebook could deter leaks by publishing an internal report about how frequently offenders are found and fired. Mr. Zuckerberg said Facebook does fire leakers, but the root cause was "bad morale" perpetuated by attacks in the media.
.. He believes this tougher management style is necessary to tackle challenges being raised both internally and externally, according to a person familiar with his thinking.
.. Mr. Zuckerberg's new posture could trouble those who feel his "move fast, break things" mantra from Facebook's early days contributed to many of the company's current problems. It also has led to confrontations with some of his top reports, including Ms. Sandberg, who has long had considerable autonomy over the Facebook teams that control communications and policy.
.. This spring, Mr. Zuckerberg told Ms. Sandberg, 49, that he blamed her and her teams for the public fallout over Cambridge Analytica
Ms. Sandberg later confided in friends that the exchange rattled her, and she wondered if she should be worried about her job.
.. Mr. Zuckerberg also has told Ms. Sandberg she should have been more aggressive in allocating resources to review troublesome content on the site
.. The heads of some other key Facebook units didn't survive conflicts with Mr. Zuckerberg.
Mr. Zuckerberg clashed with the co-founders of Instagram
.. The co-founders of WhatsApp likewise left after disagreements with Mr. Zuckerberg over how to generate more revenue from the messaging-service
.. More recently, Mr. Zuckerberg forced out Brendan Iribe, co-founder of Oculus VR, in part because of a disagreement about the future of the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset
.. Facebook remains hugely profitable, with net income of more than $5 billion in the third quarter, but its margins are under pressure in part because of its increased spending on security.
.. Mr. Zuckerberg has said Facebook is in the midst of a three-year turnaround ending in 2019 to strengthen its defenses against the risks posed by having an open platform.
.. All told, about a dozen senior or highly visible executives disclosed their resignations or left Facebook in 2018. In May, Facebook announced a major reshuffling of top product executives in a way that helped free up Mr. Zuckerberg to oversee a broader portfolio within the company.
.. This turmoil at the top of Facebook has made it difficult for the company to execute on some product decisions and shore up employee morale, which has been sinking over the last year along with the stock price, which has fallen 36% since its peak. Many employees are frustrated by the bad press and constant reorganizations, including of the security team, which can disrupt their work, according to current and former employees.
.. Scrutiny of Facebook has only escalated in the past week after the New York Times reported its use of opposition-research firms tasked with exposing critical information about Facebook's detractors, including one called Definers Public Affairs. Ms. Sandberg and Mr. Zuckerberg both said the decision to employ the firm was made by Facebook's communications officials.
Ms. Sandberg's comments in particular have angered many people on those teams, according to people familiar with the matter, given how closely she tracked and managed Facebook's media strategy, sometimes getting involved in wording changes. In the internal Q&A Friday, Ms. Sandberg said she took full responsibility for the actions of the communications team.
.. In September 2017, Erskine Bowles, the head of the audit committee and a former Clinton White House official, told Ms. Sandberg and Mr. Zuckerberg that he felt they needed to take the issue of Russian interference on the platform much more seriously.
"This is going to be much bigger than you think," Mr. Bowles said
.. Later, after the Cambridge Analytica disclosure, the board urged Mr. Zuckerberg to name an executive who would be in charge of corralling Facebook's response to that matter and resolving other issues before they metastasized, said a person familiar with the matter. After that, he put Ms. Sandberg in charge of that effort.
Mr. Zuckerberg also sought advice from a mentor, former Microsoft Corp. Chairman and CEO Bill Gates. He recommended Microsoft's model, which relies on Brad Smith to oversee its corporate, external, and legal affairs. Mr. Smith wears the title "president" and reports directly to the CEO.
Source: www.wsj.com
Tags: aggressive, bill-gates, blame, bradley-a-smith, brendan-iribe, cambridge-analytica, clash, criticism-response, definers-public-affairs, erskine-bowles, facebook, firing, instagram, mark-zuckerberg, move-fast-break-things, oculus-vr, opposition-research, resign, russia-elections, sheryl-sandberg, tough, whats-app
Exclusive: WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton Gives The Inside Story On #DeleteFacebook And Why He Left $850 Million Behind
Now he's talking publicly for the first time. Under pressure from Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg to monetize WhatsApp, he pushed back as Facebook questioned the encryption he'd helped build and laid the groundwork to show targeted ads and facilitate commercial messaging.
Acton also walked away from Facebook a year before his final tranche of stock grants vested. "It was like, okay, well, you want to do these things I don't want to do," Acton says. "It's better if I get out of your way. And I did." It was perhaps the most expensive moral stand in history. Acton took a screenshot of the stock price on his way out the door—the decision cost him $850 million.
.. "As part of a proposed settlement at the end, [Facebook management] tried to put a nondisclosure agreement in place," Acton says. "That was part of the reason that I got sort of cold feet in terms of trying to settle with these guys."
.. That kind of answer masks the kind of issues that just prompted Instagram's founders to abruptly quit. Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger reportedly chafed at Facebook and Zuckerberg's heavy hand. Acton's account of what happened at WhatsApp—and Facebook's plans for it—provides a rare founder's-level window into a company that's at once the global arbiter of privacy standards and the gatekeeper of facts, while also increasingly straying from its entrepreneurial roots.
.. Despite a transfer of several billion dollars, Acton says he never developed a rapport with Zuckerberg. "I couldn't tell you much about the guy," he says. In one of their dozen or so meetings, Zuck told Acton unromantically that WhatsApp, which had a stipulated degree of autonomy within the Facebook universe and continued to operate for a while out of its original offices, was "a product group to him, like Instagram."
.. So Acton didn't know what to expect when Zuck beckoned him to his office last September, around the time Acton told Facebook brass that he planned to leave. Acton and Koum had a clause in their contract that allowed them to get all their stock, which was being doled out over four years, if Facebook began "implementing monetization initiatives" without their consent.
.. The Facebook-WhatsApp pairing had been a head-scratcher from the start. Facebook has one of the world's biggest advertising networks; Koum and Acton hated ads. Facebook's added value for advertisers is how much it knows about its users; WhatsApp's founders were pro-privacy zealots who felt their vaunted encryption had been integral to their nearly unprecedented global growth.
.. This dissonance frustrated Zuckerberg. Facebook, Acton says, had decided to pursue two ways of making money from WhatsApp. First, by showing targeted ads in WhatsApp's new Status feature, which Acton felt broke a social compact with its users. "Targeted advertising is what makes me unhappy," he says. His motto at WhatsApp had been "No ads, no games, no gimmicks"—a direct contrast with a parent company that derived 98% of its revenue from advertising. Another motto had been "Take the time to get it right," a stark contrast to "Move fast and break things."
.. Facebook also wanted to sell businesses tools to chat with WhatsApp users. Once businesses were on board, Facebook hoped to sell them analytics tools, too. The challenge was WhatsApp's watertight end-to-end encryption, which stopped both WhatsApp and Facebook from reading messages.
.. For his part, Acton had proposed monetizing WhatsApp through a metered-user model, charging, say, a tenth of a penny after a certain large number of free messages were used up. "You build it once, it runs everywhere in every country," Acton says. "You don't need a sophisticated sales force. It's a very simple business."
.. Acton's plan was shot down by Sandberg. "Her words were 'It won't scale.' "
.. "I called her out one time," says Acton, who sensed there might be greed at play. "I was like, 'No, you don't mean that it won't scale. You mean it won't make as much money as . . . ,' and she kind of hemmed and hawed a little. And we moved on. I think I made my point. . . . They are businesspeople, they are good businesspeople. They just represent a set of business practices, principles and ethics, and policies that I don't necessarily agree with."
.. When Acton reached Zuckerberg's office, a Facebook lawyer was present. Acton made clear that the disagreement—Facebook wanted to make money through ads, and he wanted to make it from high-volume users—meant he could get his full allocation of stock. Facebook's legal team disagreed, saying that WhatsApp had only been exploring monetization initiatives, not "implementing" them.
.. Zuckerberg, for his part, had a simple message: "He was like, This is probably the last time you'll ever talk to me."
.. Acton graduated from Stanford with a bachelor's in computer science and eventually became one of the first employees at Yahoo in 1996, making millions in the process. His biggest asset from that time at Yahoo: befriending Koum, a Ukrainian immigrant he clicked with over their similar no-nonsense style.
.. WhatsApp, persuading a handful of former Yahoo colleagues to fund a seed round while he took on cofounder status and wound up with a roughly 20% stake.
.. two things sparked Zuckerberg's mega-offer in early 2014. One was hearing that WhatsApp's founders had been invited to Google's Mountain View headquarters for talks, and he did not want to lose them to a competitor.
.. He recalls Zuckerberg being "supportive" of WhatsApp's plans to roll out end-to-end encryption, even though it would block attempts to harvest user data. If anything, he was "quick to respond" during the discussions. Zuckerberg "was not immediately evaluating ramifications in the long term."
.. told them that they would have "zero pressure" on monetization for the next five years.
.. Facebook prepared Acton to meet with around a dozen representatives of the European Competition Commission in a teleconference. "I was coached to explain that it would be really difficult to merge or blend data between the two systems,"
.. Later he learned that elsewhere in Facebook, there were "plans and technologies to blend data." Specifically, Facebook could use the 128-bit string of numbers assigned to each phone as a kind of bridge between accounts. The other method was phone-number matching, or pinpointing Facebook accounts with phone numbers and matching them to WhatsApp accounts with the same phone number.
.. Within 18 months, a new WhatsApp terms of service linked the accounts and made Acton look like a liar. "I think everyone was gambling because they thought that the EU might have forgotten because enough time had passed." No such luck: Facebook wound up paying a $122 million fine for giving "incorrect or misleading information" to the EU—a cost of doing business
.. Linking these overlapping accounts was a crucial first step toward monetizing WhatsApp. The terms-of-service update would lay the groundwork for how WhatsApp could make money. During the discussions over these changes, Facebook sought "broader rights" to WhatsApp user data, Acton says, but WhatsApp's founders pushed back, reaching a compromise with Facebook management. A clause about no ads would remain, but Facebook would still link the accounts to present friend suggestions on Facebook and offer its advertising partners better targets for ads on Facebook.
.. By then, three years since the deal, Zuckerberg was growing impatient, Acton says, and he expressed his frustrations at an all-hands meeting for WhatsApp staffers. "The CFO projections, the ten-year outlook—they wanted and needed the WhatsApp revenues to continue to show the growth to Wall Street,"
.. Internally, Facebook had targeted a $10 billion revenue run rate within five years of monetization, but such numbers sounded too high to Acton—and reliant on advertising.
.. Acton had left a management position on Yahoo's ad division over a decade earlier with frustrations at the Web portal's so-called "Nascar approach" of putting ad banners all over a Web page. The drive for revenue at the expense of a good product experience "gave me a bad taste in my mouth," Acton remembers. He was now seeing history repeat.
.. He has supercharged a small messaging app, Signal, run by a security researcher named Moxie Marlinspike with a mission to put users before profit, giving it $50 million and turning it into a foundation. Now he's working with the same people who built the opensource encryption protocol that is part of Signal and protects WhatsApp's 1.5 billion users and that also sits as an option on Facebook Messenger, Microsoft's Skype and Google's Allo messenger. Essentially, he's re-creating WhatsApp in the pure, idealized form it started: free messages and calls, with end-to-end encryption and no obligations to ad platforms.
Source: www.forbes.com
Tags: advertising, autonomy, brian-acton, business-model, facebook, instagram, kevin-systrom, mark-zuckerberg, mike-krieger, monetize, nondisclosure-agreement, profit, scalability, sheryl-sandberg, signal-messaging-app, whatsapp, yahoo
One Eurostep for Manu. One Giant Leap for Mankind.
The Eurostep was exotic when it came to the NBA. Now it's universal for today's youth basketball players.
This crafty move was considered exotic when it came to the NBA two decades ago. It looked downright foreign to see a player do what Zhang described: plant one way, take one long step at full speed the other way, avoid contact and sneak around the defender for an easy layup.
.. The slow normalization of the Eurostep is obvious anytime you watch an NBA game. The last two league MVPs, James Harden and Russell Westbrook, are masters of the Eurostep. LeBron James flashing his Eurostep on the fast break turns defenders into foie gras. But the most revealing sign of the Eurostep invasion once appeared on his Instagram from someone who happens to share his name: LeBron James Jr., better known as Bronny, had the basketball world admiring his own beautiful Eurostep. He was in fifth grade.
.. "Every single trainer teaches the Eurostep," said Josh Burr, the founder of The Skill Factory in Atlanta, where a variety of players from Harden to boys on the Southeast team have trained. "Every one of those kids can do it."
The players and coaches at the first Jr. NBA World Championship this week say it's almost a prerequisite for playing these days. Something that didn't exist not so long ago has stitched itself into the fabric of the game to the point that it's becoming impossible to envision basketball without it.
"In a year or two, it'll be as popular as the triple threat,"
.. 2. He picks up his dribble and freezes his defender with a hard step to the left. The idea is that he'll finish with his dominant left hand.
3. But he doesn't. After planting his left foot, he quickly changes direction, taking a long step to the right. That creates the space for Ginobili to get around his defender for an open layup.
.. It wasn't that way when the Lithuanian guard Sarunas Marciulionis helped import the Eurostep to the NBA in 1989. His nifty way of avoiding contact around the basket was partially inspired by the legendary Croatian player Drazen Petrovic, he said, but it didn't stick right away in part because Marciulionis was an unlikely source of innovation.At his own Hall of Fame induction, Marciulionis called himself a "strange duck."
NBA players weren't in the business of copying strange ducks, and the Eurostep could have easily disappeared when he retired in 1997. But it didn't. And that's because two years later the San Antonio Spurs drafted a second-tier Italian club's top prospect named Manu Ginóbili. Marciulionis, a lefty like Ginobili, Harden and Ashlyn Zhang, soon got a call from someone telling him that a player from Argentina was bringing the Eurostep back.
.. the widespread adoption of the Eurostep is such a recent development that young elite players today are being trained by coaches in their 30s and 40s who say they went their entire careers without attempting a single one. But one unexpected benefit of NBA players oversharing on Instagram is that it's easy for anyone in the world to copy what they're doing. A boy like Phoenix Johnson can steal Kyrie Irving's moves, including his Eurostep, by studying him on YouTube and Instagram.
Tags: basketball, croatia, drazen-petrovic, eurostep, innovation, instagram, lebron-james, lithuania, manu-ginobili, nba, sarunas-marciulionis, youtube
WhatsApp suggests a cure for virality
Other tech firms should watch and learn
Services such as Facebook and Twitter are built to maximise "virality", making it irresistible to share, like and retweet things. They are getting better at it: fully half of the 40 most-retweeted tweets date from January last year.
.. Virality can cost lives. At least two dozen innocent people have been lynched in India this year after bogus rumours warning of child abductors went viral on WhatsApp, a messaging service owned by Facebook. WhatsApp has also been used by political operatives in India, its largest market, to stoke religious and nationalist fury.
.. Starting this month, however, users of WhatsApp will find it harder to spread content. They will no longer be able to forward messages to more than 20 others in one go, down from more than 100. In India the upper limit is just five and WhatsApp has removed the "quick forward" button from audio, video and images, adding an extra step to the process of sending content.
.. The goal is not to prevent people from sharing information—only to get users to think about what they are passing on. It is an idea other platforms should consider copying.
.. Sceptics point out that WhatsApp can afford to hinder the spread of information on its platform because it does not rely on the sale of advertisements to make money.
Slowing down sharing would be more damaging to social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, which make money by keeping users on their sites and showing them ads. Their shareholders would surely balk at anything that lessens engagement.
.. Facebook's shares fell by 23% in after-hours trading this week, partly because Mark Zuckerberg, its boss, said that its priority would be to get users to interact more with each other, not to promote viral content. Yet the short-term pain caused by a decline in virality may be in the long-term interests of the social networks. Fake news and concerns about digital addiction, among other things, have already damaged the reputations of tech platforms. Moves to slow sharing could help see off draconian action by regulators and lawmakers.
.. Instagram, a photo-sharing social network also owned by Facebook, shows that you can be successful without resorting to virality. It offers no sharing options and does not allow links but boasts more than a billion monthly users. It has remained relatively free of political content and misinformation.
.. Move slow, don't fake things
The need to curb virality is becoming ever more urgent. About half the world uses the internet today. The next 3.8bn users to go online will be poorer and less familiar with media. The examples of hoaxes, misinformation and violence in India suggest that the capacity to manipulate people online is even greater when they first gain access to digital communications.
Small changes can have big effects: social networks have become expert at making their services compulsive by tweaking shades of blue and the size of buttons. They have the knowledge and the tools to maximise the sharing of information. That gives them the power to limit its virality, too.
Source: www.economist.com
Tags: advertising, economist.com, facebook, instagram, money, viral, whatsapp
Commentary: I study liars. I've never seen one like Donald Trump.
The real reason Donald Trump lies
How will Trump's Mar-a-Lago-neighbors enforce the 1993 covenant that he cannot stay more than 21 days a year and 7 consecutive days when he has spent 130 days during his presidency and it is registered as his permanent Florida address?
What would the mob of 1/6/2021 in Washington DC have to have done in order for the coup attempt to be successful? Or was there never a chance?
Was the 2020 Election Stolen?
Did Philadelphia Use Dominion Voting Machines in the 2020 Election?
Donald Trump & Joe Biden 1st Presidential Debate 2020 (Transcript)
President Trump's "Peaceful Transfer of Power" "Bluff"
Naked Quotations
US could have a digital currency in 12-18 months.
Investment Portfolios: Diversification Strategies
What will Democrats have to pay Trump to leave?
Why Did Corporations "Waste their Capital"?
Why did corporations borrow to buy back their stock rather than invest it for productive purposes?
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