推特对做出艰难决定的恐惧正在扼杀它

为什么推特移动如此缓慢？...

为什么推特移动如此缓慢？

这是一个自周一以来一直萦绕在我心头的问题，因为我们看到该公司姗姗来迟地踮起脚尖，开始执行其禁止煽动暴力的准则。它在周四再次出现，因为我们看到该公司在首次承诺这样做六年后采取行动，大幅限制第三方应用程序的功能。

没有什么比不作为更能彻底地定义Twitter了。今年2月，彭博社的Selina Wang在一篇题为“为什么Twitter不能触发新产品”的文章中诊断出了这个问题。在很大程度上，Wang的报道将责任归咎于首席执行官杰克·多尔西：

Dorsey’s leadership style fosters caution, according to about a dozen people who’ve worked with him. He encourages debate among his employees and waits — and waits — for a c***ensus to emerge. As a result, ideas are often debated ‘ad nauseum’ and fail to come to fruition. ‘They need leadership that can make tough decisi*** and keep the ball rolling,’ says a former employee who left last year. ‘There are a lot of times when Jack will instead wring his hands and punt on a decision that needs to be made quickly.’

这一观点密切跟踪了我与现任和前任员工的讨论。他们为我描述了Twitter上经常发生的黑客周，在这周里，员工们模拟了各种有用的新功能，几乎没有一种功能会出现在核心产品中。

的确，Twitter的员工和资金都比Facebook的竞争对手少。甚至其最近缓慢的发展速度也比前任首席执行官迪克·科斯托洛（Dick Costolo）时期更快。

但一次又一次，推特的缓慢行动和道歉风气让它陷入麻烦。今天针对第三方应用的行动说明了这个问题。

曾几何时，推特让人们构建他们想要的任何类型的推特应用程序。在短暂而辉煌的一段时间里，推特是一个设计游乐场。开发推特应用程序的开发者发明了新功能，如“拉到新鲜”和账户静音，这成为了行业标准。

然后，在2012年，推特改变了方向。在Costolo的领导下，该公司决定其未来取决于Facebook风格的feed广告，这意味着将一切整合到一个它可以控制的本地应用程序中。

但它并没有永远消灭第三方应用程序，而是引入了一系列旨在让它们慢慢流失的折衷措施：例如，拒绝向它们提供新功能，或者通过限制API代币来限制它们可以获得的用户数量。虽然这在短期内避免了一些叫喊声，但这一举动——在用户群中仍然非常不受欢迎——毫无必要地延长了痛苦。

即使在今天的行动之后，第三方应用程序也没有消亡。他们不再能够发送推送通知，他们的时间线也不再自动刷新——这使得他们对像我这样的人毫无用处，因为我是一个推特机器人用户，每天都依赖于从我的屏幕上层叠下来的推特来与当天的新闻保持联系(从今天起，我就是一个推特用户，愿上帝保佑我。）

第三方应用程序的命运对Twitter来说是一个相对较小的问题；其绝大多数用户使用旗舰应用程序。他们最终会死，但推特拒绝一劳永逸地消灭他们。这是一个很好的例子，说明公司在面对一个明显的决定时，是如何不顾一切地避免做出决定的。

这就是为什么本周多尔西的媒体之旅让我感到困惑的原因，在这次媒体之旅中，他试图解释该公司对亚历克斯·琼斯（Alex Jones）采取的矛盾态度。在过去的一周里，推特发现琼斯八次违反了它的规定，然后给了他一周的禁赛期，在禁赛期间他仍然可以阅读推特和发送直接消息。

下面是多尔西如何向希尔的哈珀·内迪格描述这一过程：

“We’re always trying to cultivate more of a learning mindset and help guide people back towards healthier behaviors and healthier public conversation.“

“We also think it’s important to clarify what our principles are, which we haven’t done a great job of in the past, and we need to take a step back and make sure that we are clearly articulating what those mean and what our objectives are.”

同样，当推特做出一个显而易见的决定时，它拒绝做出这一决定。然后，更令人惊讶的是，它表明问题在于它没有明确阐述自己的政策——事实上，它在网上明确阐述了非常明确的政策，以至于CNN的奥利弗·达西能够利用这些政策来确定最终让琼斯陷入麻烦的违反规则的例子。

周三，杰克·多尔西（Jack Dorsey）告诉《*****》，他正在“重新思考推特的核心工作原理”。然而，该公司的历史表明，它并没有因为缺乏思考而失败。相反，问题在于思维常常被当作行动的替代品。

民主

谷歌员工**中国审查搜索引擎的秘密工作

凯特·康格（Kate Conger）和大辅Wakabayashi（Daisuke Wakabayashi）收到了一封由1400名谷歌员工签名的信，**开发一个经过审查的搜索引擎和新闻应用程序。这将成为一场重大冲突。谷歌不愿置评——审查制度在中国被视为****，因此讨论审查制度可能会破坏公司的计划——但结果是，这些员工能够在不受谷歌自身阻挠的情况下定义故事。

“We urgently need more transparency, a seat at the table, and a commitment to clear and open processes: Google employees need to know what we’re building,” the letter said.

The letter also called on Google to allow employees to participate in ethical reviews of the company’s products, to appoint external representatives to ensure transparency and to publish an ethical asses**ent of controversial projects. The document referred to the situation as a “code yellow,” a process used in engineering to address critical problems that impact several teams.

谷歌的审查计划是“不正确的”和“愚蠢的”，前谷歌自由表达负责人说

2011年至2014年，谷歌亚太区自由表达负责人Lokman Tsui介绍了谷歌的审查搜索引擎计划。”“这只是一个非常糟糕的主意，一个愚蠢的举动，”他告诉莱恩·加拉赫我觉得有必要直言不讳地说，这是不对的。”

“In these past few years things have been deteriorating so badly in China – you cannot be there without compromising yourself,” Tsui said. Google launching a censored search engine in the country “would be a moral victory for Beijing,” he added. “Beijing has nothing to lose. So if Google wants to go back, it would be under the terms and conditi*** that Beijing would lay out for them. I can’t see how Google would be able to negotiate any kind of a deal that would be positive. I can’t see a way to operate Google search in China without violating widely held international human rights standards.”

谷歌员工告诉老板，中国的审查制度是“道德和伦理”危机

加拉赫还报道了前谷歌人布兰登·唐尼（Brandon Downey）撰写的一篇文章，他曾在最初被审查的谷歌搜索引擎上工作：

“I want to say I’m sorry for helping to do this,” Downey wrote. “I don’t know how much this contributed to strengthening political support for the censorship regime in [China], but it was wrong. It did nothing but benefit me and my career, and so it fits the classic definition of morally heedless behavior: I got things and in return it probably made some other people’s life worse.”

“We have a resp***ibility to the world our technology enables,” Downey adds. “If we build a tool and give it to people who are hurting other people with it, it is our job to try to stop it, or at least, not help it. Technology can of course be a force for good, but it’s not a magic bullet – it’s more like a laser and it’s up to us what we focus it on. What we can’t do is just collaborate, and assume it will have a happy ending.”

缅甸最新情况

周三晚些时候，在一份关于其处理缅甸种族冲突的可怕报告之后，Facebook发布了其在缅甸工作的“最新情况”。talking points bingo游戏的玩家会发现“我们行动迟缓”，“我们正在招聘更多的人”，“我们还有更多的工作要做”这些都代表了这一点。但关于Facebook在缅甸的问题，我还不知道一些事情——字体显示问题加剧了这些问题：

We’re also working to make it easier for people to report content in the first place. One of the biggest problems we face is the way text is displayed in Myanmar. Unicode is the global industry standard to encode and display fonts, including for Burmese and other local Myanmar languages. However, over 90% of phones in Myanmar use Zawgyi, which is only used to display Burmese. This means that someone with a Zawgyi phone can’t read websites, posts or Facebook Help Center instructi*** written in Unicode properly. Myanmar is switching to Unicode, and we’re helping by removing Zawgyi as an option for new Facebook users and improving font converters for existing ones. This will not affect people’s posts but it will standardize how they see butt***, Help Center instructi*** and reporting tools in the Facebook app.

新的WordPress政策允许它关闭Sandy Hook deniers的博客

有人批评WordPress的母公司Automattic在周四改变了公司政策，开始关闭这些博客。莎拉·佩雷斯（Sarah Perez）报告说，WordPress的政策现在禁止“恶意发布未经授权的未成年人识别图像”

WordPress policies were designed to be more resistant to the strategic use of copyright claims as a means of getting content removed. Longtime web veterans know they were written this way because they were created at a time when large corporati*** would wield copyright law – like the DMCA – as a weapon used to force platforms to take down content about their company that they deemed unfavorable.

But in recent years, the permissiveness these policies has also created loopholes for those whose spread disinformation, incite hatred and violence, and post abusive and offensive content to the web.

播放亚历克斯·琼斯的奥斯汀海盗电台将面临1.5万美元的罚款

加里·丁格斯报道说，除WordPress外，最新一家取消Alex Jones平台的实体是联邦通信委员会(目前尚不清楚该电台与琼斯有何联系（如果有的话）

An Austin pirate radio station that airs controversial host Alex Jones has been knocked off the city’s airwaves – at least temporarily – and the Federal Communicati*** Commission has levied a $15,000 penalty that the station’s operators are refusing to pay.

A lawsuit filed this week in U.S. District Court in Austin accuses Liberty Radio of operating at 90.1 FM without federal c***ent since at least 2013. Religious programming was airing on that frequency Wednesday, in place of Liberty Radio.

为什么Facebook要招募这个研究实验室来追踪它的巨魔

Issie Lapowsky介绍了大西洋委员会的数字取证研究实验室，该实验室的任务是解释网上错误信息的来源。Facebook在努力了解目前正在开展的对该服务的影响力活动时，严重依赖该组织：

But for Facebook, giving money away is the easy part. The challenge now is figuring out how best to leverage this new partnership. Facebook is a $500 billion tech juggernaut with 30,000 employees in offices around the world; it’s hard to imagine what a 14-person team at a non-profit could tell them that they don’t already know. But Facebook’s security team and DFRLab staff swap tips daily through a shared Slack channel, and Harbath says that Brookie’s team has already made some valuable discoveries.

在别处

Snap如何成为Twitter

信不信由你，“Snap是新推特”过去被认为是热门话题。但数字并没有撒谎：这是另一家在缓慢增长和彻底衰退之间摇摆不定的公司，Tom Dotan报道：

For now, Snap’s ad revenue is growing quickly, as advertisers flock to what remains a relatively new platform. In the June quarter, the company’s revenue of $262 million was up 44% over the same period last year, blowing past ****yst projecti***. But if it follows Twitter, Snap’s ad revenue growth will slow sharply next year.

马克·扎克伯格支持的非营利组织正在帮助失散的移民家庭

据希瑟·凯利（Heather Kelly）报道，硅谷移民倡导组织FWD.us最近投资数百万美元帮助失散的移民家庭团聚，该组织的表现似乎大大低于预期。对FWD有好处。

The group spent two weeks in July in New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona booking flights for reunited parents and their children who were just out of federal custody. The multi-million dollar effort, called Flights for Families, required long hours on the phone booking some 1,300 tickets and attending to countless other details, such as lining up prepaid cell phones, connecting families with lawyers, and keeping the kids entertained.

我对广告商有什么价值？我的执着追求是为我的注意力付出代价

布莱恩·梅内格斯（Bryan Menegus）估计，7月份的一个周二，他收到了319条在线广告，广告主为此花费了约2.69美元。

发射

在多年的忽视之后，Facebook严厉打击了类**经销商

据Josh Contine报道，Facebook现在向搜索芬太尼和其他阿片类药物的人推荐资源，并从搜索结果中删除更多的毒贩。

拿

Facebook在缅甸的失败是一个蹒跚学步的孩子所为

Olivia Solon对Facebook最近关于其在缅甸工作的声明没有印象：

When the Guardian asked how the notoriously metrics-focused company would measure the success of the policy, the answer was characteristically mealy-mouthed: “Our goal is to get better at identifying and removing abuses of our platform that spread hate and can contribute to offline violence or harm, so people in Myanmar can safely enjoy the benefits of connectivity.”

When pushed again to specify how it would measure this, a spokeswoman said “that’s difficult”.

最后。。。

一个帮助假新闻网站赚钱的广告网络现在要求用户报道假新闻

Revcontent**了一个可怕的密友盒，贴在更著名的新闻故事的底部，诱使你了解一个治疗腹部脂肪的奇怪技巧，或者12个现在看起来很糟糕的前童星，或者其他什么。Buzzfeed的克雷格·西尔弗曼（Craig Silverman）向他们询问好友信箱中包含的各种虚假新闻后，Revcontent不情愿地删除了其中一些——但在谴责Buzzfeed本身是虚假新闻之前。

An ad network launched a new initiative to “continue the fight against fake news” at the same time it was working with 21 websites that have published fake news stories, according to a review conducted by BuzzFeed News.

When contacted for comment, Revcontent subsequently removed four of the sites from its network, and in a statement suggested that a previous BuzzFeed News story about ad networks on fake news sites could itself be c***idered “fake news.”

上面的故事来自2017年，Revcontent让我知道它现在正在与一个国际事实核查网络合作。进步！