这是内容适度故事的重要一周。上周五，Radiolab发布了一篇引人入胜的插曲，讲述了Facebook在决定平台上保留哪些内容方面不断发展的方法。该插曲通过公司内部的一系列历史性辩论，阐明了一家寻求在全球范围内规范言论的公司所面临的诸多挑战。

周四，主板公司的Jason Koebler和Joseph Cox在Facebook上发布了他们自己的内容节制历史，但着眼于未来。通过对Facebook高管、现任和前任主持人以及学术研究人员的采访，Koebler和Cox着手界定问题的范围以及Facebook为解决这一问题所做的努力。

这篇文章赞扬了Facebook在这方面所做的深思熟虑的工作，同时对整个项目表达了深深的怀疑。这篇文章中间的一段话一直伴随着我：

Size is the one thing Facebook isn’t willing to give up. And so Facebook’s content moderation team has been given a Sisyphean task: Fix the mess Facebook’s worldview and business model has created, without changing the worldview or business model itself.

“Making their stock-and-trade in soliciting unvetted, god-knows-what content from literally anyone on earth, with whatever agendas, ideological bents, political goals and trying to make that sustainable — it’s actually almost ridiculous when you think about it that way,” Roberts, the UCLA professor, told Motherboard. “What they’re trying to do is to resolve human nature fundamentally.“

Facebook可能不会说它试图“解决”人性问题。但是，公司的努力确实都是从这样一个理念开始的，即它能够而且应该将地球上的每个人联系起来——尽管对这样做的后果几乎没有把握。

这篇文章引起了人们对谢丽尔·桑德伯格（Sheryl Sandberg）在内容审查纠纷中扮演的角色的新关注，报道称Facebook首席运营官确实不时会对困难的电话进行权衡(首席执行官马克·扎克伯格（Mark Zuckerberg）也是如此。）它考察了留住内容版主的困难，版主的任务往往非常艰巨，而且由于一套不断发展的标准，他们必须不断接受再培训。

One hate speech presentation obtained by Motherboard has a list of all the recent changes to the slide deck, including additi***, removals, and clarificati*** of certain topics. In some months, Facebook pushed changes to the hate speech training document several times within a window of just a few days. In all, Facebook tweaked the material over 20 times in a five month period. Some policy changes are slight enough to not require any sort of retraining, but other, more nuanced changes need moderators to be retrained on that point. Some individual presentati*** obtained by Motherboard stretch into the hundreds of slides, stepping through examples and bullet points on why particular pieces of content should be removed.

大多数情况下，就像之前的Radiolab一样，这件作品传达了巨大的挑战。网上的反应基本上是怀疑的(纽约的马克斯写道：“所有这些所谓的尼采粉丝都加入了一个统一的项目，乏味地将一套‘一致’的规则应用于所有的话语和人际关系。祝你好运

也许未来的事件会使Facebook连接所有人的项目复杂化。但如果他们不这样做，我会回到公司应该继续执行扎克伯格关于内容节制的最高**的想法。正如我在本周早些时候所说：最终，什么属于Facebook的问题不能完全由在那里工作的人来决定。

德国

昨天，我承诺如果Facebook和德国难民暴力研究的作者得到我的回复，我会让你知道。我的问题是他们如何在研究中解释时间顺序：鉴于提供的数据，他们似乎不可能肯定地说Facebook上的帖子导致了暴力，而不是相反。

我收到了作者之一Karsten Müller的回信。他提出了两个关键点。首先，该研究努力不确定它是否证明了因果关系。作者的确切路线是：“本节中的结果应被解释为纯粹的暗示，不允许因果推断。”

第二点在于对调查方法的详细描述，该方法依赖于根据公共页面上的互动开发Facebook使用模型，然后将其与反难民暴力事件联系起来。Müller告诉我，让作者提出一些因果关系的原因是该研究利用互联网中断来确定德国市政当局何时较少接触Facebook：

As it turns out, we find that the correlation between the interaction of local social media penetration and a measure of anti-refugee sentiments on Facebook on one hand, and hate crimes on the other, appears to vanish in weeks such outages occur. A graph that visualizes these results can be found in the newest version of the paper, available on SSRN (look for “binned scatter plot”). If one wants to claim that social media does not have any propagating effect on hate crimes when tensi*** are already high (which is what we are measuring), one would need to explain the mediating effect of these outages.

那么你如何解释这种中介效应呢？泰勒·考恩（Tyler Cowen）在他的博客上对此进行了尝试：

Even if internet or Facebook outages do have a predictive effect on attacks in some manner, it likely shows that Facebook is a communicati*** medium used to organize gatherings and attacks (as the telephone once might have been), not, as the authors repeatedly suggest, that Facebook is somehow generating and whipping up and controlling racist sentiment over time. Again, compare such a possibility to the broader literature. There is good evidence that anti-semitic violence across German regi*** is fairly persistent, with pogroms during the Black Death predicting synagogue attacks during the Nazi time. And we are supposed to believe that racist feelings dwindle into passivity simply because the thugs cannot access Facebook for a few days or maybe a week?

考恩的文章仍然值得全文阅读。正如我昨天提到的，围绕德国研究的许多困惑源于这样一个事实，即我们无法获得大多数相关数据。匿名数据，与经过严格审查的学者安全共享，可能会让我们更接近真相。

民主

谷歌在YouTube和其他网站上删除与伊朗有联系的账户

据托尼·罗姆报道，FireEye和Facebook发现的伊朗影响力运动在YouTube和博客上都有标语：

Google announced Thursday that it deleted 58 accounts with ties to Iran on its video platform YouTube and its other sites, the latest sign that foreign agents from around the world increasingly seek to spread disinformation on a broad array of popular websites.

The new removals targeted 39 channels on YouTube, which had more than 13,000 views in the United States, as well as 13 accounts on the social networking site Google Plus and six accounts on Blogger, its blogging platform, the company said. Kent Walker, Google’s senior vice president of global affairs, said in a blog postthat each of the accounts had ties to the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, or IRIB, which is tied to Iran’s ayatollah, and that they “disguised their connection to this effort.”

FireEye如何帮助Facebook发现虚假信息活动

Kate Conger和Sheera Frenkel带领我们了解FireEye如何发现伊朗的行动：

“It started with a single social media account or a **all set of accounts that were pushing this political-themed content that didn’t necessarily seem in line with the personas that the accounts had adopted,” said Mr. Foster. Many of the fake accounts, which sprawled across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Reddit, shared content from Liberty Front Press.

Over two months, Mr. Foster and a **all group of ****ysts mapped the connecti*** between the accounts and unearthed more of them.

民主党说，试图入侵选民数据库是一个错误的警报

周三，我给大家带来了一个消息，民主党全国委员会可能成为黑客攻击的目标。事实证明，密歇根州民主党**了黑客来模拟攻击。

2018年中期选举前假新闻战愈演愈烈

莎拉·费舍尔（Sara Fischer）研究了中期选举前错误信息的一些演变方式：

More sophisticated bot tools: New tools are being created to manipulate information at the blog or comment level on everyday websites, says Mike Marriott, researcher at Digital Shadows, a digital security firm.

In a new report, Marriott explains that tools such as BotMasterLabs and ZennoStore claim to promote content across hundreds of thousands of platforms, including forums, blogs, and bulletin boards, but in reality, they control large numbers of bots that are programmed to post on specific types of forums on different topics.

审讯显示，孟菲斯警方使用伪造的Facebook账户监控黑人的生命

安东尼娅·努里·法赞报道说，这不仅仅是俄罗斯人和伊朗人在进行“协调一致的不真实行为”——现在也是警官们的一种策略：

Bob Smith said he lived in Oxford, Miss. On Facebook, he “liked” pages for Black Lives Matter, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Memphis Voices For Palestine, Mid-South Peace and Justice, and comedian Rickey Smiley, according to images obtained by The Appeal. “I’m not a cop,” he wrote in a private Facebook message to one activist, adding that he would be interested in attending protests in the Memphis area, but it was a bit of a drive. In lieu of a profile picture, he uploaded an illustration of a Guy Fawkes mask.

That’s because “Bob Smith” wasn’t a person of color, as he had claimed online. On Monday, Sgt. Timothy Reynolds, a white detective with the Memphis Police Department’s Office of Homeland Security, testified in federal court that he had created the account and friended hundreds of activists, according to the Commercial Appeal.

Facebook禁止捕获400万用户数据的问答应用

Deepa Seetharaman从一个家伙那里得到一份声明，他的个性测验应用程序周三被Facebook禁止：

One of the researchers behind the app, David Stillwell, called the ban “n***ensical and purely for PR reas***.” Mr. Stillwell said the findings from the myPersonality app were used to publish several social-science research papers in recent years and that he and his research partner were invited to Facebook’s offices in 2011 and 2015 to discuss their work.

“It is therefore odd that Facebook should suddenly now profess itself to have been unaware of the myPersonality research and to believe that the data may have been misused,” Mr. Stillwell said in a statement.

俄罗斯巨魔正在推特上传播疫苗安全的困惑

这里有一个来自Azen Ghorayshi的故事，它采纳了Twitter不断谈论的“平台健康”并使之成为文字：

Accounts run by the Russian government-backed Internet Research Agency tweeted about vaccines roughly 22 times more frequently than the average Twitter user, the study found. The tweets fell roughly equally into pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine categories.

“They don’t seem to have a particular agenda concerning vaccines — rather they seem to have a desire to boost both sides of the debate,” said David Broniatowski, assistant professor of engineering at George Washington University and lead author of the study. “That’s c***istent with this idea of spreading discord.”

科技巨头正在成为民主的捍卫者。现在怎么办？

Issie Lapowsky问，为什么科技公司在保护国家免受网络攻击方面比**做得更多：

The Department of Justice has issued scathing indictments of Russian hackers and trolls this year, but without international jurisdiction they’re largely symbolic. The White House axed its top cyber policy position following the departure of former cybersecurity czar Tom Bossert in April. The Global Engagement Center, a State Department initiative that was directed to counter Russian propaganda, has been starved for resources for much of the past year. And it’s anyone’s guess who, exactly, is resp***ible for making sure that information gets shared with the right people across the public and private sector.

“Every agency is off doing its own thing. No one is in charge,” says Brett Bruen, former White House director of global engagement under President Obama. “We continue to have a very siloed process within the government, let alone bringing the private sector to the table to try to figure this out together.”

在宾夕法尼亚州致命刺伤黑人的嫌疑人“喜欢”近50个种族主义者的Facebook页面

据Alex Amend报道，宾夕法尼亚州一名黑人遇害的嫌疑人在Facebook上沉浸在白人民族主义中：

On Facebook, Rocco “liked” nearly 50 pages that traffic in memes and slang favored by the alt-right and the broader white nationalist movement.

Rocco subscribed to pages like “Alt-Right Meme Magic,” “Smash Cultural Marxi**,” and “Lazer-Beamed Memes with Fashy Themes,” as well as a scattering of motivational speakers and other pages dedicated to body building. Rocco subscribed to the page of Identity Dixie, an SPLC-designated neo-Confederate hate group.

在别处

苹果从应用商店中删除Facebook Onavo应用

Onavo**了一个VPN应用程序，用户可以下载该应用程序以更私密地浏览web。但2013年收购Onavo的Facebook已将其用作预警系统，以了解哪些竞争性应用可能正在获得吸引力(一位前Facebooker告诉我，最可怕的应用程序增长“缓慢且缓慢”——绝对数量很小，但稳定，同时保留了现有的用户基础。）现在，苹果公司已经向Facebook施压，要求其将Onavo从应用商店中撤出。苹果公司已经将隐私问题作为一项关键的公司信息策略。它将继续在Android上运行，但对Facebook来说仍然是一个打击。

Facebook从惠普挖走了新的首席营销官安东尼奥·卢西奥

Facebook有了一位新的营销主管来取代加里·布里格斯。

Facebook业务主管Dan Rose离开

正如彼得·卡夫卡（Peter Kafka）在这里指出的那样，这是Facebook今年夏天的第二次重大离职，仅次于政策和沟通主管埃利奥特·施拉格（Elliot Schrage）。2016年加入Facebook的罗斯负责业务发展，并领导公司收购Instagram等。

新闻素养项目正在教孩子们停止虚假新闻

马克·沙利文和蒂姆·巴贾林介绍了新闻素养项目：

The News Literacy Project, an education program aimed at helping young people distinguish real news from fake news in the age of weaponized social media, attacks the fake news problem at the c***umer level. The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit says that since the 2016 electi***, it’s been fielding a surge in demand from teachers across the world. Recently, it received a $1 million grant from Facebook to help expand its curricula. By helping kids hone their own bullshit detectors, the NLP, and projects like it, may offer our best hope against fake news.

文莫考虑让人们更难看到别人在买什么

Julie Verhage报道说，Venmo终于有点可能摆脱了公共API，它让任何人都可以通过购买Venmo来让人们在网上尴尬

The debate inside PayPal was sparked by concerns over the privacy of its users. This summer, a researcher drew attention to Venmo’s privacy settings, which default to public, with her ****ysis of more than 200 million transacti*** on the platform. PayPal has said it gives users the option to only share with friends or with the recipient and can adjust this for each transaction.

发射

Wickr有一个新的计划来躲避网络阻塞

The encrypted chat app is partnering with a company named Psiphon to obscure the origins of traffic, my colleague Russell Brandom reports. As more countries seek to ban chat apps, this kind of thing could become more likely.

NewsGuard与人类而不是算法对抗假新闻

史蒂文·布里尔（Steven Brill）的“假新闻斗争公司”（fake news fighting company）有一个Chrome扩展，通过自己的记者提供的信息，根据可信度对新闻网站进行评级。伊西·拉波斯基：

To vet the sites, they use a checklist of nine criteria that typically denote trustworthiness. Sites that don’t clearly label advertising lose points, for example. Sites that have a coherent correction policy gain points. If you install NewsGuard and browse Google, Bing, Facebook, or Twitter, you’ll see either a red or green icon next to every news source, a binary indicator of whether it meets NewsGuard’s standards. Hover over the icon, and NewsGuard offers a full “nutrition label,” with point-by-point descripti*** of how it scored the site, and links to the bios of whoever scored them.

The tool is designed to maximize transparency, says Steve Brill, NewsGuard’s cofounder, best known for founding the cable company Court TV. “We’re trying to be the opposite of an algorithm,” he says. Brill started NewsGuard with Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

拿

《****》不应该如此依赖Facebook和反难民研究。

Felix Salmon在德国的Facebook研究中有更多的冷水可以泼：

With hindsight, the Times should have avoided terms like “landmark” and “breathtaking,” and should probably have avoided mentioning specific results at all. The white paper is intriguing, and it was a great idea to use it as a jumping-off point for the newspaper’s shoe-leather reporting. The study was not, however, something to cite as a significant scientific advance. Facebook deliberately makes it extremely difficult for external researchers to quantify its effects on society, which means the best we can hope for is to piece together a jigsaw puzzle of suggestive evidence. (If the company would just make its data available, we’d stop being forced to estimate via imperfect Nutella-proxies.) But as things currently stand, no one piece of research is going to be the kind of **oking gun that the Times tries to turn this one into.

Facebook或任何人能解决互联网的错误信息问题吗？

Farhad Manjoo对平台遏制错误信息的努力持悲观态度：

C***ider the most pressing question: How confident should you be that the coming midterm electi*** will be safe from hacking and propaganda operati*** online? The most likely answer: Nobody knows for sure, but probably not very confident.

WhatsApp有一个假新闻问题，可以在不破坏加密的情况下修复

在一篇聪明的文章中，希曼苏·古普塔（Himanshu Gupta）和哈什·塔尼娅（Harsh Taneja）认为WhatsApp可以通过在元数据级别识别它们来缓和WhatsApp上恶作剧的传播(古普塔以前在WhatsApp的竞争对手微信公司工作。）

Therefore, even if WhatsApp can’t actually read the contents of a message, it can access the unique cryptographic hash of that message (which it uses to enable instant forwarding), the time the message was sent, and other metadata. It can also potentially determine who sent a particular file to whom. In short, it can track a message’s journey on its platform (and thereby, fake news) and identify the originator of that message.

If WhatsApp can identify a particular a message’s metadata precisely, it can tag that message as “fake news” after appropriate content moderation. It can be argued that WhatsApp can also, with some tweaks to its algorithm, identify the original sender of a fake news image, video, or text and potentially also stop that content from further spreading on its network.

我想注销

史蒂夫·卢梭说，社交应用改变了友谊的本质，使他感到沮丧：

It’s increasingly feeling like if I’m not participating in the unending online conversation, I’m not participating in my friendships anymore. What started out as a group chat to organize bike rides is now a meme dumping ground interspersed with “we should all meet up and get beers some time.” (We’ve yet to meet up and get beers some time).

It’s not that the nature of friendship has changed, it’s that the internet made us believe that all of this was necessary and good.

最后。。。

LinkedIn消息生成器

你有没有从LinkedIn那里得到过糟糕的招聘广告？多亏了安德鲁·杜伯斯坦（Andrew Duberstein）提供的这个惊人/糟糕的工具，现在你可以自己**了。这是我的：

Hi Casey,

Super-pumped to meet you! My employer DeepCube, a de-centralized Enron, has just raised 103 DogeCoin to design the future of maritime piracy.

Amazed by your knowledge of A/B testing and hypergrowth, I think you’d be a great fit for our In-House Tea Specialist. Let’s grab coffee to discuss—how’s Thursday?

Have a good one!

Drew

那就永远不要了，德鲁。

跟我说

向我发送提示、评论或问题：[email protected]. 或者像T.一样，星期四在旧金山的蓝色瓶子里走近我的好年轻人介绍自己，并讨论了过去一周的这一时事通讯。在现实生活中与时事通讯读者见面一直是编写界面的最大乐趣之一。有空打个招呼！