在今天的科技听证会上，传统观点认为，Facebook首席运营官谢丽尔·桑德伯格（Sheryl Sandberg）将凭借她的沉着和对事实的掌控力顺利通过。推特首席执行官杰克·多尔西（Jack Dorsey）首次出现在国会面前，预计他将面临困境。谷歌拒绝派首席执行官Sundar Pichai（或Alphabet首席执行官拉里·佩奇）出席会议，并将由一张空椅子在讲台上代表谷歌。预计谷歌将受到立法者最严重的蔑视。

随着这一天的开始，在参议院情报特别委员会（Senate Select Committee on Intelligence）面前，传统智慧似乎得到了认可。《****》强大的五人现场博客操作中的这两段描述了动态：

Ms. Sandberg, who was born in Washington, and spent years living there during her time at the Treasury Department, appeared confident in her opening remarks. Speaking clearly and with practiced pacing, she complimented the committee’s previous work on election interference.

Mr. Dorsey stumbled during his opening, forgetting to turn on his microphone and reading from a cellphone he held in his hand. He added that he was also live-tweeting his opening remarks through his Twitter account.

与此同时，谷歌确实招致了立法者的愤怒。它曾提议派遣首席法律和政策执行官肯特·沃克（Kent Walker），但参议院拒绝了。”如果你不在餐桌上，你就在菜单上，国会看起来很饿，”一位说客在彭博社告诉马克·伯根和本·布罗迪。他们对谷歌拒绝发送Page或Pichai的原因进行了一些知情猜测：

For Google, the Senate decision may be a calculated risk. The bad optics of an empty chair could outweigh being dragged further into a morass that Google may feel belongs to Facebook and Twitter. Google found far less election spending from Russia’s Internet Research Agency than the other two. When Walker testified in earlier hearings, the lawyer repeatedly emphasized that Google was, unlike its peers, not a “social network.”

这一风险似乎没有得到回报，部分原因是参议院听证会——重点关注公司如何保护其平台免受外国攻击——是诚恳而巧妙的。与4月份灾难性的众议院听证会“偏见”不同，这次会议主要是本着诚意进行的。谷歌错过了一次与立法者建立友好关系的机会，只是简单地重复了其高管在其他地方说过的话——Facebook和Twitter都采取了这种方法，取得了良好的效果。

正如所料，桑德伯格顺利完成了她在听证会上的部分，基本上详细阐述了首席执行官马克·扎克伯格（Mark Zuckerberg）前一天晚上在《*****》（Washington Post）的一篇专栏文章中提供的初级读物。Facebook正在招聘版主，查杀假账户，公开广告并进行搜索，并与事实核查人员合作减少错误信息的传播。所有这些以前都被广泛宣传过，现在又成为国会记录的一部分。

如果说在听证会上有什么惊喜的话，那就是多尔西那不切实际、腼腆的个性在立法者中表现得如此出色。他也向立法者提供了他在其他地方做出的承诺，比如在最近的媒体之旅中。Twitter正在考虑给机器人贴标签；这是关于谈话健康的思考；它正在考虑重新考虑整个服务。参议院相信了他的话，赞扬了他的坦率和（当天晚些时候）他的耐力。

在众议院，多尔西似乎独自一人回答了议员们长达四个多小时的问题，语气通常更为尖锐——但国会议员最终也同样恭敬。多尔西在一些奇怪的时刻保持冷静，最明显的是一位极右翼活动家的尖叫和一位保守派立法者假扮拍卖师的声音，并举行了一场假拍卖，直到她被护送出大楼。

彼得·卡夫卡在《重新编码》中抓住了要点：

Republicans asked, over and over, whether Twitter’s programs, policies and employees favored liberal causes and politicians over c***ervative ones. Not at all, Dorsey patiently answered, over and over.

And Democrats split their time between complaining about other issues they wished the hearing focused on, like Twitter’s failure to keep abusive users off the platform, and the fact that the entire hearing seemed ginned up as a political exercise to help Republicans in the fall electi***.

If you watched any of this, there’s no way you think US lawmakers are going to do anything about US internet companies, or anything else.

当然，有些人确实认为立法者可能很快就会对美国互联网公司进行监管。司法部周三表示，它将与州检察长会面，讨论像Facebook和谷歌这样的公司是否在损害竞争，扼杀思想的自由交流。”弗吉尼亚州民主党参议员马克·华纳（Mark Warner）在周三听证会上的一段广为传阅的引述中说：“国会将不得不在这里采取行动。”社交媒体中狂野的西方时代即将结束。”

时间会证明一切，尽管我仍有疑虑(毕竟，华纳是少数党的一员。）不过，总的来说，我觉得当天的活动令人振奋。国会议员们已经多次竞选顶尖科技领袖，他们似乎正在实际掌握社交媒体平台的运作方式、好处和风险，以及试图对其进行监管的复杂性。科技公司也做出了相应的反应——即使不是总是积极的，甚至是有效的。

这还不够。我不清楚什么是足够的。但这只是一个开始。

民主

今天社交媒体听证会上最重要的7个时刻

有关今天听证会的更多信息，请阅读我和我同事阿迪·罗伯逊的指南。

谁负责保护社交媒体免受选举干扰？

莎拉·弗里尔（Sarah Frier）和艾莉莎·塞贝尼乌斯（Alyza Sebenius）关注Facebook在抵御外国干涉方面的最新言论，即Facebook需要**的帮助。

Because behind the scenes, there is a delicate struggle over who is accountable for ensuring that another election isn’t compromised. Tech firms have been stymied in efforts to get federal agencies to provide the kinds of assistance that can only come from officials who have access to sensitive national security information, according to people familiar with the matter. The government has made it clear that the companies need to do more to prevent hacking and improper influence.

Federal agencies have been hesitant to share confidential tips that could identify or prevent the next Russia-scale attack because of security concerns, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak about the matter. The intelligence community assumes the companies already know what to look for, said the people. When the companies do ask for help, they sometimes don’t know who to call, because there’s not a single person or entity in charge. In May, the White House eliminated the role of cybersecurity coordinator. In late August, a Facebook security official invited representatives from other technology companies including Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. to a meeting at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, to share strategies and tips for detecting problems ahead of the midterms. Nobody from the government was invited, one of the people said.

贝宁正在对Facebook、WhatsApp等社交媒体应用程序的使用征税

与之前的赞比亚和乌干达一样，贝宁对社交媒体的使用征税：

The government passed a decree in late August taxing its citizens for accessing the internet and social-media apps. The directive, first proposed in July, institutes a fee (link in French) of 5 CFA francs ($0.008) per megabyte c***umed through services like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter. It also introduces a 5% fee, on top of taxes, on texting and calls, according to advocacy group Internet Sans Frontières (ISF).

The new law has been denounced, with citizens and advocates using the hashtag #Taxepame**o (“Don’t tax my megabytes”) to call on officials to cancel the levy. The increased fees will not only burden the poorest c***umers and widen the digital divide, but they will also be “disastrous” for the nation’s nascent digital economy, says ISF’s executive director Julie Owono. A petition against the levy on Change.org has garnered nearly 7,000 signatures since it was created five days ago.

被指控的俄罗斯间谍散布假新闻，并潜入Facebook

凯文·鲍尔森（Kevin Poulsen）在Facebook上找到了一家被禁止的俄罗斯通讯社：

Two weeks after Facebook expunged a supposedly independent news site linked to Russia’s military intelligence arm, the banned site is **uggling its Putin-friendly content back into the social network’s streams by using a Moscow publisher as a cut-out, the Daily Beast has found.

在别处

许多美国Facebook用户改变了隐私设置或休息

美国人对社交媒体平台信任度的下降如何体现在社交媒体平台的使用上？这里有一些来自皮尤的令人信服的新数据。我希望看到进一步的研究证实这一点。但假设这一点在方向上是正确的，这表明社交媒体被抛弃现在是美国的一种大众主流现象：

Just over half of Facebook users ages 18 and older (54%) say they have adjusted their privacy settings in the past 12 months, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Around four-in-ten (42%) say they have taken a break from checking the platform for a period of several weeks or more, while around a quarter (26%) say they have deleted the Facebook app from their cellphone. All told, some 74% of Facebook users say they have taken at least one of these three acti*** in the past year.

脸谱网自己的培训材料都是假新闻

抑制仇恨言论有多难？Joseph Cox报道，Facebook自己的内容审查指南错误地识别了一个重要图像的来源：

From Alex Jones to Russian troll factories to Iranian influence operati***, Facebook is increasingly facing pressure to deal with its disinformation problem. But Facebook has internally fallen for ‘fake news’ itself. In a Facebook document obtained by Motherboard, the company falsely attributes an image to the recent Myanmar genocide, when it actually dates from an earthquake in another country years earlier.

The mistake, made in a document used to train some of Facebook’s content moderators and which appears to originate from a years-old piece of fake news, is particularly ironic, given that Facebook recently said it was going to remove misinformation on its platform that could lead to violence.

Facebook指控黑莓窃取语音信息技术

当黑莓的硬件业务失败时，它转而成为一个专利巨魔，并在今年早些时候起诉了Facebook。现在Facebook已经反诉了。

Vimeo将业务重心从媒体转向技术

如果你曾经希望Vimeo能够发展成为一个有意义的挑战YouTube的视频门户网站，使其具有更精致的美学和更好的策划，那么这些希望现在应该正式破灭了：IAC拥有的这处房产正转向成为一个股票录像目的地，其首席执行官告诉莎拉·菲舍尔。

发射

Snap推出了更像传统太阳镜的新型眼镜

Nico和Veronica是Snap眼镜太阳镜的新款式。它们看起来不错，但这些只是表面上的改变。我在四月份复习了第二版。

拿

针对谷歌、亚马逊、优步和Facebook的打破垄断案

顺便说一句，这是垄断周，这是一篇及时的文章我的同事拉塞尔·布兰登（Russell Brandom）研究了拆分四大科技公司的案例。以下是他对Facebook的看法：

In some ways, Facebook is the most urgent case. It’s inescapable, opaque, and it wields immense power over the fundamental functi*** of our society. More than any other tech giant, Facebook’s power feels like an immediate threat and the most plausible first target for congressional action. Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) has already laid out 20 different measures that would rein in Facebook and other tech giants, ranging from GDPR-style data portability requirements to more carveouts of Section 230.

But while Warner’s measures focus on nudging Facebook toward more resp***ible behavior, a growing number of critics see the problem as Facebook itself. It may be that a social network with more than 2 billion users is simply too big to be managed resp***ibly, and no amount of moderators or regulators will be able to meaningfully rein the company in. For those critics, social networks are a natural monopoly, and no amount of portability requirements will ever produce a meaningful compe***** to Facebook or a meaningful check on its power.

我在教民主党竞选活动的电子邮件安全。情况和2016年一样糟糕。

Maciej Ceglowski-发音和拼写一样发现民主竞选的安全状况相当糟糕：

For the past eight months, I’ve been traveling the country in a sometimes quixotic attempt to train congressional campaigns about email security. On one recent trip, I asked a Democratic campaign manager how he was keeping track of his personal passwords. When he hung his head, I knew what was coming.

“I use the same password for every site,” he confessed. He told me about a moment of panic when a college friend who shared his password on a sports site logged in to his Gmail account as a joke. Google noticed the out-of-state login and sent him a security alert. In the minutes before the friend admitted to the prank, he saw his career flash before his eyes.

最后。。。

那些带着“令人毛骨悚然的星号”溜进DMs的家伙

Quinn Meyers写道：“有一种令人不安的说话风格从网络文化的深处冒了出来，进入了约会世界：令人毛骨悚然的星号。”你正在和某人发短信，不知不觉中，你的对话突然变成了角色扮演。”

Creepy asterisks are now so universally despised that a subreddit exists with 220,000 subscribers who document the cringiest examples. It’s both PSA and support group.

So if asterisk roleplay is so skin-crawlingly gross, why do so many people still use them? What’s it like to be on the receiving end of a message like *grooms your hair* or *stretches while showing massive furcock*? And finally, what can they tell us about our c***tantly evolving language?

*挥手告别*

跟我说

向我发送提示、问题、评论和国会证词：[email protected].