首先，我想祝大家数据隐私日快乐健康。如果你在寻找一种有趣的庆祝方式，我建议你列一张清单，列出你为保护隐私所采取的所有措施，然后记住，直到上周，电信公司才将你的实时位置卖给任何有能力购买的人。

接下来，两个关于Facebook和power的故事。

首先，Facebook计划建立一个独立的内容审查最高**。马克·扎克伯格（MarkZuckerberg）去年4月在与埃兹拉·克莱因（Ezra Klein）的对话中提出了这个想法，Facebook在11月正式承诺了这个想法。

今天，该公司新任政策和沟通主管尼克·克莱格（Nick Clegg）宣布，Facebook将采取下一步行动，建立一个现在被称为“监督委员会”的机构，并公布了章程草案：

As we build out the board we want to make sure it is able to render independent judgment, is transparent and respects privacy. After initial c***ultation and deliberation, we’ve proposed a basic scope and structure that’s outlined in this draft charter. We’ve also identified key decisi*** that still need to be made, like the number of members, length of terms and how cases are selected.

We’ll look to answer these questi*** over the next six months in a series of workshops around the world where we will convene experts and organizati*** who work on a range of issues such as free expression, technology and democracy, procedural fairness and human rights. We’ll host these workshops in Singapore, Delhi, Nairobi, Berlin, New York, Mexico City and many more cities — soliciting feedback on how best to design a board that upholds our principles and brings independent judgment to hard cases.

我喜欢董事会的想法，它承诺将言论和内容节制的权力下放给更多元化的主题专家群体，他们与一个国家的政治或该平台的金融利益联系更少。正如我去年夏天写的：

What Facebook is describing with these ideas is something like a system of justice — and there are very few things it is working on that I find more fascinating. For all the reas*** laid out by Radiolab, a perfect content moderation regime likely is too much to hope for. But Facebook could build and support instituti*** that help it balance competing noti*** of free speech and a safe community. Ultimately, the question of what belongs on Facebook can’t be decided solely by the people who work there.

**草案提供了关于这一切如何运作的有用的新细节。该公司计划在董事会中增加40人，这对我来说既太小也太大，取决于我对董事会的看法。案件将由较小的董事会成员小组决定，他们将根据自己的利益选择他们希望审议的案件。他们将发表自己的意见，但不会发表个人投票。他们将得到报酬。

Facebook将选择第一组，董事会成员任期三年。之后，每位离任成员将选择自己的继任者。Facebook现任和前任员工以及**官员都被禁止加入董事会。

在Wired，伊西·拉波斯基（Issie Lapowsky）喜欢这个总体想法，但担心Facebook的巨大规模将使章程草案中描述的系统无法运行：

No team, no matter the size or scope, could ever adequately c***ider every viewpoint represented on Facebook. After all, arguably Facebook’s biggest problem when it comes to content moderation decisi*** is not how it’s making the decisi*** or who’s making them, but just how many decisi*** there are to make on a platform of its size.

In seeking to fix one unprecedented problem, Facebook has proposed an unprecedented, and perhaps impossible, solution. No, the decisi*** Facebook’s supreme court makes won’t dictate who’s allowed to get married or whether schools ought to be integrated. But they will shape the definition of acceptable discourse on the world’s largest social network.

我怀疑，随着监督委员会的形成，以及对其首批案件的审议，我们将有更多的争论。但Facebook如此多的批评都是从观察到该公司拥有前所未有的规模和权力开始的——因此，看到它将权力重新下放给自己的社区，即使是以有限的方式，也值得鼓励。

尤其如此，因为今天的另一件大事是权力的巩固。ProPublica和其他几家媒体已经建立了工具，允许记者在获得安装工具的用户同意的情况下，收集针对他们的广告信息。但正如杰里米B。Merrill和Ariana Tobin今天报道说，这些工具本月停止工作，因为Facebook阻止了这些工具获取广告目标数据的能力。

这是Facebook和记者之间长期存在的猫捉老鼠游戏的一部分，在这个游戏中，记者们建立了从Facebook抓取数据的工具，Facebook告诉他们停止。美林和托宾认为，他们收集的数据使研究成为可能，而Facebook自己的工具却没有：

The latest move comes a few months after Facebook executives urged ProPublica to shut down its ad transparency project. In August, Facebook ads product management director Rob Leathern acknowledged ProPublica’s project “serves an important purpose.” But he said, “We’re going to start enforcing on the existing terms of service that we have.” He said Facebook would soon “transition” ProPublica away from its tool.

Facebook has launched an archive of American political ads, which the company says is an alternative to ProPublica’s tool. However, Facebook’s ad archive is only available in three countries, fails to disclose important targeting data and doesn’t even include all political ads run in the U.S.

Facebook前首席安全官亚历克斯·斯塔莫斯（Alex Stamos）在推特上辩称，Facebook的举动最好理解为针对广告屏蔽者的防御行动，而不是针对新闻业的进攻行动。Facebook已承诺为其广告档案构建一个单独的API，这可能会支持ProPublica一直在做的更多类型的研究，但API进展缓慢。

正如斯塔莫斯所指出的，这是有充分理由的。每个API都会给公司带来一定程度的风险——剑桥分析公司丑闻就是一个典型的例子。值得赞扬的是，正如我之前所指出的，Facebook一直在真诚地努力向研究人员提供一些数据——从来没有他们想要的那么多，但比你可能期望的要多。

最雄心勃勃的此类努力被称为社会科学一号。这是研究人员和私营部门之间的合作关系，旨在利用平台数据进行社会科学研究。它与Facebook的第一个项目于去年4月宣布，将研究社交网络与民主之间的关系。

但正如Robbie Gonzalez上周在《连线》杂志上指出的，该项目进展非常缓慢：

Make no mistake: Getting SSO off the ground was—and continues to be—a royal pain, what with all the legal paperwork, privacy concerns, and ethical c***iderati*** at play. Details of the industry-academic partnership are too complex to relate here (though I’ve written about them previously), but suffice it to say that King and his SSO cofounder, Stanford legal professor Nathan Persily, earlier this month published a 2,300-word update on the status of their initiative, more than half of which is devoted to the ongoing challenges they face in bringing it to fruition. “Complicating matters,” they write, “is the obvious fact that almost every part of our project has never even been attempted before.” [...]

But if all goes well, SSO could have a more lasting impact, by setting up a framework for secure, ethical, independent research within the tech giants. There’s no reason future investigati***, funded and overseen by SSO or a similar outfit, can’t grapple with big questi*** on well-being. They should also involve companies other than Facebook. We not only want to know what a vulnerable individual watches on YouTube, we also want to know what’s happening when they go to Reddit, what questi*** they ask their Alexa or Google Home, or how they feel when they post on Instagram. We need these companies to open their doors, and their datastreams, in a prescribed way that respects every participant in the process.

随着时间的推移，我希望像SSO这样的努力对于合法的社会科学家来说会变得更容易，而类似的工具也会提供给记者。Chrome扩展的数据抓取功能带来了一些优秀的新闻报道。但他们也确实在利用Facebook代码中的漏洞，这些漏洞可以并且被用于不好的目的。

我希望ProPublica和其他人能够继续做他们的新闻工作，同时制定更好的制度。但这就是权力的本质：拥有权力的人往往会慢慢放弃权力。当他们这样做的时候，几乎总是按照他们的条件。

民主

脸谱网开辟了新的战线，以打击政治干预

Sam Schechner和Kimberly Chin报道，Facebook宣布了一项新的努力，以抵御外国对今年春季欧盟议会选举活动的干扰：

The company said Monday that it will take steps to guard against the spread of fake news and misinformation on its platform in coming electi***, including expanding the reach of a searchable database of political ads.

The new tools—similar to those it applied in the run-up to last year’s midterm election in the U.S.—will be available next month in India, before expanding to the EU in March ahead of the bloc’s hotly contested parliamentary election spread across over two dozen countries and languages in May.

GDPR投诉称，谷歌和IAB广告分类列表显示“大量泄露高度隐私数据”

根据GDPR，实时广告竞价是否应该是非法的，因为它涉及给一群人贴上敏感的标签（“精神病”、“*****”），然后将其拍卖给出价最高的人？娜塔莎·洛马斯（Natasha Lomas）报道说，这是一项新投诉中的论点。值得一看——广告拍卖是整个互联网的金融引擎。

It argues the personalized ad industry has “spawned a mass data broadcast mechani**” which gathers “a wide range of information on individuals going well beyond the information required to provide the relevant adverts”; and also that it “provides that information to a host of third parties for a range of uses that go well beyond the purposes which a data subject can understand, or c***ent or object to”.

“There is no legal justification for such pervasive and invasive profiling and processing of personal data for profit,” the complaint asserts.

谷歌关于削减成本的备忘录在公司内部引发激烈辩论

将这一点添加到谷歌员工不满意的事情列表中：一份提议削减成本的2016年文件，上周在内部共享。马克·伯根和阿利斯泰尔·巴尔：

The ideas were in a 2016 slide deck drafted by the company’s human resources department from a brainstorming session. The document, porti*** of which were read to Bloomberg News, was circulated in recent days by employees via Google’s internal communicati*** systems. It detailed proposed changes to employee compensation, benefits and perks.

The document also discussed how the proposals could be best presented to employees to minimize frustration, according to one of the people. That caused the most anger among some staff after the document was circulated, said this person. Google declined to comment.

GDPR使您更容易获取数据，但并不意味着您会理解它

Jon Porter使用GDPR的“访问权”查看您请求数据时实际获得的信息：

It was easy to download my data in the first place. Both Google and Apple’s data download services let you pick and choose what data you want to download. Facebook doesn’t, but all three are easy to find on their respective websites, and it arrives quickly. Meanwhile, rather than presenting it as an easy option to find on its site, getting a single link with all of your Amazon data relies on you digging through the site’s “Contact Us” page to find the option hidden at the end of the list. Once I requested it, it took the full 30 days to receive a link to download my data (the limit imposed by the regulation).

When it actually came time to look at the data I’d received, however, things got messy. Some files were ambiguously labeled, while others were stored in formats that tested the limits of what c***titutes “commonly used.” Actually working out what data I was looking at wasn’t nearly as simple as it should be.

印度执政党的志愿者如何在选举前利用WhatsApp为假新闻火上浇油

Billy Perrigo报告称，限制WhatsApp消息转发次数的举措并未有效阻止错误信息在印度的传播。印度各政党正在创建“数十万”WhatsApp群组聊天，以传播由总理纳伦德拉·莫迪领导的执政党印度人民党（BJP）领导的政治信息：

The strategy reflects a fundamental change in Indian society: at the time of the last national polls in 2014, just 21% of Indians owned a **artphone; by 2019, that figure is thought to have nearly doubled to 39%. And for most of them, WhatsApp is the social media app of choice — by one count, more than 90% of **artphone users have it installed. In recognition of that shift, the BJP’s social media chief declared 2019 the year of India’s first “WhatsApp electi***.”

But according to researchers, as well as screenshots of group chats from as recently as January seen by TIME, these WhatsApp group chats frequently contain and disseminate false information and hateful rhetoric, much of which comes from forwarded messages. Experts say the Hindu nationalist BJP is fueling this trend, although opposition parties are using the same tactics.

在别处

Facebook如何培训内容版主在选举期间扑灭“公关之火”

Joseph Cox探讨了Facebook如何指导版主标记可能引发公共关系危机的内容：

Internal Facebook documents obtained by Motherboard show that beyond protecting democracy, there’s a second, clearly stated reason that Facebook is interested in hardening its platform: protecting its public image. Facebook specifically instructs its content moderators to look out for posts that could cause “PR fires” around “hi-risk events” in the lead-up to electi***.

The internal documents Motherboard obtained from a source talk specifically about three separate electi*** held in 2018. A second source, when presented with secti*** of one of the documents, said that it was indicative of others that the company distributes before electi*** around the world.

Facebook Watch努力提供点击率或广告商

Sarah Frier说Facebook的视频标签起步缓慢。考虑到你能在那里找到的内容的质量，这看起来很疯狂。

While researcher Emarketer estimates that Facebook as a whole will take in nearly double YouTube’s $4.3 billion in video ad sales this year, it expects Watch to account for a single-digit percentage of that figure. “I don’t think it’s yet become a must-buy for brands,” says Abbey Klaassen, chief marketing officer at New York marketer 360i. “They are in a stiff competition for this kind of advertising and inventory.” Last summer, a year after Watch went live in the U.S., half of c***umers hadn’t heard of it and three-quarters hadn’t used it, according to researcher Diffusion Group.

多亏了可寻址电视，预算开始远离Facebook

与上述故事相关：Seb Joseph表示，Facebook最大的举措之一——从电视中抽走广告收入——因“可寻址”电视的兴起而受阻。也就是说，收集您个人信息，然后为您提供个性化广告的电视：

“TV advertisers are moving away from Facebook in relatively big numbers,” said a senior agency executive at a holding group. “They’re putting that money back into TV because it’s more regulated and is starting to establish a proposition around targeted ads. TV viewing as a whole isn’t down, but the way we watch it live is and that’s something broadcasters are still figuring out how to monetize.”

Duracell spent some of 2018 investigating where to spend Facebook budgets across Europe after it discovered that a large portion of the video ads it bought on the social network in the U.K. weren’t being viewed. “People aren’t bothered about video on Facebook,” said a marketer at the CPG business, who was not authorized to speak to Digiday. Rather than try to focus on more expensive, but viewable impressi***, Duracell decided to divert the money it had spent back to TV, a large portion of which went toward on-demand content.

Instagram否认病毒性的说法，即它对用户隐藏了大部分帖子

本月早些时候，我链接到约翰·赫尔曼（John Herrman）的一篇优秀文章，该文章讲述了Facebook的保密性如何助长了人们对该平台工作方式的偏执。在这里，Shannon Liao揭露了颠覆Instagram的最新阴谋论：

Over the past year, people have been posting claims that only 7 percent of Instagram followers see a user’s posts. The viral claim has made it as far as Pinterest and Facebook, where users, often advocating for **all businesses on Instagram, ask people to like and comment “Yes” in order to improve a user’s “ranking” and gain more views.

Although the 7 percent post has been around since at least January 2018, it recently gained more traction, accumulating thousands of likes. Instagram has now come forward to debunk the claim in a Twitter thread, commenting, “We’ve noticed an uptick in posts about Instagram limiting the reach of your photos to 7% of your followers, and would love to clear this up.” It explains that the Instagram feed shows the posts in the order of the accounts that you tend to interact with the most. That means that you should see all of the posts from accounts you’re following eventually, assuming you have the patience to scroll all the way down.

独家：Snapchat衡量的是曾经不可想象的东西

这是其中一个标题将重要性夸大了100%。但是：安吉拉·穆恩（Angela Moon）和希拉·邓（Sheila Dang）报道说，Snap正在考虑将我们的故事永久性地发布给公众，以便对其新闻合作伙伴更有用。

Snap announced the partnerships last year and will sign four more deals in the near future, said the person familiar with Snap’s plans. Initially, public stories would disappear after 30 days but now remain viewable for 90 days, according to Snap’s support website.

Some partners have said that the disappearing and anonymous nature of public stories makes them difficult to work with, the sources said. Some news organizati*** will not embed Snapchat stories into articles because the content eventually disappears, while others will not use them because they are unable to verify anonymous users’ Snapchat videos.

Tinder用价值1150万美元的超级明星解决了年龄歧视诉讼

Tinder有一个聪明的想法，就是向老年人收取比年轻人更多的费用来使用其订阅服务。在一场集体诉讼中，Tinder辩称这几乎是定义上的年龄歧视之后，公司同意支付1150万美元的费用，以购买Super Likes。Dami Lee报道：

Tinder was criticized when it service launched for its age tiers, which charged a $9.99 monthly fee for users under 29 and $19.99 for users 30 and up. At the time, Tinder defended the pricing model and compared the tiers to Spotify’s discounted rates for students in a statement to NPR. A Tinder spokesperson commented, “During our testing we’ve learned, not surprisingly, that younger users are just as excited about Tinder Plus, but are more budget c***trained and need a lower price to pull the trigger.”

发射

YouTube表示，将少推荐一些关于阴谋论的视频

周五我忘了写我自己的故事——关于YouTube算法的有意义的更新。关于这一点还有很多要说的，但我认为最好的办法是让这一测试展开，看看结果是否符合公司的说法(除了一篇博文中提到的三个例子外，YouTube认为什么是“边缘内容”基本上还完全不清楚。）

YouTube said on Friday that it would promote fewer videos containing misinformation and c***piracy theories, a potentially significant step to reducing the service’s potential to drive viewers toward extremist content. In a test limited to the United States, the service said it would stop recommending what it calls “borderline content” — videos that come close to violating its community guidelines but stop just short.

While YouTube said the change would affect less than 1 percent of videos that are available on YouTube, the sheer volume of content available on the service suggests the effect could be significant.

亚马逊纪事

我的前同事蒂姆·卡莫迪（Tim Carmoty）刚刚开始了一份充满希望的新时事通讯，它可能值得你花时间。想想界面，但不是Facebook作为核心主题，而是亚马逊。我在。

拿

困惑才是关键

科林·霍根（Colin Horgan）在一篇关于科文顿天主教冲突以及它告诉我们新闻如何在社交网络上传播的文章中说：“我们知道的越少，参与的就越多。”

Information networks like Twitter and Facebook were created to feed us endless supplies of information. They sold us the promise of grasping, at any moment, all the world’s information from all possible perspectives. We accepted these platforms happily, assuming we would know what to do with all the thoughts and ideas they provide.

We were wrong. Rather than bringing us a clearer picture of our world, platforms have left us utterly and completely bewildered. Yet, instead of questioning social media’s original promise, we carry on, mistakenly believing the solution to this problem will come with even more information. We are caught in a contextual death spiral — a bottomless gyre in which we tumble forever disoriented, helplessly drinking water to save ourselves from drowning.

BuzzFeed课程（$）

本·汤普森就Facebook、谷歌和媒体业务之间的关系提出了一个不受欢迎但必要的观点：

While I know a lot of journalists disagree, I don’t think Facebook or Google did anything untoward: what happened to publishers was that the Internet made their business models — both print advertising and digital advertising — fundamentally unviable. That Facebook and Google picked up the resultant revenue was effect, not cause. To that end, to the extent there is concern about how dominant these companies are, even the most extreme remedies (like breakups) would not change the fact that publishers face infinite competition and have uncompetitive advertising offerings.

马克·扎克伯格（MarkZuckerberg）的《华尔街日报》专栏向未来的监管机构传达了一个信息：不要插手我们的广告业务

库尔特·瓦格纳（Kurt Wagner）认为，扎克伯格最近在《华尔街日报》上发表的评论旨在劝阻监管者不要过度介入Facebook的事务：

There are a lot of people who want to regulate Facebook. And regulators, both in the United States and in Europe, probably read the Journal. That likely includes politicians who want to pass laws that would limit Facebook’s ad business, or regulators like those who work at the FTC.

Zuckerberg is bringing his argument for why Facebook doesn’t need to be babysat — “we give people complete control” — to a news outlet that should reach the people who might disagree.

最后。。。

人们经常会问我，凯西，谁是第一个影响社交媒体的人？因此，我要感谢教皇弗朗西斯一劳永逸地解决了这一问题。

当然，我永远不会忘记，当玛丽向全世界展示了基督的孩子之后，她接着说：“像巴顿家族一样打碎它，别忘了订阅！”

跟我说

向我发送提示、评论、问题以及您对Facebook监督委员会的提名：[email protected].