Platform failure! YouTube, Facebook & Co. go rogue

Platform
Failure!
Photo by Naletu on Unsplash

03. Mai 2018
Bertram Gugel
@digitalerﬁlm

https://www.facebook.com/GoldenGlobes/videos/1884375548271121/
„Wir sind kein
Medienunternehmen!“

Wo anfangen?
Exponential View on Facebook.

15 May 2016, Issue #62

Sometimes it seems that Google, Apple, Facebook & Amazon (the GAFAs) are the new trusts.
They control our access to information. They control the news we read. They control the
products we buy. They are our communications platforms. They compete with each other and
seek to broaden and deepen their influence.

My hunch is that we’re going to see an increasing desire to regulate or curtail their activities.
Why? Because that faint sound you hear is the penny is dropping. GAFAs control crucial
chokepoints in the political economy, much like the oil majors, railway barons and AT&T
established oligopolistic positions a century ago. More than half of all online time is spent on a
GAFA property.

The Facebook kerfuffle this past week is one such example. Facebook’s trending news feature
has a heavy dose of human curation, according to leaked documents. Anyone who has worked
in the axis of social media and news aggregation knows this was likely the case. As my former
head of data science used to say: “My job is to devise an algorithm that doesn’t always give the
answer Justin Bieber.” As we’ve argued many times before, platform neutrality is a myth.

A bold proposal to regulate Facebook . Explores Jonathan Zittrain’s idea of an ‘information
fiduciary’ which would close the “disconnect between the level of trust we place in [online
services] and the level of trust owed to us.” (See also  Morovoz in EV#54 )

10 July 2016, Issue #70

Emily Bell is EXCELLENT on the  dangers of the online filter bubble where algorithm s (rather
than editors) determine what we read.

The point here is that our news is now heavily curated through Facebook. And Facebook
determines what we view based on an algorithm essentially designed to maximise time on site &
retention. That is, Facebook figures out what to show us to have us staying longer and coming
back to Facebook. (Some good recent data  on the firm’s dominance as a news platform .)
That may not be educational, informative or diverse, even if you deliberately try to add diverse
sources. Why? Because your own internal bias will reward the maths one way or another. And
that slight bias will be seized on and amplified.

WSJ demonstrates this effect in a  brilliant interactive showing what news looks like
depending  on your particular digital echo chamber.

Live video is visceral and raw. As Facebook promotes it more,  how will it deal with the grisly and
violent ? “BuzzFeed News put all these questions to Facebook. But the company declined to
answer them.” (Was it the Police who made the  Facebook video of the Castile shooting
disappear  for a while?)

Part of the issue Silicon Valley’s twin heritages of libertarianism & hippiedom. Layer on a
solutionoriented engineering culture that by and large has not studied nearly enough
philosophy, political theory or history and you can understand why these platforms take the
stance they take.

Chartbeat analysis: What  Brexit tells us about how people read news.

11 September 2016, Issue #78

By now you have read about Facebook’s deletion of posts by journalists at Aftenposten
discussing the importance of war photography. The decision to censor very serious journalism
was laughably cackhanded.

The most direct piece on what happened and  why it matters is by Paul Carr.

Facebook  reversed their decision and gave an explanation of sorts . But if you read its
doublespeak closely you’ll notice it isn’t an explanation, at least not an explanation anyone
should be satisfied with.

Jeff Jarvis argues   that Facebook now needs editors.

Here is my take on this.

Facebook’s Hobson’s choice
First, Facebook is trying to navigate two fundamentally incompatible positions.
On the one hand, it claims it is only a tech company and not a media company. In other words, it
provides the tools and pipes for dialogue to occur but does not control that dialogue.

This position is derived from two things. The first is, that before Silicon Valley became the
establishment, it was grounded in ‘sticking it to the man’, with many of its cultural routes being
the counterculture of the 1960s. (Yes, I know this seems laughable now.) The second is the
derivative of the Common Carrier defence, a position used by the US Postal Service and then
telephone companies (like AT&T, in the precellular days). Common Carrier roughly argued that
as bearers of messages, with no ability to inspect messages, carriers could not be liable for the
content they transmitted. Postie could do his job without fear of prosecution for unwittingly
delivering a pound of heroin.

On the other hand, to make Facebook a ‘safe space’ (avoiding it becoming a cesspool of the
worst of humanity), the site implements ‘community standards.’ Of course, keeping advertisers
happy is the primary driver of community standards, not the community quality per se. And so
Facebook has a moreorless opaque process of moderation which bans photos of mothers’
breastfeeding but allows nasty political invective.

Cake and eat it.

Facebook’s statements on ‘community standards’ vs ‘being a neutral platform’ don’t make
sense, they are logically incompatible. You cannot have cake and eat it. And, as virtually anyone
in the humanities and social sciences knows, any notion of neutrality in social systems is false.
Indeed, Facebook has already made many choices that are not value neutral. Key among those
is its newsfeed ranking system which determines which content a user sees or does not see,
and when. While Facebook does not decide what to show on an itembyitem basis, the way a
newspaper section editor decides, Facebook sets the overall objectives for what gets chosen.
This is an explicit choice about content. Isn’t this what an editor does?

My experience
At my previous firm, PeerIndex, we used to index the flow of content across Twitter (tens of
millions of items per day) in an attempt to find what was valuable, whatever valuable meant to
us, through algorithmic means. We knew we were making ‘editorial decisions’ as we designed
our algorithms.

Examples included:
● How do you handle mutual selfreinforcing group? These groups would consistently
reshare each other’s content, creating noisy popularity signals. Was it neutral of us to
introduce weighing mechanisms to down weight the impact of this selfreinforcement?
The strongest example here was the huge number of Beliebers who promote everything
Justin Bieber posted, dominating and overwhelming any other signal.
● What do you do with homophily? This effect, birdsofafeather stick together, is a natural
social phenomenon replicated in social networks. You see it show up in those lovely
network graphs that demonstrate, for example, that people on two sides of political
debate rarely coincide on social networks. But when you do any type of algorithmic
curation (as PeerIndex did, and Facebook does), you make explicit choices on whether
to accentuate homophily or reduce it. Should your maths foster bridging across groups
or accentuates the separation?
● Not neutral, just reality

Facebook makes those decisions every day. Not on a postbypost basis, that would be absurd.
But it does in its overall selection of goals, and what tradeoffs it is willing to accept to pursue
these. Just because they don’t read each post, they cannot claim they are not making an
editorial judgement on how content flows to readers across their networks.
Part of the decisionmaking lies in its hiring diversity. My cursory LinkedIn search finds more
than 4000 engineers in Facebook’s East Palo Alto HQ but fewer than 500 with history degrees
(and many of those in junior marketing positions.) Engineers might be happy with an algorithm
that identifies  a 9/11 conspiracy as a trending news topic,  social scientists (or journalists) would
not be.

Burning the man
Facebook finds itself in an awkward position but not one with which we should have much
sympathy. In achieving the Silicon Valley dream of a building a successful monopoly and with
that dominance comes a growing stream of cash from advertisers, Facebook has become The
Man.

Several years ago, Mark Zuckerberg started to describe Facebook as a ‘social utility’. There is
no doubt that Facebook has achieved that status of both utility and monopoly. It is time
Facebook took this status more seriously.

Disclaimer: Aftenposten is owned by Schibsted Media Group, my employer. This only
represents my personal views.

Followup In #79: Thanks to readers who pointed out a couple of horrible howlers in last week’s
issue. Yes, Hobson’s choice is no choice at all. Facebook doesn’t face a Hobson’s choice over
editorialisation, it faces a difficult one and it can choose either route. Apologies for manhandling
the language.

23 October 2016, Issue #84

Facebook, Google & Apple, our new digital overlords, with their penchant for a  double Irish with
a double Dutch sandwich , had a week which exposed some failings. These companies are
remarkable but far from perfect.

On the Apple car project:   “Apple has drastically scaled back its automotive ambitions, leading to
hundreds of job cuts and a new direction that, for now, no longer includes building its own car.”

Google’s privacy reversal:  the advertising company will now associate real identity with web
tracking data.  (See also,  Cambridge Analytica has psychological profiles on every US adult .)

Facebook has often claimed that it is merely a neutral platform and doesn’t vest editorial
functions, this despite 44% of Americans relying on it as a source of news. I argued in EV#78
that  Facebook’s position was disingenuous :

not be.

Burning the man
Man.



the language.


Facebook, Google & Apple, our new digital overlords, with their penchant for a  double Irish with
a double Dutch sandwich , had a week which exposed some failings. These companies are
remarkable but far from perfect.

On the Apple car project:   “Apple has drastically scaled back its automotive ambitions, leading to
hundreds of job cuts and a new direction that, for now, no longer includes building its own car.”

Google’s privacy reversal:  the advertising company will now associate real identity with web
tracking data.  (See also,  Cambridge Analytica has psychological profiles on every US adult .)

Facebook has often claimed that it is merely a neutral platform and doesn’t vest editorial
functions, this despite 44% of Americans relying on it as a source of news. I argued in EV#78
that  Facebook’s position was disingenuous :

Facebook makes “editorial” decisions every day. Not on a postbypost basis, that would be
absurd. But it does in its overall selection of goals, and what tradeoffs it is willing to accept to
pursue these. Just because they don’t read each post, they cannot claim they are not making an
editorial judgement

This week it emerged tha t Mark Zuckerberg personally made a ruling that Donald Trump’s
messages should be published  without censorship despite employees arguing that “they  should
be removed for violating the site’s rules on hate speech.”

The point is less whether Trumps’ words are or are not hate speech, but rather to illustrate
Facebook’s inchoate position on whether it does or does not undertake an editorial function.
See also: Buzzfeed analyses  the scourge of hyperpartisan Facebook pages.

13 November 2016, Issue #87

Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t believe  that content on Facebook can influence how people vote . But
at the same time, the company contends that advertising on Facebook does influence what
people will buy.

That is a tightrope to walk. Or as a friend tweeted: “Awwwkwaaard!”

Read  Zuckerberg’s statement here .  Doc Searls’s  comment on the statement is also worth
looking at.  Pew Research’s  data disagrees with Zuckerberg too .

⭐ Niemanlab: “ The forces that drove this election’s media failure are likely to get worse. ”

Emily Bell: “ Facebook can no longer be ‘I didn’t do it’ boy of global media ”

Tim O'Reilly on how  Facebook’s chase for engagement puts the truth second, and what the
firm needs to do about this .

The problem that Facebook faces, as we have discussed in many previous issues, is to
reconcile its role as dominant media platform with its objective of serving engaged users to
advertisers.

Engagement (which ultimately drives strategic financial value) is easy to enumerate and target.
Truth, diversity, serendipity, civil discourse, reason, empathy, all things we might want our civic
discourse to manifest are just much harder to make explicit. And so they are much harder to
build. And it’s not clear they lead to more dollars from Unilever, American Express or Nestle
compared to the current strategy of optimising content to drive user engagement.
Shortterm incentives are misaligned with the longterm benefits of civil society. Worse, the
gains are taking by the producers, in this case, Facebook’s owners, while the costs are borne by
society. (Seem familiar?)

Could Facebook tune the newsfeed another way? Yes, of course, it could. It could optimise its
newsfeed by allocating more weight to a user reading a story from sources that had broad and
diverse (and longstanding) trust signals. Or it could reward the algorithm for showing me some
stories on topics read by people on the other side of the interest graph from me. Or liked by
people who sometimes, but not always, disagreed with me. Or it could put greater weight on
items read or promoted by people based  on their Scientific hindex .

Facebook chooses not to. Is that the right decision or the wrong one? We can discuss that. But
what seems certain is that these choices are Facebook’s to make.

Note: PeerIndex built an algorithmic curation engine back in 2009 to its acquisition in 2014 and
we contended with many of the issues of trust, credibility, filter bubbles, serendipity and
discovery. We learnt that sorting signals across 300m+ users per month was not an easy
technical task, but that it was possible. But ultimately metaeditorial judgement was required to
determine our specific technical implementations (what objective you target, what features you
evaluate, how you weight them and what errors you allow.)


Fake news on Facebook:  how it outperforms real news.  MUST READ. Also read this excellent
filter bubble experiment which had US conservatives and liberals swap feeds  for a few weeks
and  this detailed NPR investigation . Having denied responsibility for months,  Mark Zuckerberg
explains what Facebook is doing to tackle this problem . Jeff Jarvis has  launched a collaborative
initiative to tackle fake news .

29 January 2017, Issue #98

Google, Facebook and their ilk proclaim to be ‘neutral platforms’ when it comes to the content
they mediate. This, of course, isn’t really the case, especially if the content in question is a
paidfor ad.  Great insight into how Google fights bad adverts  (1.7bn last year, up 100% on 2015;
1,000 people dedicated to the effort.)

5 March 2017, Issue #103

We regularly cover ethics in Exponential View. The rationale is reasonably straightforward.
Increasingly our access to all services are mediated by technology. Technology has long
outgrown its niche status but rather is our fundamental interface to the world.

The optimism of the technology industry (particularly with the rise of the Internet in the 1980s
and 1990s) was that power would be decentralised and distributed. The Internet was the
supposed to be a decentralised, open network. Built to survive nuclear destruction (if the  line of
defence afforded by MAD  failed), the Internet’s first services were initiated, in many cases, by
thoughtful netizens influenced by the counterculture movement of the late 1960s. (See, for
example,  Jon Postel  and  Stewart Brand .)

In the past 30 years, the Internet has grown up. Far from being decentralised, favouring the
edge and facilitating groups, the Internet is dominated by two Leviathans Facebook and Google.
At the same time, a template, call it ‘zerotoone’, has emerged for building new monopolies,
new Leviathans. And that template,  as DHH describes above , relentless optimisation in pursuit
of extreme growth. At all costs. At any cost.

And the engineersentrepreneurs leading these firms have found themselves in positions of
power that call for more Socrates than slide rule, Mill & Marx than machine learning, Rawls than
regression analysis, Aristotle than AI, Nussbaum than ninetydayplans…

● Adam Pasick: Facebook  on how it can sway elections.  (FB’s  page on this .)

28 May 2017, Issue #115

Facebook's guide to  content moderation was leaked  by The Guardian. Just demonstrates
that Facebook is, well, a media platform not a common carrier. And that they are making some
pretty strong judgments which have previously governed not by fiat of a single firm (which is
essentially controlled by a single individual) but by law or social consensus.

Facebook is increasing its number of  content moderators  to 7,500 (from 4,500), suggesting it
still isn't taking this task very seriously. Facebook pays its moderators about $600 for a 40hour
week (according to this  excellent reportage  by Olivia Solon). The total moderation bill will run to
about $250m per annum or about 1% of Facebook's profit.

A firm as important as Facebook, which enjoys increasing gross margins in excess of 85%, has
enough latitude to invest more heavily in addressing this issue. The investment should be
accompanied with greater data transparency and a more open, collegial approach to evaluating
and dealing with the problem.

BBC:  Facebook's tentacles reach further than you think  and "what is most striking is the sense
of resignation, the impotence of regulation, the lack of options, the public apathy."

No zone of privacy. Facebook " won't say if it will use your brain activity for advertising ."

Due to dominant digital platforms , "markets today are radically different than what we believe –
we have the façade of competition." (Review of a debate at Booth School of Business.)

20 August 2017, Issue #127

It’s become clear that our large digital firms have become significant actors in civil society.
Facebook reaches 2bn people each month. Apple’s $250bn+ cash horde is larger than the gold
reserves of every nation barring the US. (And Apple’s is within touching distance of Fort Knox.)

Apple denounced ‘neoNazis’  and started a programme to match employee donations to human
rights groups. Spotify clamped down on ‘hate bands’ identified by the Southern Poverty Law
Centre. Google and GoDaddy cut the domain support for the Daily Stormer.  Several payment
firms  have also cut ties.

☁   And Matthew Prince, founder of Cloudflare, a service which ensures website reliability,
evicted the Daily Stormer from the network. It’s worth reading  Prince’s rationale here , where he
points out our increasing dependence on a few giant networks:
In a notsodistant future, if we're not there already, it may be that if you're going to put content
on the Internet you'll need to use a company with a giant network like Cloudflare, Google,
Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, or Alibaba. For context, Cloudflare currently handles around 10%
of Internet requests.

Without a clear framework as a guide for content regulation, a small number of companies will
largely determine what can and cannot be online.

Silicon Valley has long been born of two political spirits: hippiedom (stick it to the man) and
libertarianism. Neither naturally align themselves with playing an engaged role in the polity. Both
are a heady mix, predominantly socially liberally and economically conservative. This, together
with avoiding the legal inconvenience of being responsible for content or behaviour on their
platforms, lead to a positioning as ‘platform not publisher’, notions of the ‘neutral point of view’
(of Wikipedia) and generally a handsoff approach to what users and customers did on their
networks (unless it upset advertisers).

As I wrote in  EV#70 :

Layer on a solutionoriented engineering culture that by and large has not studied nearly
enough philosophy, political theory or history and you can understand why these
platforms take the stance they take.

For many years, this has raised alarm, argues Alexis Madrigal:

[s]cholars who study the internet’s dynamics have been saying that the public
sphere—the place where civic society is supposed to play out, the place “free speech”
advocates desire to see preserved—has been privatized by Facebook, Google, and the
other big internet companies. Most on the left saw this privatization as part of a larger
conservative ...movement that was sapping the strength of the governmentsecured
commons.

Madrigal’s essay is worth reading .

I welcome the arrival, awakening of these firms to their power, whether that power was sought
or not, and the discomfort and hard thinking they need to do about their role and responsibility in
the world. And I welcome them stepping in at the time when some political leaders have failed
to.

But should they be the final arbiters of what is appropriate or not? The recognition that they can’t
simply cry “neutral platform” and absolve themselves of responsibilities to society is a good first
step. (The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a libertarianleaning organisation that has done a
great deal to campaign for the open internet and personal freedoms  does ring an alarm bell  over
actions of the large tech firms.)

And, yes, I can hear the cries of “but decentralised ledgers will be immune to such interference”.
They may well be, which makes it all the more important to establish a clearer framework for
content regulation now.


[...] designing and implementing AI systems, except if it is the most fundamental basic research,
is about designing economicallyviable products that are going to play a role in human systems.
Lots of great PhDs in machine learning do not necessarily make great products that further
humanity or are devoid of prejudice, distraction or other negative consequences. Take
Facebook, which has some of the best applied AI research in the world, but uses it to build the
warty Facebook we know today. The machine learning expertise was applied to build a
highlyaddictive user experience, as well as automated systems to promote advertising quality.
But few cycles were applied to the impact of what all that 'addiction' would do to our psyches or
the wide lacuna it allowed malevolent state actors unparalleled access to democracies around
the world.

Or take the whole stream of ad tech, where machine learning expertise has been squandered
on pushing the limits of personal privacy and data.


The truth of Russian meddling in global politics through social media platforms is starting to
emerge. It isn’t just, as we humorously suggested in  EV#86  a group of bored, but digital savvy
teenagers in Veles, Macedonia.

No, it’s becoming clear that it is much more widely orchestrated, not just by Russia and their
agents but by social networks (Facebook, and punching above its weight, Twitter) abetting them.
● How Russian agents spent $200 to organise protests and counter protests in a Texas
town.  This resulted in realworld showdowns between the two sides .
● The NY Times  shows examples of Russianbought Facebook ads .
● Facebook reckons that 146m Americans saw ads bought by Russian agents, above the
company’s initial estimate of close to zero. ( Some members of US Congress  want
Facebook to notify every member affected.)
● Twitter’s sales pitch to Russia Today  offering them 15% reach of their US audience
during the election for $3m.
● Thomas Rid, a cybersecurity historian, explains cleary why  Twitter’s bot problem  is so
pervasive & pernicious.
● Facebook’s segmentation offering outlining how to use Ad platform to  slice, dice & divide
Americans by their political leanings .
● Nick Bilton: “ What have we done ”. Early Facebook employees rue “the monster they
have created.”
● The AP unearths evidence of  Russian infowar far outside the US , stretching even to the
Vatican.
● Leslie Miley, a Twitter exec,  sounded the alarm of Russian botnets  on the network back
in 2015. He says "Anything we would do that would slow down signups, delete accounts,
or remove accounts had to go through the growth team. They were more concerned with
growth numbers than fake and compromised accounts."
● Twitter botnets  are still stoking racial divisions in a contested gubernatorial race in the
American state of Virginia.

I used to run PeerIndex, which analysed 316m users on Twitter in realtime, predicting
behaviours and scoring their trustworthiness and resonance in a highly granular fashion. My
experience is that flagging, tracking and identifying bots or implementing mechanisms to audit
who is buying ads is a pain, but is far from technically insurmountable.

This boils down to business decisions, the sorts of things Mustafa Suleyman alluded to in  last
week’s EV :
We also need to rethink the standard metrics our industry uses to measure progress
investment round valuations, “active users”... and revenues are the crudest of proxies for
company success, and largely ignore externalities…

In any case, Facebook has admitted as much.  Taking steps to mitigate abuse will hurt its
profitability.  In their recent earnings announcement, Zuckerberg says the company was shifting
its focus to "time well spent". Tristan Harris, the promulgator of the 'time well spent' movement
doubts Facebook's intention . (See  EV#33 for a discussion on Tristan Harris  and time well
spent.)

My friends at  The Economist pull no punches :
Facebook, Google and Twitter were supposed to save politics as good information drove
out prejudice and falsehood. Something has gone very wrong and… [the] stakes for
liberal democracy could hardly be higher.

A selection of articles previously linked to covering Facebook


  The Web we have to save : Hossein Derakshan argues passionately we need to break out of
the Facebook jail.

16 August 2015, Issue #22

How  Facebook, Twitter and Apple are eliminating online equality . Providing ‘celebrities’ better
tools and easier discovery runs counter to many of the democratising advantages of the Web. In
my view, Twitter’s suggested user list has been an affordance that has hurt the overall
development of the network. Richgetricher dynamics often do that.


Facebook sees 1.5bn searches per day  (compared to Google’s 3.5bn).


“Facebook has succeeded because it has continuously found a way to scale—its service, its
business, and its ambitions”. EXCELLENT  profile of Zuck and his plans for Facebook .


This also seems to be an area where governments can look for innovation in the tech industry.
Germany tracks  420 potential extremists  and France about 1,400 (with a similar number of
officers to follow them). Facebook tracks 1.2bn people around the world in realtime, can predict
how we are likely to behave and indeed trigger us to behave in particular ways. Would seem to
suggest that crosspollinating some of the software, processes and techniques from the internet
ad industry to the terror threat might be a fruitful approach. (Of course, data scientist salaries in
GCHQ/DSGE might not  compete with those in Facebook .)


The  Facebook newsfeed is the most powerful mediacontrol tool ever, determining the reading
list of over a billion of us . Here is how it works.

5 June 2016, Issue #65

Why the world is drawing battle lines against American tech giants . Introducing the frightful five.
(See also Hossein Derakshan: “ Facebook’s algorithms control us, we need to resist .”)

3 July 2016, Issue #69

Facebook changes its newsfeed algorithm  to favour personal content over publisher content.
This is the algorithm which arguably optimises the most human attention on the planet.


Facebook released a feature allowing  advertisers to exclude particular racial groups from ad
targeting .

Facebook is  being taken somewhere it never wanted to go , argues Emily Bell. “Like the BBC,
which also started out with an engineering mission, Facebook cannot see publishing
decisions—whoever takes them—made on its platform as separate from its corporate health
and reputation. They are the same thing.”


How  Macedonia became the global hub of Trump bots . It isn’t the politics, it’s the profit.
Generate clicks on Facebook from US visitors is worth a lot. THOUGHT PROVOKING.
(Unintended consequences of the global digital village interfacing with capitalism. Almost satire,
imagine if the election result was affected by 16year olds half a world away getting a better
CPC.)

11 December 2016, Issue #91

Frederick Filloux:  Facebook’s walled wonderland  is no substitute for the news &  super research
visualising the Democrat/Republic filter bubble  on Twitter.

18 December 2016, Issue #92

Facebook starts to address the fake news problem  it claimed it didn’t have.

EV reader Jonathan Wolff  on how Facebook influences you : “I’ve spent a hundred million dollars
on Facebook advertising and it works.”

On  Google, democracy and the truth of internet search.  EXCELLENT (See also Frederick
Filloux:  Facebook’s walled wonderland  is no substitute for the news &  super research visualising
the Democrat/Republic filter bubble  on Twitter.)

How  the Trump campaign used Facebook Ads  to win the election.


Buzzfeed:  559 Facebook users spread Britain First  content to hundreds of thousands.

12 February 2017, Issue #100

How FB makes its money .


Is Facebook a structural threat to a free society?


New alert to combat fake news

16 April 2017, Issue #109

We need alternatives to Facebook , argues Brian Bergstein. THOUGHTFUL (See also: ” the use
of Facebook [is] negatively associated with overall wellbeing “ argue Shakya & Christakis in
HBR.)

21 May 2017, Issue #114

  How Trump won . Sue Halpern in NYRB: "Donald Trump is our first Facebook president. His
team figured out how to use all the marketing tools of Facebook, as well as Google, the two
biggest advertising platforms in the world, to successfully sell a candidate that the majority of
Americans did not want."

18 June 2017, Issue #118

  How Russians trap US troops by  posing as attractive women on Facebook .

9 July 2017, Issue #121

Facebook finally  acknowledges election manipulation . (See also: How  fake news tricked a
Trump supporter  into accidentally shooting himself; and also  this handy guide  to how the
Facebook newsfeed ranks content.)

30 July 2017, Issue #124

Live video is visceral and raw. As Facebook promotes it more,  how will it deal with the grisly and
violent ? “BuzzFeed News put all these questions to Facebook. But the company declined to
answer them.” (Was it the Police who made the  Facebook video of the Castile shooting
disappear  for a while?)

Part of the issue Silicon Valley’s twin heritages of libertarianism & hippiedom. Layer on a
solutionoriented engineering culture that by and large has not studied nearly enough
philosophy, political theory or history and you can understand why these platforms take the
stance they take.

Chartbeat analysis: What  Brexit tells us about how people read news.


By now you have read about Facebook’s deletion of posts by journalists at Aftenposten
discussing the importance of war photography. The decision to censor very serious journalism
was laughably cackhanded.

The most direct piece on what happened and  why it matters is by Paul Carr.

Facebook  reversed their decision and gave an explanation of sorts . But if you read its
doublespeak closely you’ll notice it isn’t an explanation, at least not an explanation anyone
should be satisfied with.

Jeff Jarvis argues   that Facebook now needs editors.

Here is my take on this.

Facebook’s Hobson’s choice
not be.

Burning the man
Man.



the language.

defence afforded by MAD  failed), the Internet’s first services were initiated, in many cases, by
thoughtful netizens influenced by the counterculture movement of the late 1960s. (See, for
example,  Jon Postel  and  Stewart Brand .)

In the past 30 years, the Internet has grown up. Far from being decentralised, favouring the
edge and facilitating groups, the Internet is dominated by two Leviathans Facebook and Google.
At the same time, a template, call it ‘zerotoone’, has emerged for building new monopolies,
new Leviathans. And that template,  as DHH describes above , relentless optimisation in pursuit
of extreme growth. At all costs. At any cost.

And the engineersentrepreneurs leading these firms have found themselves in positions of
power that call for more Socrates than slide rule, Mill & Marx than machine learning, Rawls than
regression analysis, Aristotle than AI, Nussbaum than ninetydayplans…

● Adam Pasick: Facebook  on how it can sway elections.  (FB’s  page on this .)

28 May 2017, Issue #115

Facebook's guide to  content moderation was leaked  by The Guardian. Just demonstrates
that Facebook is, well, a media platform not a common carrier. And that they are making some
pretty strong judgments which have previously governed not by fiat of a single firm (which is
essentially controlled by a single individual) but by law or social consensus.

Facebook is increasing its number of  content moderators  to 7,500 (from 4,500), suggesting it
still isn't taking this task very seriously. Facebook pays its moderators about $600 for a 40hour
week (according to this  excellent reportage  by Olivia Solon). The total moderation bill will run to
about $250m per annum or about 1% of Facebook's profit.

A firm as important as Facebook, which enjoys increasing gross margins in excess of 85%, has
enough latitude to invest more heavily in addressing this issue. The investment should be
accompanied with greater data transparency and a more open, collegial approach to evaluating
and dealing with the problem.  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FOgGzRaT7dGv3YOccTg6wQ2XMxAEQ2WfUlczOMPPI1s/edit

Für jedes Beispiel von Facebook  
gibt es eines von YouTube!
“The company has been
embroiled in scandal after
scandal — from Elsagate to crisis
actors conspiracies to wanton
moderators — all of which seem
to point to the same conclusion:
YouTube doesn’t have as much
control over its platform as we
thought. And it’s far from a new
problem.”
– Paris Martineau, the Outline
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/4/16736242/youtube-children-kids-inappropriatehttps://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/youtube-is-addressing-its-massive-child-exploitation-problem?utm_term=.edqWozYeN#.ubkXa687ohttps://theoutline.com/post/3804/inside-youtube-s-fake-views-economy?zd=1&zi=iot5gqqz


Fake news on Facebook:  how it outperforms real news.  MUST READ. Also read this excellent
filter bubble experiment which had US conservatives and liberals swap feeds  for a few weeks
and  this detailed NPR investigation . Having denied responsibility for months,  Mark Zuckerberg
explains what Facebook is doing to tackle this problem . Jeff Jarvis has  launched a collaborative
initiative to tackle fake news .


Google, Facebook and their ilk proclaim to be ‘neutral platforms’ when it comes to the content
they mediate. This, of course, isn’t really the case, especially if the content in question is a
paidfor ad.  Great insight into how Google fights bad adverts  (1.7bn last year, up 100% on 2015;
1,000 people dedicated to the effort.)


We regularly cover ethics in Exponential View. The rationale is reasonably straightforward.
Increasingly our access to all services are mediated by technology. Technology has long
outgrown its niche status but rather is our fundamental interface to the world.

The optimism of the technology industry (particularly with the rise of the Internet in the 1980s
and 1990s) was that power would be decentralised and distributed. The Internet was the
supposed to be a decentralised, open network. Built to survive nuclear destruction (if the  line of

The road to hell is
paved with good
intentions.

Warum haben sie so massive Probleme?
Targeting statt
Umfelder
Overengineering

Millionen von Werbetreibende …
🏭🏦🏢
>5 Millionen Werbetreibende
>4 Millionen Werbetreibende

Alles mit Regeln wird automatisiert!
💰📝🚨

Mehr Automation und AI als Antwort?
$
False
Positives
❌ Demonetization – 🆕 noch aggressiver

Nicht mal die Top 1%
sind sicher!
https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/10/youtube-drops-logan-paul-from-google-preferred-and-puts-his-originals-on-hold/ https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/pewdiepie-youtube-google-preferred-ads-anti-semitic-death-to-all-jews-a7580206.html
„PewDiePie dropped from YouTube's
advertising platform“
– The Independent
„YouTube drops
Logan Paul from
Google Preferred“
– Techcrunch
Google
Preferred

„Exclusive: YouTube ran ads from hundreds of brands
on extremist channels“ – @CNNTech
„On the other hand, Procter & Gamble,
which had kept its ads off of YouTube
since March 2017, said it had come back
to the platform“
https://phys.org/news/2018-04-facebook-scrutiny-google.html http://money.cnn.com/2018/04/19/technology/youtube-ads-extreme-content-investigation/index.html
Schmieren-
theater!

0
20.000
40.000
60.000
80.000
März 2017 Juni 2017 September 2017 Dezember 2017 März 2018
Videos Facebook Videos YouTube
Wenn Umfelder nicht zählen,
werden Zulieferer zur Commodity

Videos werden wie Texte produziert.
https://www.facebook.com/MotionCooking/videos/1694642980559769/https://www.facebook.com/EinfachTasty/videos/506349506396824/https://www.facebook.com/SweetsHeavenOfﬁcial/videos/258259654703331/ https://www.facebook.com/1264829850246245/videos/1647766175285942/https://www.facebook.com/CheesecakeRezepte/videos/1903220506673345/https://www.facebook.com/FOODBOOM/videos/2050316811869093/

Nullsummenspiel mit interessanten
Konkurrenten!
56 Mio. 47 Mio. 20 Mio. 15 Mio.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FcOfPZUH4w

8.000
16.000
24.000
32.000
1,0
2,0
3,0
4,0
März 2017 Mai 2017 Juli 2017 September 2017 November 2017 Januar 2018 März 2018
Mrd. Abrufe/Monat
Videos/Monat
Was passiert wenn sich Facebook neu orientiert?
Quelle: WebTV Monitor 2017, Basis: Facebook Profile, n=550 & , Basis: YouTube Channels in Deutschland, n= 12.048
1,83,75

Top 20: -500 Mio. Views in 3 Monaten
-70 %
-50 %
-30 %
-10 %
10 %
HashemAl-Ghaili
Promiﬂash
Reﬁnery29Germa
Bild
INVENTIONSINSID
moviepilot
Riquísimo
Leckerschmecker
BestTrendVideos
tagesschau
VideoTrends
Filmstarts
ClubofCooks
CHEESEINSIDER
EinfachTasty
FCBayernMünche
BUNTE.de
BobderPfuscher
ZDFheute

Konsequenzen sind direkt spürbar.
-50 Stellen
Mashable
-50 Stellen 
VOX
-8% Stellen
Buzzfeed
https://www.recode.net/2017/12/5/16735262/ziff-davis-mashable-sold-50-layoffs-pete-cashmorehttps://www.fastcompany.com/40501711/buzzfeed-layoffs-could-be-a-huge-bellwether-for-digital-media https://www.tubeﬁlter.com/2018/02/21/vox-lays-off-50-staffers-across-social-video-teams/
Videos brauchen ein
Publikum – nicht Trafﬁc.

„Die Gläubigen leben 
von der Erwartung der durch
symbolische Ersatz-
handlungen herbeigeführten
Wiederkehr der Ahnen, die
[…] Waren mit sich bringen
sollen.“  
– Wikipedia
Cargo-Kult der Plattformen:  
„Der Algorithmus“ – „Der Newsfeed“
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo-Kult

Feedback-Loops formen die Inhalte
https://twitter.com/hankgreen/status/951143226462765056
– Hank Green
„YouTube (and, really, all of these
platforms) aren't just hacking viewer's
attention by showing them things
that will keep them watching, they're
hacking creators to get them to
create exactly the kind of content that
fulﬁlls the platform's goals.“

Creators werden adaptiert.
https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2018/04/your-pretty-face-is-going-to-sell/
Concrafter – Luca BonnytrashPaluten

Trends
Die Bausteine der Plattformen
Suche Empfehlungen

16 Std.
19 Std. 2.383
1.913
1.062
662
Trending 2017 vs. 2018:  
734 Stunden mit je 49 Empfehlungen
Videos Präsenz Videos Präsenz
226
Kanäle Kanäle
2017 2018
⬆ ⬇⬆

Auch die Top 10 verlieren deutlich.
Abrufe Präsenz Abrufe Präsenz
38 Mio. 30 Wo 22 Mio. 23 Wo
2017 2018
-42%

YouTube bereinigt die Trends von Letsplays!
Abrufe Präsenz Abrufe Präsenz
2017 2018
Bodyformus
Jay & Arya
HerrNewstime
Hey Aaron!!!
PrankBrosTV
Brotatos
JP Performance
KuchenTV
Galileo
GamerBrother
LOGO
JP Performance
ApeCrimeTV
LeFloid
Arazhul
GermanLetsPlay
Chaosﬂo44
Gronkh
Benx
Paluten
Letsplays
Sonstige

Glitches oder System?
Kanal Video Abrufe
Coin Trend 10300$ Bitcoin Preisfrage Waltconchain Fiasko Nano Sprung 1.280
WuD-News Maischberger: Beatrix von Storch(AfD) zerlegt die öffentlich-rechtlichen u1.822
Coin Trend ☹Bitcoin unter 8000$ ☄QTUM, Lisk und Monero legen zu 1.910
Coin Trend 😁9000$ Bitcoin kommt voran🏔 Ethereum, Monero, Icon fallen2.306
Freie PropagandaBündnis 90 / Die Grünen - "Flüchtlingskrise mit Klimapolitik lösen"2.664
Malarich Gauland bekennt sich zu Volksbewegungen wie Pegida Dresden2.950

Die Suche ﬁndet Alternativen!

Auch für etablierte YouTuber!
Alternativen
Gronkh
Paluten

052015 112015 052016 112016 052017 112017 042018
7 Mio
Hallo: Kuchen Talks und Tanzverbot

42 Marken auf YouTube
ApeCrimeTV, ARD, BibisBeautyPalace, Bonnytrash,
concafter, DieLochis, dner, epicstun, extra3, falco,
freekickerz, galileo, gronkh, HanadiBeauty,
HandOfBlood, Jarow, Julien Bam, Julita, LaCaraPiccola,
Laura-Lareeva, LifeLoveNiki, LumaraaOfﬁziell,
McDoenerHD, Mischa, moviepilotKids, myspassde,
NEO-MAGAZIN-ROYALE, neuste.news, Paluten,
PietSmiet, Pipapueppo, promiﬂash, rezo, Sallys-Welt,
Sirlo, Steven-Show, tagesschau, TANZVERBOT,
Thermifee, unge, ZDF

0
7500
15000
22500
30000
1 2 3 4 51 2 3 4 5
42 Suchen an 7 Tagen: 205.000 Empfehlungen von
33.000 Videos aus 8200 Kanälen

Klare Präferenzen der Algorithmen
5 91 177 264 350 436 522 609 695 781 867 953 1040 1126 1212 1298 1385 1471 1557 >1557
Alter der Empfehlungen
<90 Tage
7 520 1.033 1.546 2.059 2.572 3.085 3.598 4.111 4.624
Abrufe der Empfehlungen in 1000
<230k Abrufe
Je jünger desto
öfter empfohlen

Retention, wie gut werden die Nutzerinnen gehalten?
Galileo MySpassde EpicStun PietSmiet Gronkh
12 %
26 %
35 %
68 %69 %
🔄

Pull: wie sehr promoted YouTube die Videos auf
anderen Kanälen?
Galileo MySpassde EpicStun PietSmiet Gronkh
0 %5 %3 %9 %
19 %
↩

Galileo ZDF PietSmiet rezo Bonnytrash TANZVERBOT Mischa Janiec DEGalileo ZDF PietSmiet rezo Bonnytrash TANZVERBOT Mischa Janiec DE
Sichtbarkeit: Retention plus Push.

Neue Kanäle werden gepusht. Alte stagnieren.
052017 082017 112017 012018 042018
30 Mio
38 31 12
Sichtbarkeit:

Hohe Sichtbarkeit:  
direkte Auswirkung auf Kanal-Abrufe
032016 062016 092016 122016 032017 062017 092017 122017 022018
50 Mio
+64%
+63%
77 88
Sichtbarkeit:

Bibi SONNENSEITE Wissenswert JONAS rewinside Rebekah Wing
19 %
23 %
26 %
28 %29 %30 %
40 %
44 %45 %46 %
20 %
Wer wird sonst noch gepusht?
Bibi SONNENSEITE Wissenswert JONAS rewinside Rebekah Wing

Massiver Push für Kanäle, die  
hochfrequent Videos veröffentlichen.
102016 012017 042017 072017 102017 012018 032018
10 Mio
Sichtbarkeit:
23
40
30
45 SONNENSEITE
Wissenswert
#Mentale Zuﬂucht
5-MINUTEN TRICKS

Marken werden durch schlechte  
Empfehlungen beschädigt.
Learn German
tagesschau
American Supps
der Wolpertinger.
y8nn8ck - Germany
DW Deutsch
Verborgene Geheimnisse TV
DISCERE
Freie Propaganda
Minotheras
Bibi
Julienco
JONAS
Dagi Bee
Rebekah Wing
RayFox
GNTM
Wissenswert
Station B1
Bonnytrash
Gronkh
IDzock
HandOfUncut
Thadeuz
Wissenswert
Mori
HandOfBlood
Zerobrain
VERRÜCKTEN LAB
WatchMojo Deutschland
Bibi Gronkh Tagesschau

Wo funktioniert es
denn besser?

0
70
140
Dec '12 Sep '13 Jun '14 Mar '15 Dec '15 Sep '16 Jun '17 Mar '18
Wie wäre es hiermit?

Algorithmen, die Nutzerinnen 
und Nutzer lieben!
„Among them is its so-called
"algatorial approach." That's how
Spotify characterizes music curation
system for its playlists, which mix
algorithms and human editorial
curation.“
Humans &
Algorithms = 🙌
https://www.businessinsider.de/spotify-investor-day-ipo-2018-3?r=US&IR=T

Musiker werden bezahlt!
1999 2002 2005 2008 2011 2014 2017
Physical
Streaming
Downloads
https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/8372798/ifpi-global-report-2018-music-sales-rise-streaming-revenue
$6,6 Mrd.
ausbezahlt

Neue Inhalte werden eingekauft!
2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018E
2,5 Bn
2,5 Bn
2 Bn
1,8 Bn
0,8 Bn
0,6 Bn
0,5 Bn
6 Bn
4,5 Bn
3,25 Bn
2,7 Bn
1,5 Bn
1 Bn
0,5 Bn
12 Bn
9 Bn
7 Bn
4,6 Bn
3,2 Bn2,4 Bn1,8 Bn
Netﬂix
Amazon
Hulu
https://twitter.com/ballmatthew/status/974719292703830016

Neue Shows und Stoffe, die  
es sonst nicht gegeben hätte.
http://variety.com/2018/tv/news/2017-scripted-tv-series-fx-john-landgraf-1202653856/
2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018E
152
117
90
49
33
24
15
370370365373356
325
273
TV Services
Online Services
"We'll spend over $10 billion on
content and marketing and a billion-
three on tech. […] So, I mean, just
objectively, we're much more of a
media company in that way than pure
tech.“
VOX &
Buzzfeed
https://www.axios.com/old-school-nyt-buzzfeed-media-turn-tv-salvation-8731e629-bdc8-4295-9c3a-816d2ec479c3.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/16/netﬂix-ceo-reed-

Was sind die
Konsequenzen für
Creators auf YouTube
und Facebook?

2%
Für Kleine gibt es  
keine Luft zum Atmen!
Creators
26.282
631
Abrufe pro Monat
1,1 Mrd.
4,3 Mrd.YouTube  
≠ Beruf
80%

Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash
YouTube und
Facebook sind wie
Kasinos. Am Ende
gewinnt immer
die Bank!

Nutzt Plattformen, statt Euch von
Plattformen benutzen zu lassen!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DGNZnfKYnU

Vielen Dank!
Bertram Gugel
M: +49 179 22 1 77 63
bertram@gugelproductions.com
www.gugelproductions.de

Platform failure! YouTube, Facebook & Co. go rogue

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