Facebook vows to fight fake news but won’t say how
Facebook has a news problem. The algorithm powering its Newsfeed can’t always distinguish an accurate story from a complete fabrication, which means misleading and false stories regularly circulate throughout the site. Following Donald Trump’s win in the US presidential election this week, commentators are arguing that fake stories shared on Facebook’s Newsfeed propelled his campaign, and executives at the site need to take responsibility for distributing accurate, vetted news.
In a statement shared with TechCrunch, Facebook VP of product management Adam Mosseri said that the company is aware of the fake-news problem. “We take misinformation on Facebook very seriously,” the statement says. “We value authentic communication and hear consistently from those who use Facebook that they prefer not to see misinformation.” The rest of Mosseri’s thoughts read as follows:
In Newsfeed we use various signals based on community feedback to determine which posts are likely to contain inaccurate information, and reduce their distribution. In Trending we look at a variety of signals to help make sure the topics being shown are reflective of real-world events, and take additional steps to prevent false or misleading content from appearing. Despite these efforts we understand there’s so much more we need to do, and that is why it’s important that we keep improving our ability to detect misinformation. We’re committed to continuing to work on this issue and improve the experiences on our platform.
Facebook does not label itself a news organization, even though Pew Research Center found in May that 62 percent of adults in the US get their news from social media, and Facebook is a powerhouse in this space.
As BuzzFeed News reported last week, a team of teenagers in Macedonia figured out how to game the Facebook Newsfeed algorithm, and they made up to $5,000 a month circulating fake pro-Trump stories on the site. Their headlines include, “Breaking: Proof surfaces that Obama was born in Kenya – Trump was right all along,” and, “Oprah Tells FOX News Host ‘Some White People Have To Die.’”
The prominence of these stories speaks to a larger problem of “filter bubbles” on Facebook and other social media sites, where users end up seeing stories and opinions only from sources they agree with. Facebook has not stated how it plans to address the issues of fake news or filter bubbles on the site.
Facebook came under fire recently for getting rid of human editors who curated the site’s Trending news section. The Trending stories are now picked by an algorithm with a poor track record of distinguishing truth from fiction.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared his own thoughts on the election, alongside a photo of him holding his daughter as the results poured in. His update read as follows:
Holding Max, I thought about all the work ahead of us to create the world we want for our children. This work is bigger than any presidency and progress does not move in a straight line. The most important opportunities of Max’s generation — like curing all disease, improving education, connecting everyone and promoting equal opportunity — will take long term focus and finding new ways for all of us to work together, sometimes over decades.
We are all blessed to have the ability to make the world better, and we have the responsibility to do it. Let’s go work even harder.
Source: TechCrunch
Clinton urges supporters to speak outside secret Facebook groups
A political candidate’s online support isn’t always in the open, and Hillary Clinton wouldn’t mind changing that. In her presidential campaign concession speech, she indirectly thanked “secret, private” Facebook support groups like Pantsuit Nation, a 3 million-strong outfit she’d messaged (through her digital team leader) on election day. At the same time, she didn’t want supporters keeping their message bottled up in these groups — she wanted them “coming out from behind that” to make sure their “voices are heard.” You can see the statement below at the 15:15 mark.
Both statements were brief, but they acknowledge both the importance of social networking in modern political campaigns as well as the problems it can create. The very fact that millions of supporters had their own space to discuss the campaign and political issues is relatively novel, and opening it to the public could easily have invited trolling and harassment. However, a private group also isn’t sharing its ideas with the outside world. How many voters might have been swayed if they could have seen and participated in some of these discussions? As important as organizations like Pantsuit Nation might be to galvanize fans, they risk creating bubbles that prevent messages from spreading.
Source: PBS (YouTube), Mic
Facebook built a Snapchat-like app for developing countries
Facebook has launched a new Snapchat-like app less than a year after it killed its old Snapchat-like app Slingshot, according to Recode. What’s special about this one is that it was built specifically with emerging markets in mind. The new application called Flash was reportedly created by a team within the social network in charge of building apps for developing nations. They also could’ve been the ones behind Facebook and Messenger Lite. Flash is less than 25MB in size, which is much smaller than Snapchat for Android that’s roughly 70MB. It was also built to work even in areas with limited connectivity.
Facebook recently emulated many of Snapchat’s selfie filters and other features. It even tried to buy the famous “Asian Snapchat” Snow. Looks like the social network doesn’t just want a piece of Snapchat’s pie, it also wants to conquer markets where the ephemeral messaging app isn’t as big. It’s unclear which countries will actually get Flash, but people in one country can now download it whenever they want: Facebook has already launched the app for Android devices in Brazil on Tuesday.
Source: Recode
Facebook wants a piece of LinkedIn’s job recruiting features
After seeing businesses and employers post ad hoc job openings on their Facebook pages, the massive social network is finally experimenting with job recruitment tools in earnest. As TechCrunch reports today, Facebook is testing out a new “Jobs” tab for business pages alongside an “Apply Now” button for applicants that will start filling out a job application with information from the user’s Facebook profile.
That Jobs tab acts as a landing page where businesses can send potential new hires and interested folks rather than directing them to a jobs page on their own website or a third-party job board. Users looking to get their foot in the door at a specific company could also subscribed to that company’s Facebook page to get notified about future openings. Businesses will also be able to pay to post their openings in the News Feed for additional reach or laser-focused targeting to reach people with the right credentials.
From the job applicant’s side, the “Apply Now” button will save users the trouble of entering resumé details and job history information, similar to how other job board sites already use Facebook Connect. On the other hand, that feature might be less appealing to users who like to keep their professional and personal lives separate on social media. When a user does apply, the application is sent in to the business in the same way as a normal Facebook message, which could get a little messy for companies that handle a large volume of customer support requests through Facebook. With nearly four times as many users as LinkedIn, Facebook offers a much larger pool of potential applicants — many of whom might not even know their next job was out there looking for them.
Source: TechCrunch
Facebook’s new mobile AI can process video in real time
Facebook has started rolling out its “Caffe2Go” AI platform that does advanced style transfer video effects in real time using only your iOS or Android smartphone’s horsepower. While the painterly effects are cool (see the video, below), the tech behind it is much more interesting. Deep learning normally requires content “be sent off to data centers for processing on big-compute servers,” Facebook wrote, but with Caffe2Go, the processing can be done “in the palm of your hand.”
The new platform is part of a larger AI effort that includes the machine-vision Lumos app used to suss out images that violate its community standards. It has also open-sourced similar tech on Github to non-Facebook developers. It’s not the only company doing AI projects, of course. Google released its Tensorflow framework to the open source community and Microsoft recently made its Cognitive Toolkit available to developers.
Facebook first flaunted Caffe2Go last month, then brought some of the effects to a new camera in a limited European release. Much like the Prisma app, it transfers styles from Van Gogh or Monet onto any still or moving image. Processing live video normally requires at least a well-equipped PC, but Facebook says “we were able to provide AI [processing] on some mobile phones at less than 1/20th of a second,” six times faster than an eye blink.
Company engineers had to design software that worked with your smartphone’s limitations on memory and computing power. At the same time, they wanted the app to scale up for use on servers or workstation class machines. To that end, the team created a lightweight UNIX-based system 100 times smaller than similar deep-learning programs that works on CPU, GPU, Android and iOS. They then created add-in modules, including a CPU feature called NEON that improves mobile processing speeds.
Facebook is giving developers access to Caffe2Go via its stack, and plans to open-source parts of it “over the coming months.” While the video style transfer is a good test of the technology, it’s capable of doing other AI processing tasks related to image, speech and more. It won’t result in WestWorld any time soon, but it should open up the possibilities of what you can do on your smartphone in the near future.
Source: Facebook
Prisma can turn Facebook Live broadcasts into artistic affairs
Prisma’s latest update gives you the power to air artistic videos on Facebook Live. When you switch from Photos to Videos, you’ll now see a “Live Stream” button that broadcasts whatever it is you’re capturing on cam. You’ll be able to apply any of the eight available art filters onto your broadcasts, which means you can transform any ordinary event into a moving painting on the fly. Unfortunately, this feature has a pretty limited reach: you’ll only get Facebook Live integration if you have an iPhone 7 or a 6s. Prisma says it’s because videos are processed locally on the device — the update also improves overall video quality — and requires the phones’ power.
In its announcement, the company said it knows both Facebook and Google are working on their own Prisma-like offerings. The social network launched artistic filters along with Snapchat-like features for Live a few days ago, while Google revealed that it’s working on its own style-transfer technology at the same time. Prisma CEO Aleksey Moiseenkov says it’s “really cool that Google and Facebook are trying to copy” the company’s app, but he thinks “that’s the evidence that style transfer and all this on-device deep learning stuff matters a lot for every big company in the world.”
Besides announcing the new feature, the company also assures Android fans that it still plans to bring offline processing to the platform, even though it’s taking some time to do so. Prisma promises to launch GIF support, to add social sharing options and to improve photo quality and offline processing time, as well.
Source: Prisma
Facebook iOS App Will Soon Gain Prisma-Like Art Filters for Photos and Videos
In a lengthy blog post about Facebook’s ten-year plan to “accelerate innovation and power new experiences with AI,” chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer mentioned that one update coming to the company’s mobile apps will be a “style transfer” tool that turns normal photos and videos into works of art using “high efficiency neural networks,” all running directly on iOS and Android smartphones.
Facebook’s impending update will, according to Schroepfer, run entirely on the user’s smartphone and not be dependent on the content to be sent to servers, creating long load times and frustrating users. The CTO described this as the most demanding and “technically difficult” hurdle to clear in the process of adding the feature to the company’s mobile apps, but Schroepfer said the company has done just that, and the result is a deep learning platform called “Caffe2Go.”
Just three months ago we set out to do something nobody else had done before: ship AI-based style transfer running live, in real time, on mobile devices. This was a major engineering challenge, as we needed to design software that could run high-powered computing operations on a device with unique resource constraints in areas like power, memory and compute capability. The result is Caffe2Go, a new deep learning platform that can capture, analyze and process pixels in real time on a mobile device.
We found that by condensing the size of the AI model used to process images and videos by 100x, we’re able to run deep neural networks with high efficiency on both iOS and Android. This is all happening in the palm of your hand, so you can apply styles to videos as you’re taking them.
Schroepfer said that the alternative of sending the content to data centers to be analyzed and filtered was “not ideal for letting people share fun content in the moment.” In addition to basic image and video filtering capabilities, the new deep-learning platform will also feasibly be able to understand gesture controls when taking a selfie, for instance. In today’s blog post, an example is given of a user swiping right and left between various artistic filters for a selfie (all running live, in real-time) and even snapping a picture when the user smiles.
As a comparison, the update sounds largely similar to Prisma, an app that launched over the summer and impressed many with its ability to turn photos, and eventually videos, into stylized images. Originally, Prisma used a server-side combination of neural networks and artificial intelligence to apply the different filters to user photos, but an update also introduced offline image processing, meaning users could use some of the app’s filters to alter their images right from their smartphones.
For Facebook, the announcement follows a year of video-first announcements from the company, most recently embodied in CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to make the camera more prominent in the app. No specific timeline was given for a possible launch of the new features on Facebook’s mobile apps, but the company is clearly looking to lay the groundwork for its future, calling its new AI initiative, along with virtual reality, “new technologies that will shape the next decade.”
Tag: Facebook
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Facebook Suspends WhatsApp Data Sharing in the U.K. Following Privacy Probe
Facebook has agreed to pause data collection from WhatsApp users in the United Kingdom following a government probe into the company’s privacy policy (via Engadget).
Back in August, Facebook-owned WhatsApp updated its terms of service and privacy policy to reflect that it would begin sharing select data with the social media network, including the phone number a user verifies during the registration process and the last time a user accessed the service.
Facebook argued that the new policy would allow it to better fight spam and abuse, deliver better friend suggestions and more relevant ads. However, the company soon came under fire from European Privacy watchdogs who cited “serious concerns” over the policy change, while the U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is now eight weeks into its own probe.
The U.K.’s Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham explained the reasons for the probe on the ICO website:
“I had concerns that consumers weren’t being properly protected, and it’s fair to say the enquiries my team have made haven’t changed that view. I don’t think users have been given enough information about what Facebook plans to do with their information, and I don’t think WhatsApp has got valid consent from users to share the information. I also believe users should be given ongoing control over how their information is used, not just a 30-day window.”
ICO said it was “pleased” that Facebook had agreed to pause using data from U.K. WhatsApp users for advertisements or product improvement purposes. As part of the inquiry, the ICO has also asked Facebook to sign an “undertaking” that describes how it will collect and use data and give users “ongoing control” over what is shared.
We also want individuals to have the opportunity to be given an unambiguous choice before Facebook start using that information and to be given the opportunity to change that decision at any point in the future. We think consumers deserve a greater level of information and protection, but so far Facebook and WhatsApp haven’t agreed. If Facebook starts using the data without valid consent, it may face enforcement action from my office.
WhatsApp’s updated terms and privacy policy did not affect its encryption policy. All messages sent through the service continue to be end-to-end encrypted, a measure that has been in place since April.
Tags: Facebook, WhatsApp, privacy
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Facebook suspends WhatsApp data use after UK privacy probe
It’s fair to say that news of WhatsApp sharing user data with its parent company Facebook hasn’t gone down well. Users have questioned why the social network needs to collect phone numbers, profile names and photos, online statuses and last seen timestamps, while European privacy watchdogs have expressed “serious concerns” over the app’s new privacy policy. The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is now eight weeks into its own probe, but that pressure has paid off: Facebook has agreed to pause data collection from UK WhatsApp users.
In a statement on the ICO’s website, Elizabeth Denham, the UK’s Information Commissioner, explained the reasons for the probe: “I had concerns that consumers weren’t being properly protected, and it’s fair to say the enquiries my team have made haven’t changed that view. I don’t think users have been given enough information about what Facebook plans to do with their information, and I don’t think WhatsApp has got valid consent from users to share the information. I also believe users should be given ongoing control over how their information is used, not just a 30 day window.”
While Facebook has stopped using WhatsApp data for “advertisements or product improvement purposes” in the UK for the time being (it’s not clear how this will affect European users), the ICO isn’t stopping there. It’s asked the company to sign an “undertaking” that lays out how it will collect and use data and give users “ongoing control” over what is shared. “We think consumers deserve a greater level of information and protection, but so far Facebook and WhatsApp haven’t agreed, said Denham. “If Facebook starts using the data without valid consent, it may face enforcement action from my office.”
The ICO is aware that as startups and digital companies harvest data, bigger corporations are snapping them up purely to merge datasets and reveal “intrusive” details about them. “It’s a problem that is broader than data protection, and we’re speaking with industry, competition regulators and consumer groups to see how we can make people clearer on the law,” the Commissioner concluded.
Via: V3
Source: ICO
Facebook is gearing up to serve ads on Apple TV and Roku
Facebook is preparing to make (more) money by selling ads that will be shown on TV — connected TV, that is. According to Recode, the social network will start showing video ads on apps that run on set-top boxes, including Apple TV and Roku. The company hasn’t figured out the best format and length yet, but it will begin running tests as soon as next week. A spokesperson told Recode that these tests will help the team determine the best way to “deliver (over the top) video ads through Audience Network,” which is Menlo Park’s ads platform.
Facebook aims to serve the most targeted ads possible by taking note of both IP addresses and the FB account that’s currently logged into the set-top box. Clearly, the company hopes to have an up-and-running prominent ads platform as video-on-demand and streaming services become more common. Even if you’re chosen to be one of the testers, though, you won’t be seeing those targeted ads just yet. It will test the waters by promoting its own services, such as Facebook Live, and its non-profit partners.
Source: Recode
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