Justin Rosenstein and Chris Cox on fixing Facebook

Last year, when a series of former Facebook executives came forward to reveal misgivings about the world that social media had created, few names resonated more loudly than Justin Rosenstein’s. Rosenstein, who helped to develop the Like button at Facebook and previously worked on Gmail chat at Google, told The Guardian that he had taken several steps to eliminate social media distractions in his life, including limiting his time on Facebook and “banning himself from Snapchat.” “It is very common,” Rosenstein told the newspaper in October, “for humans to develop things with the best of intentions and for them to have unintended, negative consequences.”

Half a year later, Rosenstein says he’s bringing his ideas about digital distractions into his current product. Rosenstein is the co-founder and head of product at Asana, which makes software for tracking work via to-do lists, Trello-like boards, and other tools. Today the company, which raised an additional $75 million in January and is now valued at $900 million, is announcing a new tool: Timeline, which lets workers quickly create and modify Gantt charts based on the data they’ve already put into Asana.

As a successful gambit to get me to write about Gantt charts, Asana offered Justin up for an interview about social media and his recent comments about its effect on our lives. You can read the whole thing here, but here’s the key exchange:

Is social media good or bad?

I think it’s good for the world on balance. The question is so complicated, it’s hard to compute. But the good parts of social media have become so taken for granted that we’ve stopped praising them. And the bad parts, people are starting to see for the first time. So people are like, “Oh, it’s all terrible.” That’s a very unbalanced perspective.

You look at the #MeToo movement. That’s named after a hashtag. It’s this really important social movement that spread on the wings of social media. A hugely important, civilization-level conversation — millions of people in a week. That’s incredible! People weren’t like, “Wow, Facebook, you’re amazing.” They’re just like, “Of course you can do that these days.” [But] that wasn’t possible 10 years ago. All these stories I hear — people reconnecting with lost loved ones, grandparents staying in touch with their children. Jared Cohen at the State Department said that Facebook’s mere existence in its first five years did more to help with relations between Arabs and Israelis than 30 years of coordinated attempts by the CIA. This really basic stuff you get from connectivity is so powerful … but people just take that for granted at this point.

Then you do have distraction, filter bubbles, polarization, information privacy, and a lot of problems social media needs to fix. And I’m hopeful. I think these are all fixable problems. You look at industries like tobacco. The difference between this and tobacco: no matter how you package that product, it’s harmful. Whereas social media, if done the right way, if we have a commitment to making sure the content we’re showing people is relevant to them, if we’re only sending notifications when something is actually timely and important, the potential is for the pie chart to move very much in the positive direction.

“There are solutions to these things,” Rosenstein told me during our chat. Today, Facebook offered up a couple. First, it took a step to make privacy tools easier to find. Here’s my colleague Ashley Carman:

Most obviously, the privacy settings page now features shortcuts with images to make it easier to navigate, particularly on mobile. Users can enable two-factor authentication, control what they share or have shared, manage who can see their posts, and learn more about their ad preferences.

The company’s also launching a new page called “Access Your Information,” on which users can further evaluate the information they’ve shared and manage it. From there, they can delete anything from their timeline or profile that they don’t want on Facebook.

Meanwhile BuzzFeed had what seems like a brief chat with chief product officer Chris Cox.

Cox suggested that Facebook will continue to heavily rely on data for its products and services. “We want to understand which data is giving people great experiences in ads, feed, search, messaging, and relevance systems,” Cox said. “On top of that, we should be clear about how data is used, and offer easy ways to control it.”

So far, Facebook has only made a few tiny tweaks in response to the Cambridge Analytica crisis. It’s yet to be seen whether it will simply refurbish the facade of its platform, or if it will rebuild its services from the ground up. Referring to the Wednesday’s privacy center announcement, Cox indicated said additional steps are on the way. “It’s just a small step,” he said. “There’s more to come.”

“If data isn’t helping people, we shouldn’t use it,” Cox says elsewhere in the piece. It’s a philosophical departure from the company’s historic stance of “if data is available, we should build features around it.” The question is now what counts as “helping” people — and to what extent the people being “helped” will have any say in the matter.

The person behind the Like button says software is wasting our time — The Verge — www.theverge.com
Asana’s Justin Rosenstein says social media is too addictive — but it can be fixed. His company just released Timeline, a tool that makes it easier to create Gantt charts.

It’s Time to Make Our Privacy Tools Easier to Find | Facebook Newsroom — newsroom.fb.com

Facebook responds to privacy crisis by making privacy tools easier to find — The Verge — www.theverge.com
Facebook is making its privacy settings more accessible on mobile and helping users figure out how to delete their data.

Democracy

Facebook Is Getting Grilled In India As Elections Draw Near — www.buzzfeed.com

India is putting Facebook on notice in the wake of the data privacy scandal:

India’s Ministry of Information and Technology issued a notice to Facebook on Wednesday asking five questions, including how Facebook planned to prevent its platform from being exploited to influence elections in India, Facebook’s largest market outside the US with over 240 million users. Facebook’s deadline to respond to the Ministry’s questions is April 7.

India is gearing up for national elections in 2019, and several key state elections through 2018.

Earlier this month, Ravi Shankar Prasad, India’s IT minister, warned Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that the country would summon him if “any data theft of Indians is done with the collusion of Facebook systems.”

The platforms are the problem: The fight against digital disinformation gets $10 million from the Hewlett Foundation — www.niemanlab.org

Unlike other philanthropic efforts related to disinformation, this one is focused on how it spreads on the platforms themselves:

Hewlett wants to fund research into the firehose of content that’s coming at people, microtargeting, bots, inauthentic conversations — the “wild west of voices.” It plans to fund research in three areas:

— Explanatory research that increases understanding of the current problem, including examining the supply of disinformation, how it spreads across different technology platforms and its effect on people’s political knowledge, beliefs and actions.

— Experimental research that helps examine potential solutions, by testing what actions can reduce disinformation’s negative impact on individuals or how high-quality content can be elevated.

— Ethical, legal, and technical research that examines the practical and philosophical considerations in addressing digital disinformation, including how well norms around privacy and free speech are bearing up in the digital age, the incentives for voluntary regulation, and the role of government including agencies such as the FEC, FTC, FCC, and others.

Peter Thiel Employee Helped Cambridge Analytica Before It Harvested Data — www.nytimes.com

The Cambridge Analytica story has entered the phase where people are taping various faces to the wall and connecting them with yarn. (Another example would be this Amazon connection.) Today’s new faces on the wall are Peter Thiel and Palantir, which apparently had the idea for the now-infamous survey app that caused all the trouble:

It was a Palantir employee in London, working closely with the data scientists building Cambridge’s psychological profiling technology, who suggested the scientists create their own app — a mobile-phone-based personality quiz — to gain access to Facebook users’ friend networks, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.

Cambridge ultimately took a similar approach. By early summer, the company found a university researcher to harvest data using a personality questionnaire and Facebook app. The researcher scraped private data from over 50 million Facebook users — and Cambridge Analytica went into business selling so-called psychometric profiles of American voters, setting itself on a collision course with regulators and lawmakers in the United States and Britain.

The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower Wanted His New Company To Work With Trump Campaign’s Manager — www.buzzfeed.com

Also today on the yarn wall: “whistleblower” Christopher Wylie using the data set he complained about Cambridge Analytica having to start his own company, Eunoia. Ryan Mac reports:

Emails from 2014 provided to BuzzFeed News show that Eunoia, possessed a database of more than 50 million Facebook profiles at the time. That same information — and Facebook’s wider data collection policies in general — are now being scrutinized following reports by the New York Times and the Observer of London that Cambridge Analytica improperly acquired it from a company called Global Science Research (GSR), which originally collected it for academic purposes.

Trump hates Amazon, not Facebook — www.axios.com

Here’s a piece of good news for Facebook, I guess:

Capitol Hill wants Facebook’s blood, but President Trump isn’t interested. Instead, the tech behemoth Trump wants to go after is Amazon, according to five sources who’ve discussed it with him. “He’s obsessed with Amazon,” a source said. “Obsessed.”

Elsewhere

Facebook Delays Home-Speaker Unveil Amid Data Crisis — www.bloomberg.com

Sarah Frier has a scoop on Facebook delaying the announcement of its forthcoming line of Amazon Echo clones for the home over the data privacy scandal:

Facebook Inc. has decided not to unveil new home products at its major developer conference in May, in part because the public is currently so outraged about the social network’s data-privacy practices, according to people familiar with the matter.

Amid Uproar, Facebook Considers Privacy Safeguards for Smart-Home Devices — www.theinformation.com

Cory Weinberg has a scoop on how Facebook plans to eventually counter privacy concerns over the device, which is apparently to be known as “Portal.”

One of the devices under development, called Portal, would use facial-recognition technology to help set up video calls between friends and family members, according to people familiar with the matter. Facebook now plans to process and store video data on the device, rather than on the company’s servers. The decision came after discussions over the past several months with privacy experts, according to a person close to the company.

Facebook also is considering delaying planned software and hardware product releases, including Portal, over privacy concerns, the person close to the company said.

Facebook temporarily blocks new apps from joining its platform — www.theverge.com

Something else Facebook has delayed in the wake of the privacy scandal: the app approval process.

Facebook paused its app review process last week, it quietly announced on Monday, to “implement new changes.” The company’s move to momentarily put a break on adding new apps and chatbots to its platform comes after the Cambridge Analytica data breach fiasco became public a week and a half ago.

Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted — nymag.com

Madison Malone Kirchner finds that Facebook still retains a bunch of draft videos that users recorded but never posted:

Another co-worker, Brittany Stephanis, found over 100 videos in her archive and says that she only ever publicly posted about a third of them. The earliest date back to Christmas Day in 2008 when Stephanis, then 13, started recording videos to wish her friends a happy holiday. Stephanis says that her archive contains videos she clearly never planned to shared with anyone. “There are videos of me just checking my teeth,” she explained. My sister also had videos — rehearsing for school musicals and cheerleading — where she was using Facebook’s desktop camera to review herself and then erase, or so she thought, the video forever.

#DeleteFacebook? Get Ready for Joy, Despair, Agony, Relief — www.wsj.com

Betsy Morris interviews some of the dangerous radicals who have quit Facebook. (USA Today also talked to users about the recent news.) Most of the people Morris talked to either lost their nerve during the deactivation process or came back soon thereafter:

He finally pulled the trigger as he was about to take off for a 2014 New Year’s Eve party. Almost immediately, he felt the sting of life without Facebook. He had forgotten to write down the address of the party and didn’t know where to go.

A Friendly Reminder That Instagram Uses All Your Facebook Data — www.buzzfeed.com

Interface readers know this. Many others do not!

Brands and marketers can choose to have ads run only on Instagram and not show up on Facebook. But they still have to place the ads through the Facebook ad manager. So yes, ads can be tailored to only appear on Instagram, but all of that is handled in Facebook’s ad system.

Playboy deletes its Facebook accounts — www.theverge.com

Speaking of “Instagram uses all your data,” consider this bold statement from Playboy and consider that they announced it … on Instagram:

”The recent news about Facebook’s alleged mismanagement of users’ data has solidified our decision to suspend our activity on the platform at this time,” reads the statement. “There are more than 25 million fans who engage with Playboy via our various Facebook pages, and we do not want to be complicit in exposing them to the reported practices.”

While Playboy certainly doesn’t hold the immense cultural influence it once did, the brand still holds a certain cachet with an older generation of humans. You know, the ones that still use Facebook. In 2014, Playboy said that Facebook was its largest audience. Of course, that was back when the magazine stopped posting nudes (a practice it restarted last year) in order to court a larger following on social media.

She says Facebook brainwashed her husband — he disagrees — www.newstatesman.com

Amelia Tait talked to a couple about how social media has polarized them in opposite directions. After a woman’s tweet saying Facebook brainwashed her husband went viral, they retreated to separate platforms:

Tracy says she and Brandon have had “a million horrific fights” about politics over the last few years, and now they try to avoid the topic completely.

“It’s just tragic,” she says. “We just can’t talk about politics.” Instead, the couple now talk to like-minded others online.

Brandon has Facebook and doesn’t use Twitter. Tracy uses Twitter, and has “quit” Facebook.

Snapchat is building the same kind of data-sharing API that just got Facebook into trouble — Recode — www.recode.net

The timing here is downright provocative!

As Facebook users are uninstalling apps they connected long ago via Facebook log-in, Snapchat may be pushing for its community to do the exact opposite.

The latest Snapchat beta version features a new tab called “Connected Apps” within the Settings page. The page doesn’t show anything except text that reads, “These apps are connected to your Snapchat account. Choose an app to control what it has access to.”

Snapchat tests ‘Connected Apps’ as people choose to delete Facebook — mashable.com
Let Snapchat be your log-in.

MSU spent $500K to monitor social media from Nassar victims, others — www.lansingstatejournal.com

Meanwhile, taxpayers paid Weber Shandwick half a million dollars to read potentially harmful tweets and other social media posts about the former university doctor who sexually abused hundreds of women and girls:

EAST LANSING — A public relations firm billed MSU for more than $500,000 for January as it tracked social media activity surrounding the Larry Nassar case, which often included the accounts of victims and their families, journalists, celebrities and politicians.

The work, which also included collecting and evaluating news articles, had previously been done by members of Michigan State University’s Office of Communication and Brand Strategy, some of whom continued to do so in January.

Launches

Bringing Local News Section, Today In, to More US Cities — media.fb.com

Facebook’s experimental local news section is rolling out to 25 more cities:

Anderson, SC; Bismarck, ND; Bloomington, IL; Boise, ID; Charleston, WV; Chattanooga, TN; Columbia, SC; Decatur, IL; Franklin, TN; Evansville, IN; Greensboro, NC; Greenville, SC; Huntsville, AL; Poughkeepsie, NY; Lafayette, LA; Lakeland, FL; Macon, GA; Myrtle Beach, SC; Santa Rosa, CA; Sarasota, FL; Saint Joseph, MO; San Angelo, TX; Shreveport, LA; Tyler, TX; York, PA

Takes

Mark Zuckerberg Is Just Doing What He’d Have Been Forced to Do — www.bloomberg.com

Alex Webb points out that many of the changes Facebook is making in apparent response to the Cambridge Analytica story are actually a product of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, which goes into effect in May:

The reality is that most, if not all, of the measures are required by the General Data Protection Regulation, a law imposed by the European Union which becomes enforceable from May 25th. The ability to download your photos and posts and move them elsewhere? That falls under the GDPR’s “Data Portability” stipulations. To delete data? The GDPR dubs that the “Right to be Forgotten”. Seeing how your data is used to push ads in your direction? That’s the “Right to Access”.

Accelerating the measures is clearly politically expedient, which is why I chuckled at the assertion in the press release headline that “It’s Time”. As with so much news-flow relating to data over the past two years, there’s an overwhelming sense that the barn door is casually being closed long after the horse has bolted.

Can Social Media Be Saved? — www.nytimes.com

Kevin Roose has some practical thoughts for how Facebook can clean up its act. I like the idea of more temporary social graphs:

I’d go even further, and suggest that social networks give their users an automatic “self-cleaning” option, which would regularly clear their profiles of apps they no longer used, friendships and followers they no longer interacted with, and data they no longer needed to store. If these tools were enabled, users would need to take affirmative action if they didn’t want their information to disappear after a certain number of months or years.

Making social graphs temporary, rather than preserving them forever by default, would undoubtedly be bad for most social networks’ business models. But it could create new and healthy norms around privacy and data hygiene, and it would keep problems from piling up as networks get older and more crowded. It might even recapture some of the magic of the original social networks, when things were fresh and fascinating, and not quite so scary.

What worries me about AI — medium.com

François Chollet, a deep learning expert at Google, also has some good ideas for social networks:

Here’s an idea — any algorithmic newsfeed with significant adoption should:

• Transparently convey what objectives the feed algorithm is currently optimizing for, and how these objectives are affecting your information diet.
• Give you intuitive tools to set these goals yourself. For instance, it should be possible for you to configure your newsfeed to maximize learning and personal growth — in specific directions.
• Feature an always-visible measure of how much time you are spending on the feed.
• Feature tools to stay control of how much time you’re spending on the feed — such as a daily time target, past which the algorithm will seek to get you off the feed.

Dreaming of a Spotless Social Media Timeline? The Solutions Are Far From Ideal — The New York Times — www.nytimes.com

Brian Chen finds that deleting your old Facebook posts is more trouble than you’d imagine:

So over the last two months, I decided to do something different by trying to erase that permanence. Specifically, I used web tools to eradicate the vast majority of my Facebook and Twitter posts. Those turned out to be impractical and tedious to use — though automated, the programs were flawed and missed many posts after several attempts. The chore took about five hours, spread out over weeks.

While I walked away from the ashes of my digital self feeling less haunted, I confess my methods may not be worth the trouble, though there are other, more practical solutions. Yet cleaning up your timeline is an exercise I recommend in moderation if you care about your privacy.

And finally …

Guardian reporter Olivia Solon had a novel way of reducing her time spent using a smartphone:

Talk to me

Questions? Comments? Privacy settings? casey@theverge.com