Illustration: Rosie Roberts

Facebook’s secret censorship rules, women journalists in Muslim countries and how to cover under-reported areas

Our personal weekly selection about journalism and innovation. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.

edited by Marco Nurra

• BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti: news publishers only have themselves to blame for losing out to Google and Facebook. “A lot of the traditional media players are opportunistically attacking Facebook and Google because Facebook and Google have figured out a better model for delivering information and entertaining people which is real-time, personalised, shareable and global — all these things that you can’t do in broadcast and print,” he says. “These traditional media companies have had decades of massive cashflow and they decided to stockpile that instead of investing in digital. They just kept managing earnings on their traditional businesses even though we have known for 20-plus years that the internet was going to be a big thing and now all these things have unfolded, with some surprises but in a way that was not that hard to predict. Now we are at the point where Facebook’s and Google’s revenues are starting to be a substantial portion of the pie, they are attacking them, saying it is unfair. The truth is that Facebook and Google have always taken a long term perspective — so has Netflix, so has Amazon — that the internet would win out in the end. A lot of the big media companies always took a quarter-to-quarter perspective, a maximise earnings perspective, and that has resulted in them being in a tough position and so they attack Facebook and Google because of it.”
• Facebook’s secret censorship rules protect “white men” from hate speech but not “black children”. A trove of internal documents reviewed by ProPublica sheds new light on the secret guidelines that Facebook’s censors use to distinguish between hate speech and legitimate political expression. The documents reveal the rationale behind seemingly inconsistent decisions. The reason is that Facebook deletes curses, slurs, calls for violence and several other types of attacks only when they are directed at “protected categories” — based on race, sex, gender identity, religious affiliation, national origin, ethnicity, sexual orientation and serious disability/disease. It gives users broader latitude when they write about “subsets” of protected categories. White men are considered a group because both traits are protected, while female drivers and black children, like radicalized Muslims, are subsets, because one of their characteristics is not protected.
• Risk, Laura Poitras’ film on Julian Assange, six years in the making, is finally finished. “Filming is always hard, and this was particularly hard. I knew Julian was going to be furious with the film, and I don’t have any joy with that. I know he’s polarising, but there is no doubt he’s a really significant historical figure in the work that he has done, which has transformed journalism, and I think he understood ahead of many people how the internet was going to change global politics.” While she is critical of Assange, Poitras is also scathing of the media — indeed, the film is partly a critique of the pack mentality of the press. The film has been criticized by Wikileaks lawyers for not protecting journalistic sources, for an absence of personal and professional integrity, and for failing to honor contractual obligations.
• Fusion and The Guardian are changing their coverage of under-reported areas. “We want to support people who actually live in these places reporting on their own states, about inequality, and then we want to bring them to traditional elite audiences,” Alissa Quart (The Guardian) says.
• How women journalists are silenced in a man’s world: the double-edged sword of reporting from Muslim countries. A new paper by Iranian journalist Yeganeh Rezaian focuses on the difficulties women reporters face while working in Muslim countries. Rezaian, who worked for Bloomberg News and Abu Dhabi’s The National, was imprisoned in Tehran with her husband Jason Rezaian of The Washington Post.
• Newsrooms are moving away from a focus on mass shootings to tell more nuanced stories about the people and communities marred by gun violence. Finding ways to tell these broader, nuanced stories has helped move the conversation away from stigmatizing communities and toward examining the societal conditions that lead to these tragedies.
• “Why I’m devoting a year to helping black newspapers survive: As black communities risk being overlooked by many newsrooms, so do black newspapers risk being overlooked or undervalued by advertisers,” Regina H. Boone says.
• A how-to guide for collaborative journalism projects. This 66-page playbook provides a detailed account of how Electionland was conceived, planned, and executed as the teams involved worked to track and cover voting on Election Day in 2016. It also provides tips for those who are hoping to create a reporting project in the same vein.
• Google News launches a streamlined redesign that gives more prominence to fact-checking. Google News’ desktop site is now broken into three main sections: Headlines, which features the day’s top news stories; Local, which allows users to follow news from certain locations; and For You, which contains specific topics a user has said they’re interested in. The redesign also introduces a card-based interface. The new layout is meant to highlight publisher titles, article labels, and offers more prominence to video. Users can also expand the cards to show more coverage on a certain topic.
• With $500,000 in funding, Full Fact is building two automated fact-checking tools for journalists. The UK’s independent fact-checking charity announced that it has received $500,000 (£385,000) in funding from the Omidyar Network and the Open Society Foundations to build two automated fact-checking tools, called Live and Trends, that will be available in 2018 to journalists and fact-checkers globally.
• Here are the principles that support the News Quality Scoring project, by Frederic Filloux. “By highlighting the most valuable part of the journalistic production, automatically and in real-time, we should be able to create a machine-readable signal of quality that advertisers and news distributors can take advantage of.”

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