company:wall street journal

Nintendo to unveil two Switch models this summer, The Wall Street Journal reports
▻https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-03-25-nintendo-to-unveil-two-switch-models-around-e3-the-wall-st

One version will be the previously reported hardware upgrade, with a cheaper version aimed at a more casual market

#Publishing #Development

The Mystery of the Exiled Billionaire Whistle-Blower - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/magazine/the-mystery-of-the-exiled-billionaire-whistleblower.html

From a penthouse on Central Park, Guo Wengui has exposed a phenomenal web of corruption in China’s ruling elite — if, that is, he’s telling the truth.

By Lauren Hilgers, Jan. 10, 2018

阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版

On a recent Saturday afternoon, an exiled Chinese billionaire named Guo Wengui was holding forth in his New York apartment, sipping tea while an assistant lingered quietly just outside the door, slipping in occasionally to keep Guo’s glass cup perfectly full. The tycoon’s Twitter account had been suspended again — it was the fifth or sixth time, by Guo’s count — and he blamed the Communist Party of China. “It’s not normal!” he said, about this cycle of blocking and reinstating. “But it doesn’t matter. I don’t need anyone.”

Guo’s New York apartment is a 9,000-square-foot residence along Central Park that he bought for $67.5 million in 2015. He sat in a Victorian-style chair, his back to a pair of west-facing windows, the sunset casting craggy shadows. A black-and-white painting of an angry-looking monkey hung on the wall to Guo’s right, a hat bearing a star-and-wreath Soviet insignia on its head and a cigarette hanging from its lips. Guo had arrived dressed entirely in black, except for two silver stripes on each lapel. “I have the best houses,” he told me. Guo had picked his apartment for its location, its three sprawling balconies and the meticulously tiled floor in the entryway. He has the best apartment in London, he said; the biggest apartment in Hong Kong. His yacht is docked along the Hudson River. He is comfortable and, anyway, Guo likes to say that as a Buddhist, he wants for nothing. If it were down to his own needs alone, he would have kept his profile low. But he has a higher purpose. He is going to save China.

Guo pitches himself as a former insider, a man who knows the secrets of a government that tightly controls the flow of information. A man who, in 2017, did the unthinkable — tearing open the veil of secrecy that has long surrounded China’s political elite, lobbing accusations about corruption, extramarital affairs and murder plots over Facebook and Twitter. His YouTube videos and tweets have drawn in farmers and shopkeepers, democracy activists, writers and businesspeople. In China, people have been arrested for chatting about Guo online and distributing T-shirts with one of his slogans printed on the front (“This is only the beginning!”). In New York, Guo has split a community of dissidents and democracy activists down the middle. Some support him. Others believe that Guo himself is a government spy.

Nothing in Guo’s story is as straightforward as he would like it to seem. Guo is 47 years old, or 48, or 49. Although he has captured the attention of publications like The Guardian, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, the articles that have run about him have offered only hazy details about his life. This is because his biography varies so widely from one source to the next. Maybe his name isn’t even Guo Wengui. It could be Guo Wugui. There are reports that in Hong Kong, Guo occasionally goes by the name Guo Haoyun.

When pressed, Guo claims a record of unblemished integrity in his business dealings, both in real estate and in finance (when it comes to his personal life, he strikes a more careful balance between virility and dedication to his family). “I never took a square of land from the government,” he said. “I didn’t take a penny of investment from the banks.” If you accept favors, he said, people will try to exploit your weaknesses. So, Guo claims, he opted to take no money and have no weaknesses.

Yet when Guo left China in 2014, he fled in anticipation of corruption charges. A former business partner had been detained just days before, and his political patron would be detained a few days afterward. In 2015, articles about corruption in Guo’s business dealings — stories that he claims are largely fabrications — started appearing in the media. He was accused of defrauding business partners and colluding with corrupt officials. To hear Guo tell it, his political and business opponents used a national corruption campaign as a cover for a personal vendetta.

Whatever prompted Guo to take action, his campaign came during an important year for China’s president, Xi Jinping. In October, the Communist Party of China (C.P.C.) convened its 19th National Congress, a twice-a-decade event that sets the contours of political power for the next five years. The country is in the throes of a far-reaching anti-corruption campaign, and Xi has overseen a crackdown on dissidents and human rights activists while increasing investment in censorship and surveillance. Guo has become a thorn in China’s side at the precise moment the country is working to expand its influence, and its censorship program, overseas.

In November 2017, the Tiananmen Square activist Wang Dan warned of the growing influence of the C.P.C. on university campuses in the United States. His own attempts to hold “China salons” on college campuses had largely been blocked by the Chinese Students and Scholars Association — a group with ties to China’s government. Around the same time, the academic publisher Springer Nature agreed to block access to hundreds of articles on its Chinese site, cutting off access to articles on Tibet, Taiwan and China’s political elite. Reports emerged last year that China is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars quarterly to purchase ads on Facebook (a service that is blocked within China’s borders). In Australia, concerns about China’s growing influence led to a ban on foreign political donations.

“That’s why I’m telling the United States they should really be careful,” Guo said. China’s influence is spreading, he says, and he believes his own efforts to change China will have global consequences. “Like in an American movie,” he told me with unflinching self-confidence. “In the last minutes, we will save the world.”

Propaganda, censorship and rewritten histories have long been specialties of authoritarian nations. The aim, as famously explained by the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, is to confuse: to breed a combination of cynicism and gullibility. Propaganda can leave people in doubt of all news sources, suspicious of their neighbors, picking and choosing at random what pieces of information to believe. Without a political reality grounded in facts, people are left unmoored, building their world on whatever foundation — imaginary or otherwise — they might choose.

The tight grip that the C.P.C. keeps on information may be nothing new, but China’s leadership has been working hard to update the way it censors and broadcasts. People in China distrusted print and television media long before U.S. politicians started throwing around accusations of “fake news.” In 2016, President Xi Jinping was explicit about the arrangement, informing the country’s media that it should be “surnamed Party.” Likewise, while the West has only recently begun to grapple with government-sponsored commenters on social media, China’s government has been manipulating online conversations for over a decade.

“They create all kinds of confusion,” said Ha Jin, the National Book Award-winning American novelist born in China’s Liaoning Province, and a vocal supporter of Guo. “You don’t know what information you have and whether it’s right. You don’t know who are the informers, who are the agents.”

Online, the C.P.C. controls information by blocking websites, monitoring content and employing an army of commenters widely known as the 50-cent party. The name was used as early as 2004, when a municipal government in Hunan Province hired a number of online commenters, offering a stipend of 600 yuan, or about $72. Since then, the 50-cent party has spread. In 2016, researchers from Harvard, Stanford and the University of California-San Diego estimated that these paid commenters generated 448 million social-media comments annually. The posts, researchers found, were conflict averse, cheerleading for the party rather than defending it. Their aim seemed not to be engaging in argument but rather distracting the public and redirecting attention from sensitive issues.

In early 2017, Guo issued his first salvos against China’s ruling elite through more traditional channels. He contacted a handful of Chinese-language media outlets based in the United States. He gave interviews to the Long Island-based publication Mingjing News and to Voice of America — a live event that was cut short by producers, leading to speculation that V.O.A. had caved to Chinese government pressure. He called The New York Times and spoke with reporters at The Wall Street Journal. It did not take long, however, before the billionaire turned to direct appeals through social media. The accusations he made were explosive — he attacked Wang Qishan, Xi Jinping’s corruption czar, and Meng Jianzhu, the secretary of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, another prominent player in Xi’s anti-corruption campaign. He talked about Wang’s mistresses, his business interests and conflicts within the party.

In one YouTube video, released on Aug. 4, Guo addressed the tension between Wang and another anti-corruption official named Zhang Huawei. He recounted having dinner with Zhang when “he called Wang Qishan’s secretary and gave him orders,” Guo said. “Think about what Wang had to suffer in silence back then. They slept with the same women, and Zhang knew everything about Wang.” In addition, Guo said, Zhang knew about Wang’s corrupt business dealings. When Zhang Huawei was placed under official investigation in April, Guo claimed, it was a result of a grudge.

“Everyone in China is a slave,” Guo said in the video. “With the exception of the nobility.”

To those who believe Guo’s claims, they expose a depth of corruption that would surprise even the most jaded opponent of the C.P.C. “The corruption is on such a scale,” Ha Jin said. “Who could imagine that the czar of anti-corruption would himself be corrupt? It is extraordinary.”

Retaliation came quickly. A barrage of counteraccusations began pouring out against Guo, most published in the pages of the state-run Chinese media. Warrants for his arrest were issued on charges of corruption, bribery and even rape. China asked Interpol to issue a red notice calling for Guo’s arrest and extradition. He was running out of money, it was reported. In September, Guo recorded a video during which he received what he said was a phone call from his fifth brother: Two of Guo’s former employees had been detained, and their family members were threatening suicide. “My Twitter followers are so important they are like heaven to me,” Guo said. But, he declared, he could not ignore the well-being of his family and his employees. “I cannot finish the show as I had planned,” he said. Later, Guo told his followers in a video that he was planning to divorce his wife, in order to shield her from the backlash against him.

Guo quickly resumed posting videos and encouraging his followers. His accusations continued to accumulate throughout 2017, and he recently started his own YouTube channel (and has yet to divorce his wife). His YouTube videos are released according to no particular schedule, sometimes several days in a row, some weeks not at all. He has developed a casual, talkative style. In some, Guo is running on a treadmill or still sweating after a workout. He has demonstrated cooking techniques and played with a tiny, fluffy dog, a gift from his daughter. He invites his viewers into a world of luxury and offers them a mix of secrets, gossip and insider knowledge.

Wang Qishan, Guo has claimed, is hiding the money he secretly earned in the Hainan-based conglomerate HNA Group, a company with an estimated $35 billion worth of investments in the United States. (HNA Group denies any ties to Wang and is suing Guo.) He accused Wang of carrying on an affair with the actress Fan Bingbing. (Fan is reportedly suing Guo for defamation.) He told stories of petty arguments among officials and claimed that Chinese officials sabotaged Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared in 2014 en route to Beijing, in order to cover up an organ-harvesting scheme. Most of Guo’s accusations have proved nearly impossible to verify.

“This guy is just covered in question marks,” said Minxin Pei, a professor at Claremont McKenna who specializes in Chinese governance.

The questions that cover Guo have posed a problem for both the United States government and the Western journalists who, in trying to write about him, have found themselves buffeted by the currents of propaganda, misinformation and the tight-lipped code of the C.P.C. elite. His claims have also divided a group of exiled dissidents and democracy activists — people who might seem like Guo’s natural allies. For the most part, the democracy activists who flee China have been chased from their country for protesting the government or promoting human rights, not because of corruption charges. They tell stories of personal persecution, not insider tales of bribery, sex and money. And perhaps as a consequence, few exiled activists command as large an audience as Guo. “I will believe him,” Ha Jin said, “until one of his serious accusations is proved to be false.”

Pei, the professor, warns not to take any of Guo’s accusations at face value. The reaction from the C.P.C. has been so extreme, however, that Pei believes Guo must know something. “He must mean something to the government,” he said. “They must be really bothered by this billionaire.” In May, Chinese officials visited Guo on visas that did not allow them to conduct official business, causing a confrontation with the F.B.I. A few weeks later, according to The Washington Times, China’s calls for Guo’s extradition led to a White House showdown, during which Jeff Sessions threatened to resign if Guo was sent back to China.

Guo has a history of cultivating relationships with the politically influential, and the trend has continued in New York. He famously bought 5,000 copies of a book by Cherie Blair, Tony Blair’s wife. (“It was to give to my employees,” Guo told me. “I often gave my employees books to read.”) Guo has also cultivated a special relationship with Steve Bannon, whom he says he has met with a handful of times, although the two have no financial relationship. Not long after one of their meetings, Bannon appeared on Breitbart Radio and called China “an enemy of incalculable power.”

Despite Guo’s high-powered supporters and his army of online followers, one important mark of believability has continued to elude him. Western news organizations have struggled to find evidence that would corroborate Guo’s claims. When his claims appear in print, they are carefully hedged — delivered with none of his signature charm and bombast. “Why do you need more evidence?” Guo complained in his apartment. “I can give them evidence, no problem. But while they’re out spending time investigating, I’m waiting around to get killed!”

The details of Guo’s life may be impossible to verify, but the broad strokes confirm a picture of a man whose fortunes have risen and fallen with the political climate in China. To hear Guo tell it, he was born in Jilin Province, in a mining town where his parents were sent during the Cultural Revolution. “There were foreigners there,” Guo says in a video recorded on what he claims is his birthday. (Guo was born on Feb. 2, or May 10, or sometime in June.) “They had the most advanced machinery. People wore popular clothing.” Guo, as a result, was not ignorant of the world. He was, however, extremely poor. “Sometimes we didn’t even have firewood,” he says. “So we burned the wet twigs from the mountains — the smoke was so thick.” Guo emphasizes this history: He came from hardship. He pulled himself up.

The story continues into Guo’s pre-teenage years, when he moved back to his hometown in Shandong Province. He met his wife and married her when he was only 15, she 14. They moved to Heilongjiang, where they started a small manufacturing operation, taking advantage of the early days of China’s economic rise, and then to Henan. Guo got his start in real estate in a city called Zhengzhou, where he founded the Zhengzhou Yuda Property Company and built the tallest building the city had seen so far, the Yuda International Trade Center. According to Guo, he was only 25 when he made this first deal.

The string of businesses and properties that Guo developed provide some of the confirmable scaffolding of his life. No one disputes that Guo went on to start both the Beijing Morgan Investment Company and Beijing Zenith Holdings. Morgan Investment was responsible for building a cluster of office towers called the Pangu Plaza, the tallest of which has a wavy top that loosely resembles a dragon, or perhaps a precarious cone of soft-serve ice cream. Guo is in agreement with the Chinese media that in buying the property for Pangu Plaza, he clashed with the deputy mayor of Beijing. The dispute ended when Guo turned in a lengthy sex tape capturing the deputy mayor in bed with his mistress.

There are other details in Guo’s biography, however, that vary from one source to the next. Guo says that he never took government loans; Caixin, a Beijing-based publication, quoted “sources close to the matter” in a 2015 article claiming that Guo took out 28 loans totaling 588 million yuan, or about $89 million. Guo, according to Caixin, eventually defaulted. At some point in this story — the timeline varies — Guo became friends with the vice minister of China’s Ministry of State Security, Ma Jian. The M.S.S. is China’s answer to the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. combined. It spies on civilians and foreigners alike, conducting operations domestically and internationally, amassing information on diplomats, businessmen and even the members of the C.P.C. Describing Ma, Guo leans back in his chair and mimes smoking a cigarette. “Ma Jian! He was fat and his skin was tan.” According to Guo, Ma sat like this during their first meeting, listening to Guo’s side of a dispute. Then Ma told him to trust the country. “Trust the law,” he told Guo. “We will treat you fairly.” The older master of spycraft and the young businessman struck up a friendship that would become a cornerstone in Guo’s claims of insider knowledge, and also possibly the reason for the businessman’s downfall in China.

Following the construction of Pangu Plaza in Beijing, Guo’s life story becomes increasingly hard to parse. He started a securities business with a man named Li You. After a falling-out, Li was detained by the authorities. Guo’s company accused Li and his company of insider trading. According to the 2015 article in Caixin, Li then penned a letter to the authorities accusing Guo of “wrongdoing.”

As this dispute was going on, China’s anti-​corruption operation was building a case against Ma Jian. In Guo’s telling, Ma had long been rumored to be collecting intelligence on China’s leaders. As the anti-corruption campaign gained speed and officials like Wang Qishan gained power, Ma’s well of intelligence started to look like a threat. It was Guo’s relationship with Ma, the tycoon maintains, that made officials nervous. Ma was detained by the authorities in January 2015, shortly after Guo fled the country. Soon after Ma’s detention, accounts began appearing in China’s state-run media claiming that Ma had six Beijing villas, six mistresses and at least two illegitimate sons. In a 2015 article that ran in the party-run newspaper The China Daily, the writer added another detail: “The investigation also found that Ma had acted as an umbrella for the business ventures of Guo Wengui, a tycoon from Henan Province.”

In the mix of spies, corrupt business dealings, mistresses and sex scandals, Guo has one more unbelievable story to tell about his past. It is one reason, he says, that he was mentally prepared to confront the leaders of the Communist Party. It happened nearly 29 years ago, in the aftermath of the crackdown on Tiananmen Square. According to Guo, he had donated money to the students protesting in the square, and so a group of local police officers came to find him at his home. An overzealous officer fired off a shot at Guo’s wife — at which point Guo’s younger brother jumped in front of the bullet, suffering a fatal wound. “That was when I started my plan,” he said. “If your brother had been killed in front of your eyes, would you just forget it?” Never mind the fact that it would take 28 years for him to take any public stand against the party that caused his brother’s death. Never mind that the leadership had changed. “I’m not saying everyone in the Communist Party is bad,” he said. “The system is bad. So what I need to oppose is the system.”

On an unusually warm Saturday afternoon in Flushing, Queens, a group of around 30 of Guo’s supporters gathered for a barbecue in Kissena Park. They laid out a spread of vegetables and skewers of shrimp and squid. Some children toddled through the crowd, chewing on hot dogs and rolling around an unopened can of Coke. The adults fussed with a loudspeaker and a banner that featured the name that Guo goes by in English, Miles Kwok. “Miles Kwok, NY loves U,” it said, a heart standing in for the word “loves.” “Democracy, Justice, Liberty for China.” Someone else had carried in a life-size cutout of the billionaire.

The revelers decided to hold the event in the park partly for the available grills but also partly because the square in front of Guo’s penthouse had turned dangerous. A few weeks earlier, some older women had been out supporting Guo when a group of Chinese men holding flags and banners showed up. At one point, the men wrapped the women in a protest banner and hit them. The park was a safer option. And the protesters had learned from Guo — it wasn’t a live audience they were hoping for. The group would be filming the protest and posting it on social media. Halfway through, Guo would call in on someone’s cellphone, and the crowd would cheer.

Despite this show of support, Guo’s claims have divided China’s exiled dissidents to such an extent that on a single day near the end of September, two dueling meetings of pro-democracy activists were held in New York, one supporting Guo, the other casting doubt on his motivations. (“They are jealous of me,” Guo said of his detractors. “They think: Why is he so handsome? Why are so many people listening to him?”) Some of Guo’s claims are verifiably untrue — he claimed in an interview with Vice that he paid $82 million for his apartment — and others seem comically aggrandized. (Guo says he never wears the same pair of underwear twice.) But the repercussions he is facing are real.

In December, Guo’s brother was sentenced to three years and six months in prison for destroying accounting records. The lawsuits filed against Guo for defamation are piling up, and Guo has claimed to be amassing a “war chest” of $150 million to cover his legal expenses. In September, a new set of claims against Guo were made in a 49-page document circulated by a former business rival. For Ha Jin, Guo’s significance runs deeper than his soap-opera tales of scandal and corruption. “The grand propaganda scheme is to suppress and control all the voices,” Jin said. “Now everybody knows that you can create your own voice. You can have your own show. That fact alone is historical.” In the future, Jin predicts, there will be more rebels like Guo. “There is something very primitive about this, realizing that this is a man, a regular citizen who can confront state power.”

Ho Pin, the founder of Long Island’s Mingjing News, echoed Jin. Mingjing’s reporters felt that covering Guo was imperative, no matter the haziness of the information. “In China, the political elite that Guo was attacking had platforms of their own,” Ho said. “They have the opportunity, the power and the ability to use all the government’s apparatus to refute and oppose Guo Wengui. So our most important job is to allow Guo Wengui’s insider knowledge reach the fair, open-minded people in China.” Still, people like Pei urge caution when dealing with Guo’s claims. Even Guo’s escape raises questions. Few others have slipped through the net of China’s anti-corruption drive. “How could he get so lucky?” Pei asked. “He must have been tipped off long before.”

At the barbecue, a supporter named Ye Rong tucked one of his children under his arm and acknowledged that Guo’s past life is riddled with holes. There was always the possibility that Guo used to be a thug, but Ye didn’t think it mattered. The rules of the conflict had been set by the Communist Party. “You need all kinds of people to oppose the Chinese government,” Ye said. “We need intellectuals; we also need thugs.”

Guo, of course, has his own opinions about his legacy. He warned of dark times for Americans and for the world, if he doesn’t succeed in his mission to change China. “I am trying to help,” he told me. “I am not joking with you.” He continued: “I will change China within the next three years. If I don’t change it, I won’t be able to survive.”
Correction: Jan. 12, 2018

An earlier version of this article misidentified the name of the province where the Chinese government hired online commenters in 2004. It is Hunan Province, not Henan.

#Chine #politique #corruption #tireurs_d_alarme

Facebook staff discussed cashing in on user data, reports say
▻https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/12/facebook-staff-discussed-cashing-in-on-user-data-reports-say

Proposals to charge firms for data said to have been revealed by badly redacted court papers Facebook staff discussed charging companies for access to user data, before ultimately deciding against such a policy, according to reports. The internal discussions were revealed due to improperly redacted court documents, released as part of Facebook’s lawsuit against American software developer Six4Three last year. According to Ars Technica and the Wall Street Journal, an 18-page court filing (...)

#Facebook #données #BigData #publicité #hacking #CambridgeAnalytica #Six4Three

##publicité
▻https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d20c289fefab5caf4b03fcfc4b4588ba419346f7/0_61_3500_2101/master/3500.jpg

Uber Releases Ugly 3Q 2018 Results: Losses Widen to $1.1 Billion, Growth Slows | naked capitalism
▻https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/11/uber-releases-ugly-3q-2018-results-losses-widen-to-1-1-billion-grow

Uber has no plan to make money – it would have to raise fares 2 to 3 times to become profitable – how long will investors continue to subsidize a Company that promises to make it up in volume.

Alles klar?

Posted on November 15, 2018 by Yves Smith
From Hubert Horan:

3q P&Ls released tonight. Losses and margins got worse. Gross revenue growth continues to slow down, showing their inability to fix the fundamental weakness in the core car service business.

Expenditures on the marginal business (food delivery, scooters) that are key to the longer term growth narrative drag results down further.

Mainstream media coverage hasn’t reached “The Emperor has no clothes” point yet, but stories are raising explicit doubts about the viability of next year’s IPO.

Actually, as we’ll discuss, there are Uber skeptics, just not necessarily among reporters.

First, from Eric Newcomer at Bloomberg, who shows doubts about Uber’s proposed IPO valuation of $100 billion and its oft-made claims that it’s another Amazon:

Uber’s sales are dramatically slowing even as the ride-hailing company is spending more to fuel global growth, particularly in its food delivery business. Revenue growth of 38 percent in the third quarter was almost half of what the growth rate was six months earlier, when the company was negotiating a $9.3 billion investment led by SoftBank Group Corp.

That’s a troubling sign for a serially unprofitable business that hopes to get valued like a technology company in a planned initial public offering next year. Uber Technologies Inc. lost $1.07 billion in the quarter ended Sept. 30, an improvement over a year ago, but the loss widened 20 percent from the second quarter.

Highly valued companies typically grow quickly or generate big profits — and great ones do both. In the fourth quarter of 2005, Amazon.com Inc. had about the same revenue as Uber’s today — just under $3 billion, not adjusted for inflation. Yet, Amazon earned $199 million in profit and was worth about a fourth of Uber’s $76 billion valuation.

TechCrunch was more credulous, and also touted a more flattering profit metric:

Uber, which is expected to go public sometime next year, just released its Q3 2018 financial results. Uber’s net losses increased 32 percent quarter over quarter to $939 million on a pro forma basis, though Uber expected these losses as it continues to invest in future growth areas.

On an earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization basis (EBIDTA), Uber’s losses were $527 million, up about 21 percent quarter over quarter. And as Uber prepares to go public, the company has started presenting the income statements with stock-based compensation.

Ten years from now, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi envisions its core ride-hailing business accounting for less than 50 percent of Uber’s overall business, Khosrowshahi told me at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018. That means Uber expects businesses like Eats, scooters, bikes and freight to contribute to be more of Uber’s business, which requires Uber to invest heavily in those businesses.

And why should we expect UberEats and scooters to become profitable? Just because Uber wants it to be so?

The New York Tines’ story came off like a string of Uber talking points, with the only apparent real cause for pause that Lyft is also planning its IPO for 2019. For instance:

Uber’s I.P.O. is likely to create an enormous financial bonanza for its many investors and shareholders, including the company’s co-founder, Travis Kalanick, as well as venture capital firm Benchmark and the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank.

To get ready for a public offering, Mr. Khosrowshahi has been trimming Uber’s money-losing businesses. Uber has withdrawn from markets including Southeast Asia and Russia, where it faced stiff competition and was spending a lot of money. It has focused on other areas, like food delivery, as well as other geographies that show more potential for growth. On Wednesday, Uber began a loyalty program that will give riders access to extra perks the more frequently they use Uber services.

Uber said Uber Eats, its food delivery business that started in 2015, was growing rapidly, with bookings through its separate app up 150 percent from last year.

Yet Uber’s spending also continues to rise. The company said its total costs and expenses were $3.7 billion in the third quarter, up from $3.5 billion in the prior quarter.

It would be more accurate to say that Uber is cutting some loss-generating operations while expanding others.

Finally, to the Wall Street Journal:

The results for the three months ending in September show that Uber is still growing quickly but is likely to be unprofitable for some time. In documents for a bond offering last month, Uber said it expected it wouldn’t reach a profit for at least three years.

Uber has turned its attention to providing customers with a host of transportation options in addition to its core ride-hailing service. Mr. Khosrowshahi said he is particularly hopeful about electric-scooters and bicycle rentals, which he has said can be a low-cost replacement for short car trips in urban centers.

“What we’re going after is essentially to debundle car ownership,” Mr. Khosrowshahi said in an interview at The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech D.Live conference Tuesday. “A world in which the people who cannot afford to buy a car have access to consistent mobility wherever they are, that’s a better world.”

Of the 22 comments on the story so far, only one read as positive, and other readers dismissed it as bad sarcasm. And remember that WSJ readers viciously attacked the initial stories on the Theranos fraud, accusing the journalists of being jealous of a talented entrepreneur. A sampling:

charles cotton

I’ve been tracking Uber and its copy cat, Lyft since 2013. The underlying root of their both their problems is that there business platform is toxic and can not ever make a profit. The burn rate is over 90% of investors money which has resulted in a meltdown. Outside investors have dried up and quite frankly dismayed. Such investors were all reckless, naive, and greedy being lured by hyped, false financials and advertising.

The promise of “get in quick, we’re going public’” being the worm on the hook. There were no accurate disclosures or prospectus given to the investor…. No one really knows what is going on at Uber.”

Joseph Swartz

Uber may be the biggest con game the Street has seen in decades…..an IPO of a Company that loses billions of dollars, subsidizes every ride we take, and has gone off the path with Uber Eats, a ridiculous venture. I recently read it’s drivers last about 6 months, on average, before quitting.

Uber has no plan to make money – it would have to raise fares 2 to 3 times to become profitable – how long will investors continue to subsidize a Company that promises to make it up in volume.

Gary Ayer

Uber is raising money via a public offering because otherwise they would go out of business due to continuous losses.

Jef Kurfess

Doing a thriving business selling dollar bills for $.85?

So Uber’s PR machine is having less and less success in keeping its story going. But will polite press amplification be enough to save Uber’s bacon.

#Uber

Apple News’s Radical Approach: Humans Over Machines - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/apple-news-humans-algorithms.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/10/28/business/28applenews/28applenews-facebookJumbo.jpg

Apple has waded into the messy world of news with a service that is read regularly by roughly 90 million people. But while Google, Facebook and Twitter have come under intense scrutiny for their disproportionate — and sometimes harmful — influence over the spread of information, Apple has so far avoided controversy. One big reason is that while its Silicon Valley peers rely on machines and algorithms to pick headlines, Apple uses humans like Ms. Kern.

The former journalist has quietly become one of the most powerful figures in English-language media. The stories she and her deputies select for Apple News regularly receive more than a million visits each.

Their work has complicated the debate about whether Silicon Valley giants are media or technology companies. Google, Facebook and Twitter have long insisted they are tech entities and not arbiters of the truth. The chief executive of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and others have bet heavily on artificial intelligence to help them sort through false news and fact-based information. Yet Apple has unabashedly gone the other direction with its human-led approach, showing that a more media-like sensibility may be able to coexist within a technology company.

There are ambitious plans for the product. Apple lets publishers run ads in its app and it helps some sign up new subscribers, taking a 30 percent cut of the revenue. Soon, the company aims to bundle access to dozens of magazines in its app for a flat monthly fee, sort of like Netflix for news, according to people familiar with the plans, who declined to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. Apple also hopes to package access to a few daily-news publications, like The Times, The Post and The Wall Street Journal, into the app, the people said.

Apple’s executives grandly proclaim that they want to help save journalism. “There is this deep understanding that a thriving free press is critical for an informed public, and an informed public is critical for a functioning democracy, and that Apple News can play a part in that,” Ms. Kern said.

But there are early signs that Apple is not the industry’s savior. Many publishers have made little on ads in Apple News, and Apple’s 30 percent cut of subscriptions it helps sell does not help. Having experienced Google’s and Facebook’s disruption of their industry, many publications are wary of Apple, according to conversations with executives from nine news organizations, many of whom declined to comment on the record for fear of upsetting the trillion-dollar corporation. Some were optimistic that Apple could be a better partner than other tech giants, but were leery of making the company the portal to their readers.

The rise of Google and Facebook in news was partly driven by algorithms that provided enormous scale, enabling them to surface millions of articles from thousands of sources to their billions of users. The algorithms were largely designed to keep users engaged and clicking, meaning they tended to promote posts that drew clicks and shares, which often meant the sensational. That elevated fringe and partisan sites that produced intentionally misleading, highly partisan or downright false content.

(A Google spokeswoman said the company aimed to avoid misinformation by screening publishers before letting them into Google News. She added that Google this year began helping news organizations sell subscriptions. A Facebook spokeswoman said the company helps publishers reach more readers, earn ad revenue and sell subscriptions. She said Facebook’s algorithm recently decreased the visibility of pages that share clickbait.)

Into that environment came Apple. In late 2015, the iPhone maker released a free news app to match users with publications they liked. People selected their interests and favorite publications, and the app returned a feed of relevant stories.

The announcement attracted little fanfare. Three months later, Apple announced an unusual new feature: humans would pick the app’s top stories, not algorithms.

Not all of the stories in Apple News are handpicked. Algorithms still deliver stories based on which new sources or topics users have followed, such as sports, cars or entertainment. Algorithms also pick the five prominent “trending” stories below Ms. Kern’s team’s curated stories. Those items tend to focus on Mr. Trump or celebrities. Making the list on Oct. 2: a People magazine headline reading “Kate Middleton Is Back from Maternity Leave — with a New Haircut and Old Boots!”

Daniel Hallac, chief product officer for New York Magazine, said traffic from Apple News has doubled since December to now account for nearly 12 percent of visits to the magazine’s website. Traffic from Facebook has dropped about a third, to 8 percent of visits, while Google’s share has increased slightly to nearly half of the site’s traffic. “I’m optimistic about Apple News,” he said.

But in return for that traffic, publishers are stuck with Apple’s less-than-ideal terms. Apple News readers typically stay in Apple’s app, limiting the data that news organizations learn about them and curbing their ad revenues. Slate reported last month that its Apple News readers had roughly tripled over the past year but that, on average, it earned more money on 50,000 views on its site than the six million views it averaged per month in Apple News.

Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president who oversees its services push, said publishers can run their own ads alongside their stories in Apple News and keep all of the revenue. “That’s very rare,” he said. He noted most major publishers take advantage of that feature. Apple also places ads for publishers for a 30 percent cut.

But news publishers said selling ads for Apple News is complicated, and that advertisers’ interest was limited because of the lack of customer data. Slate also attributed its issues to minuscule revenue from the ads Apple placed. Apple recently made it easier for publishers to place their own ads, but Mr. Cue conceded Apple is not terribly good — or interested — in advertising.

#Apple #Journalisme #Médias #Apple_news #Editorialisation

Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy? | The New Yorker
►https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/17/can-mark-zuckerberg-fix-facebook-before-it-breaks-democracy

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5b9189222baa30258f02e769/16:9/w_1200,h_630,c_limit/180917_r32804.jpg

Since 2011, Zuckerberg has lived in a century-old white clapboard Craftsman in the Crescent Park neighborhood, an enclave of giant oaks and historic homes not far from Stanford University. The house, which cost seven million dollars, affords him a sense of sanctuary. It’s set back from the road, shielded by hedges, a wall, and mature trees. Guests enter through an arched wooden gate and follow a long gravel path to a front lawn with a saltwater pool in the center. The year after Zuckerberg bought the house, he and his longtime girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, held their wedding in the back yard, which encompasses gardens, a pond, and a shaded pavilion. Since then, they have had two children, and acquired a seven-hundred-acre estate in Hawaii, a ski retreat in Montana, and a four-story town house on Liberty Hill, in San Francisco. But the family’s full-time residence is here, a ten-minute drive from Facebook’s headquarters.

Occasionally, Zuckerberg records a Facebook video from the back yard or the dinner table, as is expected of a man who built his fortune exhorting employees to keep “pushing the world in the direction of making it a more open and transparent place.” But his appetite for personal openness is limited. Although Zuckerberg is the most famous entrepreneur of his generation, he remains elusive to everyone but a small circle of family and friends, and his efforts to protect his privacy inevitably attract attention. The local press has chronicled his feud with a developer who announced plans to build a mansion that would look into Zuckerberg’s master bedroom. After a legal fight, the developer gave up, and Zuckerberg spent forty-four million dollars to buy the houses surrounding his. Over the years, he has come to believe that he will always be the subject of criticism. “We’re not—pick your noncontroversial business—selling dog food, although I think that people who do that probably say there is controversy in that, too, but this is an inherently cultural thing,” he told me, of his business. “It’s at the intersection of technology and psychology, and it’s very personal.”

At the same time, former Facebook executives, echoing a growing body of research, began to voice misgivings about the company’s role in exacerbating isolation, outrage, and addictive behaviors. One of the largest studies, published last year in the American Journal of Epidemiology, followed the Facebook use of more than five thousand people over three years and found that higher use correlated with self-reported declines in physical health, mental health, and life satisfaction. At an event in November, 2017, Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president, called himself a “conscientious objector” to social media, saying, “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.” A few days later, Chamath Palihapitiya, the former vice-president of user growth, told an audience at Stanford, “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works—no civil discourse, no coöperation, misinformation, mistruth.” Palihapitiya, a prominent Silicon Valley figure who worked at Facebook from 2007 to 2011, said, “I feel tremendous guilt. I think we all knew in the back of our minds.” Of his children, he added, “They’re not allowed to use this shit.” (Facebook replied to the remarks in a statement, noting that Palihapitiya had left six years earlier, and adding, “Facebook was a very different company back then.”)

In March, Facebook was confronted with an even larger scandal: the Times and the British newspaper the Observer reported that a researcher had gained access to the personal information of Facebook users and sold it to Cambridge Analytica, a consultancy hired by Trump and other Republicans which advertised using “psychographic” techniques to manipulate voter behavior. In all, the personal data of eighty-seven million people had been harvested. Moreover, Facebook had known of the problem since December of 2015 but had said nothing to users or regulators. The company acknowledged the breach only after the press discovered it.

We spoke at his home, at his office, and by phone. I also interviewed four dozen people inside and outside the company about its culture, his performance, and his decision-making. I found Zuckerberg straining, not always coherently, to grasp problems for which he was plainly unprepared. These are not technical puzzles to be cracked in the middle of the night but some of the subtlest aspects of human affairs, including the meaning of truth, the limits of free speech, and the origins of violence.

Zuckerberg is now at the center of a full-fledged debate about the moral character of Silicon Valley and the conscience of its leaders. Leslie Berlin, a historian of technology at Stanford, told me, “For a long time, Silicon Valley enjoyed an unencumbered embrace in America. And now everyone says, Is this a trick? And the question Mark Zuckerberg is dealing with is: Should my company be the arbiter of truth and decency for two billion people? Nobody in the history of technology has dealt with that.”

In 2002, Zuckerberg went to Harvard, where he embraced the hacker mystique, which celebrates brilliance in pursuit of disruption. “The ‘fuck you’ to those in power was very strong,” the longtime friend said. In 2004, as a sophomore, he embarked on the project whose origin story is now well known: the founding of Thefacebook.com with four fellow-students (“the” was dropped the following year); the legal battles over ownership, including a suit filed by twin brothers, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, accusing Zuckerberg of stealing their idea; the disclosure of embarrassing messages in which Zuckerberg mocked users for giving him so much data (“they ‘trust me.’ dumb fucks,” he wrote); his regrets about those remarks, and his efforts, in the years afterward, to convince the world that he has left that mind-set behind.

New hires learned that a crucial measure of the company’s performance was how many people had logged in to Facebook on six of the previous seven days, a measurement known as L6/7. “You could say it’s how many people love this service so much they use it six out of seven days,” Parakilas, who left the company in 2012, said. “But, if your job is to get that number up, at some point you run out of good, purely positive ways. You start thinking about ‘Well, what are the dark patterns that I can use to get people to log back in?’ ”

Facebook engineers became a new breed of behaviorists, tweaking levers of vanity and passion and susceptibility. The real-world effects were striking. In 2012, when Chan was in medical school, she and Zuckerberg discussed a critical shortage of organs for transplant, inspiring Zuckerberg to add a small, powerful nudge on Facebook: if people indicated that they were organ donors, it triggered a notification to friends, and, in turn, a cascade of social pressure. Researchers later found that, on the first day the feature appeared, it increased official organ-donor enrollment more than twentyfold nationwide.

Sean Parker later described the company’s expertise as “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” The goal: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” Facebook engineers discovered that people find it nearly impossible not to log in after receiving an e-mail saying that someone has uploaded a picture of them. Facebook also discovered its power to affect people’s political behavior. Researchers found that, during the 2010 midterm elections, Facebook was able to prod users to vote simply by feeding them pictures of friends who had already voted, and by giving them the option to click on an “I Voted” button. The technique boosted turnout by three hundred and forty thousand people—more than four times the number of votes separating Trump and Clinton in key states in the 2016 race. It became a running joke among employees that Facebook could tilt an election just by choosing where to deploy its “I Voted” button.

These powers of social engineering could be put to dubious purposes. In 2012, Facebook data scientists used nearly seven hundred thousand people as guinea pigs, feeding them happy or sad posts to test whether emotion is contagious on social media. (They concluded that it is.) When the findings were published, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they caused an uproar among users, many of whom were horrified that their emotions may have been surreptitiously manipulated. In an apology, one of the scientists wrote, “In hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this anxiety.”

Facebook was, in the words of Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, becoming a pioneer in “ persuasive technology. ”

Facebook had adopted a buccaneering motto, “Move fast and break things,” which celebrated the idea that it was better to be flawed and first than careful and perfect. Andrew Bosworth, a former Harvard teaching assistant who is now one of Zuckerberg’s longest-serving lieutenants and a member of his inner circle, explained, “A failure can be a form of success. It’s not the form you want, but it can be a useful thing to how you learn.” In Zuckerberg’s view, skeptics were often just fogies and scolds. “There’s always someone who wants to slow you down,” he said in a commencement address at Harvard last year. “In our society, we often don’t do big things because we’re so afraid of making mistakes that we ignore all the things wrong today if we do nothing. The reality is, anything we do will have issues in the future. But that can’t keep us from starting.”

In contrast to a traditional foundation, an L.L.C. can lobby and give money to politicians, without as strict a legal requirement to disclose activities. In other words, rather than trying to win over politicians and citizens in places like Newark, Zuckerberg and Chan could help elect politicians who agree with them, and rally the public directly by running ads and supporting advocacy groups. (A spokesperson for C.Z.I. said that it has given no money to candidates; it has supported ballot initiatives through a 501(c)(4) social-welfare organization.) “The whole point of the L.L.C. structure is to allow a coördinated attack,” Rob Reich, a co-director of Stanford’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, told me. The structure has gained popularity in Silicon Valley but has been criticized for allowing wealthy individuals to orchestrate large-scale social agendas behind closed doors. Reich said, “There should be much greater transparency, so that it’s not dark. That’s not a criticism of Mark Zuckerberg. It’s a criticism of the law.”

La question des langues est fondamentale quand il s’agit de réseaux sociaux

Beginning in 2013, a series of experts on Myanmar met with Facebook officials to warn them that it was fuelling attacks on the Rohingya. David Madden, an entrepreneur based in Myanmar, delivered a presentation to officials at the Menlo Park headquarters, pointing out that the company was playing a role akin to that of the radio broadcasts that spread hatred during the Rwandan genocide. In 2016, C4ADS, a Washington-based nonprofit, published a detailed analysis of Facebook usage in Myanmar, and described a “campaign of hate speech that actively dehumanizes Muslims.” Facebook officials said that they were hiring more Burmese-language reviewers to take down dangerous content, but the company repeatedly declined to say how many had actually been hired. By last March, the situation had become dire: almost a million Rohingya had fled the country, and more than a hundred thousand were confined to internal camps. The United Nations investigator in charge of examining the crisis, which the U.N. has deemed a genocide, said, “I’m afraid that Facebook has now turned into a beast, and not what it was originally intended.” Afterward, when pressed, Zuckerberg repeated the claim that Facebook was “hiring dozens” of additional Burmese-language content reviewers.

More than three months later, I asked Jes Kaliebe Petersen, the C.E.O. of Phandeeyar, a tech hub in Myanmar, if there had been any progress. “We haven’t seen any tangible change from Facebook,” he told me. “We don’t know how much content is being reported. We don’t know how many people at Facebook speak Burmese. The situation is getting worse and worse here.”

I saw Zuckerberg the following morning, and asked him what was taking so long. He replied, “I think, fundamentally, we’ve been slow at the same thing in a number of areas, because it’s actually the same problem. But, yeah, I think the situation in Myanmar is terrible.” It was a frustrating and evasive reply. I asked him to specify the problem. He said, “Across the board, the solution to this is we need to move from what is fundamentally a reactive model to a model where we are using technical systems to flag things to a much larger number of people who speak all the native languages around the world and who can just capture much more of the content.”

Lecture des journaux ou des aggrégateurs ?

once asked Zuckerberg what he reads to get the news. “I probably mostly read aggregators,” he said. “I definitely follow Techmeme”—a roundup of headlines about his industry—“and the media and political equivalents of that, just for awareness.” He went on, “There’s really no newspaper that I pick up and read front to back. Well, that might be true of most people these days—most people don’t read the physical paper—but there aren’t many news Web sites where I go to browse.”

A couple of days later, he called me and asked to revisit the subject. “I felt like my answers were kind of vague, because I didn’t necessarily feel like it was appropriate for me to get into which specific organizations or reporters I read and follow,” he said. “I guess what I tried to convey, although I’m not sure if this came across clearly, is that the job of uncovering new facts and doing it in a trusted way is just an absolutely critical function for society.”

Zuckerberg and Sandberg have attributed their mistakes to excessive optimism, a blindness to the darker applications of their service. But that explanation ignores their fixation on growth, and their unwillingness to heed warnings. Zuckerberg resisted calls to reorganize the company around a new understanding of privacy, or to reconsider the depth of data it collects for advertisers.

Antitrust

In barely two years, the mood in Washington had shifted. Internet companies and entrepreneurs, formerly valorized as the vanguard of American ingenuity and the astronauts of our time, were being compared to Standard Oil and other monopolists of the Gilded Age. This spring, the Wall Street Journal published an article that began, “Imagine a not-too-distant future in which trustbusters force Facebook to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp.” It was accompanied by a sepia-toned illustration in which portraits of Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, and other tech C.E.O.s had been grafted onto overstuffed torsos meant to evoke the robber barons. In 1915, Louis Brandeis, the reformer and future Supreme Court Justice, testified before a congressional committee about the dangers of corporations large enough that they could achieve a level of near-sovereignty “so powerful that the ordinary social and industrial forces existing are insufficient to cope with it.” He called this the “curse of bigness.” Tim Wu, a Columbia law-school professor and the author of a forthcoming book inspired by Brandeis’s phrase, told me, “Today, no sector exemplifies more clearly the threat of bigness to democracy than Big Tech.” He added, “When a concentrated private power has such control over what we see and hear, it has a power that rivals or exceeds that of elected government.”

When I asked Zuckerberg whether policymakers might try to break up Facebook, he replied, adamantly, that such a move would be a mistake. The field is “extremely competitive,” he told me. “I think sometimes people get into this mode of ‘Well, there’s not, like, an exact replacement for Facebook.’ Well, actually, that makes it more competitive, because what we really are is a system of different things: we compete with Twitter as a broadcast medium; we compete with Snapchat as a broadcast medium; we do messaging, and iMessage is default-installed on every iPhone.” He acknowledged the deeper concern. “There’s this other question, which is just, laws aside, how do we feel about these tech companies being big?” he said. But he argued that efforts to “curtail” the growth of Facebook or other Silicon Valley heavyweights would cede the field to China. “I think that anything that we’re doing to constrain them will, first, have an impact on how successful we can be in other places,” he said. “I wouldn’t worry in the near term about Chinese companies or anyone else winning in the U.S., for the most part. But there are all these places where there are day-to-day more competitive situations—in Southeast Asia, across Europe, Latin America, lots of different places.”

The rough consensus in Washington is that regulators are unlikely to try to break up Facebook. The F.T.C. will almost certainly fine the company for violations, and may consider blocking it from buying big potential competitors, but, as a former F.T.C. commissioner told me, “in the United States you’re allowed to have a monopoly position, as long as you achieve it and maintain it without doing illegal things.”

Facebook is encountering tougher treatment in Europe, where antitrust laws are stronger and the history of fascism makes people especially wary of intrusions on privacy. One of the most formidable critics of Silicon Valley is the European Union’s top antitrust regulator, Margrethe Vestager.

In Vestager’s view, a healthy market should produce competitors to Facebook that position themselves as ethical alternatives, collecting less data and seeking a smaller share of user attention. “We need social media that will allow us to have a nonaddictive, advertising-free space,” she said. “You’re more than welcome to be successful and to dramatically outgrow your competitors if customers like your product. But, if you grow to be dominant, you have a special responsibility not to misuse your dominant position to make it very difficult for others to compete against you and to attract potential customers. Of course, we keep an eye on it. If we get worried, we will start looking.”

Modération

As hard as it is to curb election propaganda, Zuckerberg’s most intractable problem may lie elsewhere—in the struggle over which opinions can appear on Facebook, which cannot, and who gets to decide. As an engineer, Zuckerberg never wanted to wade into the realm of content. Initially, Facebook tried blocking certain kinds of material, such as posts featuring nudity, but it was forced to create long lists of exceptions, including images of breast-feeding, “acts of protest,” and works of art. Once Facebook became a venue for political debate, the problem exploded. In April, in a call with investment analysts, Zuckerberg said glumly that it was proving “easier to build an A.I. system to detect a nipple than what is hate speech.”

The cult of growth leads to the curse of bigness: every day, a billion things were being posted to Facebook. At any given moment, a Facebook “content moderator” was deciding whether a post in, say, Sri Lanka met the standard of hate speech or whether a dispute over Korean politics had crossed the line into bullying. Zuckerberg sought to avoid banning users, preferring to be a “platform for all ideas.” But he needed to prevent Facebook from becoming a swamp of hoaxes and abuse. His solution was to ban “hate speech” and impose lesser punishments for “misinformation,” a broad category that ranged from crude deceptions to simple mistakes. Facebook tried to develop rules about how the punishments would be applied, but each idiosyncratic scenario prompted more rules, and over time they became byzantine. According to Facebook training slides published by the Guardian last year, moderators were told that it was permissible to say “You are such a Jew” but not permissible to say “Irish are the best, but really French sucks,” because the latter was defining another people as “inferiors.” Users could not write “Migrants are scum,” because it is dehumanizing, but they could write “Keep the horny migrant teen-agers away from our daughters.” The distinctions were explained to trainees in arcane formulas such as “Not Protected + Quasi protected = not protected.”

It will hardly be the last quandary of this sort. Facebook’s free-speech dilemmas have no simple answers—you don’t have to be a fan of Alex Jones to be unnerved by the company’s extraordinary power to silence a voice when it chooses, or, for that matter, to amplify others, to pull the levers of what we see, hear, and experience. Zuckerberg is hoping to erect a scalable system, an orderly decision tree that accounts for every eventuality and exception, but the boundaries of speech are a bedevilling problem that defies mechanistic fixes. The Supreme Court, defining obscenity, landed on “I know it when I see it.” For now, Facebook is making do with a Rube Goldberg machine of policies and improvisations, and opportunists are relishing it. Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, seized on the ban of Jones as a fascist assault on conservatives. In a moment that was rich even by Cruz’s standards, he quoted Martin Niemöller’s famous lines about the Holocaust, saying, “As the poem goes, you know, ‘First they came for Alex Jones.’ ”

#Facebook #Histoire_numérique

Did IDF admit giving weapons to Islamists in Syria? Explosive Israeli news report vanishes — RT World News
▻https://www.rt.com/news/437677-israel-weapons-jerusalem-post-idf
▻https://cdni.rt.com/files/2018.09/article/5b8fec8ffc7e937a6a8b45a4.png

One of at least seven groups believed to have received weapons from Israel, Fursan al-Joulan, or ‘Knights of Golan,’ reportedly participated in the Israeli-led operation to evacuate hundreds of members of the controversial White Helmets group out of Syria. The group is also believed to have received upwards of $5,000 per month from Israel.

The deleted report comes on the heels of another major disclosure: On Monday the IDF announced that Israel has carried out more than 200 strikes in Syria in the past year and half.

The Israeli military usually declines to comment on missile strikes attributed to Israel, although Tel Aviv has repeatedly claimed that it has the right to attack Hezbollah and Iranian military targets inside Syria. Damascus has repeatedly claimed that Israel uses Hezbollah as a pretext to attack Syrian military formations and installations, accusing Tel Aviv of “directly supporting ISIS and other terror organizations.”

Le lien vers l’article en cache : ▻https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:5JDOiVV-EgUJ:https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/IDF-confirms-Israel-provided-light-weapons-to-Syrian-reb

#israël #syrie

Corruption : une enquête ouverte contre les pratiques commerciales de Microsoft en Hongrie
▻https://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/corruption-une-enquete-ouverte-contre-les-pratiques-commerciales-de-microsoft-

Les autorités américaines enquêtent sur une affaire de corruption liée à la vente de logiciels de la suite Office à des administrations hongroises, via des sociétés tierces. Est-ce que Microsoft est au cœur d’un système de pots de vin sur la vente de logiciels comme Word ou Excel à des administrations hongroises ? C’est ce que cherchent à savoir le département américain de la Justice et la Securities and Exchange Commission, qui régule et contrôle les marchés financiers. Selon le Wall Street Journal, (...)

#Microsoft #corruption

https://www.zdnet.fr/images/base/zdnet-default-og-image.jpg

The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب : New York Times and Wall Street Journal hail (alleged) Lebanese drug dealers just because they are running against Hizbullah
▻http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2018/05/new-york-times-and-wall-street-journal.html

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1oh4Zrzr-wo/Wuxv-KwPDnI/AAAAAAAAKwM/sODT0WJHWRI6UB6IIzxsK7JSv5oy3nAEACLcBGAs/w1200-h630-p-k-no-nu/IMG_0432.JPG

Pour mieux comprendre il faut savoir que Shamas et Jawhari sont chiites.

US media coverage of Lebanese election only sees foes of Hizbullah. Yesterday, NYT published a fawning profile of a convicted (and jailed) drug dealer, Yahya Shamas, just because he is running against Hizbullah and presented him as the hope of change and rule of law (although he is aligned with the corrupt Hariri movement in the region), while the Wall Street Journal today presented an insignificant cleric, Abbas Jawhari, with a long sheet of drug charges (and who was recently arrested) as “influential”. For Western media, anyone running against Hizbullah must be a good person.

U.S. questions COSCO’s takeover of California cargo terminal : WSJ
▻https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-ooil-m-a-cosco-ship-hold/u-s-questions-coscos-takeover-of-california-cargo-terminal-wsj-idUKKBN1H

A U.S. national security review has raised concerns about a takeover by China’s COSCO Shipping Holdings Co (601919.SS) of a large container terminal in Long Beach, California, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

Après un méchant arabe (DP World, 2006), un méchant chinois (2018).
Même cause, mêmes effets.
DP World and U.S. Port Security | NTI
▻http://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/dp-world-and-us-port-security

Tiens, d’ailleurs, je crois bien que j’avais loupé le dernier (?) développement de l’affaire de 2006…

Dubai Ports World controversy - Wikipedia
▻https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubai_Ports_World_controversy

In 2017, a Turkish company seeks to buy Ports America, bringing us full circle to 2006.

Trump’s sending troops to the border to take on 200 kids and parents

According to President Donald Trump, the mightiest, richest country in the world is under a threat so huge and scary that it will require the deployment of military forces — as many as 2,000 to 4.000, Trump said Thursday — along its 2,000-mile southern border. The danger consists of a ragtag caravan formed by several hundred impoverished people, many of them children from tiny Central American nations. Yes, the time has come to protect America from marauding youngsters and their parents.

▻https://edition.cnn.com/2018/04/05/opinions/trump-has-no-shame-on-immigration-fernandez-kelly-opinion/index.html?sr=twCNN040518trump-has-no-shame-on-immigration-fernandez-ke
#Trump #frontières #armée #militarisation_des_frontières #USA #Etats-Unis

The Butcher Builders : How Western Journalists Helped Create a Monster in Russia
▻https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2018/02/the-butcher-builders-how-western-journalists-helpe.html

Nonobstant le terme de « monstre » pour désigner Poutine,

While all of this was going on, western journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The Boston Globe, The Baltimore Sun, and other publications, were enamoured with the narrative of capitalism overcoming Communism. The economic reformers—Yeltsin and his administration—were “good,” as Financial Times reporter John Lloyd put it in a retrospective blog post, and their efforts generally successful. This lasted right up until Russia’s ‘98 economic collapse, when their reporting would undergo a major shift in tone.

#MSM #Etats-Unis #Eltsine #Russie

Private War: #Erik_Prince Has His Eye On Afghanistan’s Rare Metals
▻https://www.buzzfeed.com/aramroston/private-war-erik-prince-has-his-eye-on-afghanistans-rare

Prince briefed top Trump administration officials directly, talked up his plan publicly on the DC circuit, and published op-eds about it. He patterned the strategy he’s pitching on the historical model of the old British East India Company, which had its own army and colonized much of Britain’s empire in India. “An East India Company approach,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “would use cheaper private solutions to fill the gaps that plague the Afghan security forces, including reliable logistics and aviation support.”

But the details have never been made public. Here is the never-before-published slide presentation for his pitch, which a source familiar with the matter said was prepared for the Trump administration.

One surprising element is the commercial promise Prince envisions: that the US will get access to Afghanistan’s rich deposits of minerals such as lithium, used in batteries; uranium; magnesite; and “rare earth elements,” critical metals used in high technology from defense to electronics. One slide estimates the value of mineral deposits in Helmand province alone at $1 trillion.

#états-unis #milice_privée

The Navy’s Crash Course on Accountability - Bloomberg
▻https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-09/the-navy-s-crash-course-on-accountability

Le point de vue (cité ici intégralement) de James Stavridis, amiral en retraite de la marine états-unienne et ancien commandant en chef de l’OTAN (SACEUR de 2009 à 2013).

In 1952, on a stormy night in the North Atlantic, the aircraft carrier USS Wasp cut the highly decorated World War II destroyer USS Hobson in two, with the loss of 176 sailors. Afterward, the accountability was swift and sure — such is the tradition of the Navy. The Wall Street Journal responded with an editorial that is still routinely quoted in the service: “Now comes the cruel business of accountability. It was no wish to destruction that killed this ship and its 176 men; the accountability lies with good men who erred in judgment under stress so great that it is almost its own excuse.”

Today’s Navy is facing some hard business of accountability itself, following the shocking loss of two guided missile destroyers and the deaths of 17 sailors — part of a string of seamanship failures in the legendary 7th Fleet. In particular, the twin collisions of USS Fitzgerald and USS McCain sent shock waves through the entire Navy, prompting the abrupt retirement of the four-star admiral who commanded the entire Pacific Fleet, as well as the firings of the three-star commander of the 7th Fleet, the two-star admiral commanding the Japanese-based strike group, and the commanding officers, executive officers (second in command) and senior enlisted sailors aboard both destroyers. This is breathtaking accountability, from top to bottom.

Even more striking was the release this month of a searing and recommendation-laced report prepared by the Navy’s senior surface-warfare admiral, Phil Davidson. While there are additional reports that will follow (including one prepared at the behest of the service’s civilian leader, Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer), it is Davidson’s report that will drive the corrective action.

The Navy’s failures in the forward-deployed ships are centered in a culture of “shut up and do the job” in the surface fleet. Growing up as a junior officer in that world, I saw again and again the refusal to balance sufficient rest with on-deck watch standing in order to accomplish the mission: admirable in concept, foolish in execution.

I failed personally in command of my first ship — the USS Barry, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer like the Fitzgerald and McCain — to find the right balance between operational demands, training and rest levels of my crew. We were lucky on several occasions to avoid a grounding or collision. That such situations are still so prevalent is, of course, is a leadership failure at heart, and will take the longest to correct.

Unfortunately, these challenges emerge against the backdrop of a long, embarrassing investigation into more than 60 current and retired admirals surrounding allegations of corruption, likewise in the 7th Fleet. The so-called “Fat Leonard” scandal — named after Leonard Glenn Francis, the convicted Malaysian defense contractor at its center — is part of the leadership clean-up ahead at the senior levels of the Navy.  

The report also highlights and mandates corrections in equipment and maintenance, training and qualification pipelines, and organizational oversight. While complex, these steps can largely be accomplished swiftly if they get the senior-level attention and resources they need. For decades, unfortunately, the surface forces have been the “poor cousin” of better-resourced nuclear powered fleet (submarines and nuclear aircraft carriers) and the aviation arm of the Navy.

Also critical is the longstanding insufficiency of the Navy’s size. The fleet count hovers around 275, far lower than at any point since early in the 20th century. While all of the ships today are certainly of high quality, the old saying “quantity has a quality of its own” has great merit, and the vast majority of analysts believe the fleet needs to grow to around 350 front-line warships. This will allow lower operational tempo, better rest cycles, and more training and ship-handling opportunities for officers coming up through the ranks.

Basic blocking and tackling are the heart of real-world operations. Even in this increasingly high-tech, artificial-intelligence and cyber driven world, humans will continue to make difficult operational decisions. There is no easy way to substitute for basic experience — it takes five years of ship handling to have five years of ship handling experience. We can use simulators more creatively and aggressively, but the heart of such skills comes the good old-fashioned way: spending time performing hard tasks under demanding instructors who challenge the apprentice again and again until he or she masters the art.

Institutional reputation can evaporate in an instant, but rebuilding it takes time. The damage to the Navy’s national and international reputation caused by this string of mishaps is profound — but hardly irretrievable. Over the past few months, I have been challenged in dozens of public forums to explain the Navy’s failure streak, and I tend to revert to what I was taught 40 years ago as a plebe at Annapolis: to say simply, “no excuse, sir,” and describe how the Navy has taken all the right steps and will emerge stronger over time. Rebuilding the sea wall of our reputation can only be done brick by brick, but that wall will stand again.

Harsh accountability is painful but critical when facing serious damage. The chief of naval operations, Admiral John Richardson, has been forced to fire good officers and enlisted sailors. He feels that loss personally and profoundly; but he has shown the courage and leadership to do what must be done. Too many American institutions again and again refuse to seize the “hard right course of action,” and default to an easier path. This may be the most important lesson of all in the wake of these failures.

In closing their editorial six decades ago, the Journal editors said:

We are told men should no longer be held accountable for what they do as well as for what they intend. To err is not only human, it absolves responsibility. Everywhere else, that is, except on the sea. On the sea there is a tradition older even than the traditions of the country itself and wiser in its age than this new custom. It is the tradition that with responsibility goes authority and with them both goes accountability.

The Navy will emerge stronger from this ordeal, and better at the basics of operating our ships. Its ruthless sense of operational accountability lies at the heart of recovery — and here lies a profound lesson for any organization.

Très instructif de voir exhumer l’idée du #responsable_mais_pas_coupable dès 1952, principe alors supposé acquis partout sauf sur mer !

UN sees spike in meetings between Israeli army, Syrian rebels, warns of escalation -

Israel says the meetings are held for humanitarian purposes, but the UN warns they could trigger clashes between rebels and the Syrian army

Barak Ravid Jun 19, 2017
read more: ▻http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.796536

During the last seven months, the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force has noted a significant escalation in contact and interactions between Israeli armed forces and rebel organizations along Israel’s border with Syria, chiefly in the area of Mt. Hermon, says a report released in recent days by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to the members of the UN Security Council.
The report expressed Guterres’ concern, for the first time, that the interactions between the Israelis and the rebel organizations could lead to escalation, causing harm to UN observers.
Published on June 8, the United Nations report describes the activity of the UN observers from March 2 to May 16. Every few days during that time, they observed meetings and contacts between the Israel Defense Forces and the rebels in the area of the border, including by the Hermon. Altogether they listed at least 16 such meetings in that time.
The meetings took place in proximity to UN outposts in the Mt. Hermon area, in the area of Quneitra and in the central Golan Heights, near moshav Yonatan.
“Relative to the previous reporting period, there has been a significant increase in interaction between Israel Defense Forces soldiers and individuals from the Bravo side, occurring on four occasions in February, three in March, eight in April and on one occasion in May,” the report stated, referring to the Syrian side of the border.

Members of the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) ride armored personnel carriers (APCs) in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights before crossing into Syria, August 31, 2014.Reuters
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That increase in the number of interactions between Israeli soldiers and representatives of the rebels continues a trend evident in the previous report, which had been published on March 17. That report covered the period between November 18, 2016, and March 1, 2017, and listed at least 17 interactions along the Golan border, including in the vicinity of the Hermon.

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According to both reports, UN observers saw 33 interactions between Israeli and rebel representatives over the last seven months.
In comparison, only two such meetings took place from August 30 to November 16 of last year according to UN reports, and they were only by the border, not by the Hermon.
One topic addressed in the latest report was meetings that took place in the area of the Hermon in the last three months. It stated that all such meetings happened in the vicinity of one of the IDF outposts there and all followed the same pattern: Unidentified people apparently affiliated with the rebel organizations, some of them armed, arrived at the IDF outpost accompanied by mules, and were greeted by the soldiers.
“In some instances, personnel and supplies were observed to have been transferred in both directions. On all occasions, the unknown individuals and mules returned to the Bravo side,” the report stated.
The UN secretary general clarified in the report that the nature of the interactions could not be observed.
“The Israel Defense Forces have stated that the interactions were of a humanitarian and medical nature,” the report said.
Israel contends that all the interactions with rebel representatives on the Syrian side were for humanitarian reasons, but in recent months the UN has started to view these interactions askance and began to warn they could lead to escalation. The report especially noted concern about the meetings around the Hermon, which the UN secretary-general defined as an area of strategic importance.
“Interaction between the Israel Defense Forces and unidentified individuals from the Bravo side, including in the area of Mount Hermon, has the potential to lead to clashes between armed elements and the Syrian Arab Armed Forces. I reiterate my call to both parties to the Disengagement of Forces Agreement regarding the requirement to maintain stability in the area. All military activities in the area of separation conducted by any actor pose a risk to the ceasefire and to the local civilian population, in addition to the United Nations personnel on the ground,” the secretary-general wrote in the report.
The UN secretary-general’s latest report on the activities of the UN observers on the Golan Heights, as well as the three preceding reports, criticized the Syrian army for bringing heavy weapons to the area of the border, violating the disengagement agreement. The UN also criticized Israel for the same thing.
According to the last four reports, in the last year the IDF has kept one or two batteries of the Iron Dome system in the Golan, and also holds heavy 155mm cannons and rocket launchers in the area, in violation of the disengagement agreement with Syria. UNDOF has protested the violations to both sides.
On Sunday, The Wall Street Journal reported Israel has been secretly providing aid to Syrian rebels in the Golan Heights for years, with the goal of maintaining a buffer zone of friendly forces to keep ISIS and forces aligned with Iran at bay.

French Special Forces Attract Iraqi Servicemen to Kill Frenchmen Joining Daesh
▻https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201705301054107963-france-iraq-kill-french-daesh

According to The Wall Street Journal, French military have provided the Iraqi counterterrorism forces with 30 names of French nationals identified as high-value targets, and French intelligence information has allowed to kill an undisclosed number of Frenchmen, who joined Daesh.

A foreign affairs adviser to the French government told the media outlet that the aim of this secret operation was to ensure that French nationals, who had taken the jihadists’ side, would never return to Europe for staging attacks.

Il aurait été plus simple et plus efficace - si on est d’accord avec ce genre de méthode - de s’adresser aux Syriens mais on a choisi, contre les conseils des spécialistes de la sécurité d’ailleurs, de ne pas avoir de relations avec eux.

Gulf states ’offer deal to Israel’ as Trump heads to Middle East | Middle East Eye
▻http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/gulf-states-prepared-normalise-relations-israel-restart-peace-talks-2

Numerous Gulf states have offered to a deal to normalise relations with Israel if Tel Aviv takes steps to restart peace talks with the Palestinians, according to reports.

The offer to normalise relations come a week before Donald Trump visits Saudi Arabia and Israel in his first foreign trip as US president.

The Wall Street Journal said numerous Gulf states were prepared to set up telecommunication lines between the countries, open trade negotiations and allow planes to fly over their airspace.

In exchange, Israel would have to freeze settlement construction [partiellement précisent certaines sources] in the West Bank and relax trade restrictions with the Gaza Strip.

The position to normalise relations with Israel were outlined in an unreleased discussion paper shared among several Arab states, obtained by the Wall Street Journal.

The paper, according to WSJ, was intended to demonstrate the Gulf states commitment to align itself to Trump’s foreign policy, who has stressed a desire to work with Arab states to forge a Middle East peace agreement.

voir aussi ▻http://www.timesofisrael.com/gulf-states-could-upgrade-israel-ties-in-exchange-for-peace-overtures

#normalisation #israël

Who Is Tony Kim? North Korea Has Detained A Korean-American University Professor
▻https://www.bustle.com/p/who-is-tony-kim-north-korea-has-detained-a-korean-american-university-profes

On Sunday, The Wall Street Journal reported that North Korea had detained an American citizen at the Pyongyang international airport. According to CBS News, Tony Kim is one of three American citizens currently in North Korean custody.

It was not clear on Sunday if North Korean officials had confirmed Kim’s arrest, but the Swedish embassy in North Korea said that the incident occurred as Kim was trying to board a flight out of North Korea’s capital city. The Swedish embassy represents American interests in North Korea, since the U.S. does not formally maintain relations with Kim Jong-Un’s government.

It also wasn’t clear on Sunday exactly when the incident took place. CNBC reported that Kim was detained on Friday, while CNN and CBS News reported his arrest as occurring on Saturday. Also unknown were Kim’s charges, if any.

What is clear, though, is Kim’s reason for being in the controversial country. According to various media reports, Kim is a Korean-American professor who had been teaching accounting at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST). Kim, who is reportedly in his 50s, also goes by his Korean name, Kim Sang-duk.

The Platform Press : How Silicon Valley reengineered #journalism - Columbia Journalism Review via @opironet
▻https://www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/platform-press-how-silicon-valley-reengineered-journalism.php

Avec une chronologie bien dense à la fin.

2000

October 23: Google AdWords launches.

2002

October 4—21: Harvard study finds 113 white nationalist, Nazi, anti-Semitic, and radical Islamic sites, and at least one fundamentalist Christian site, were removed from French and German Google listings.

2004

February 2: Facebook launches as a Harvard-only social network.

2006

January 23: Google News formally launches; had been in beta since September 2002.
January 25: Google launches Google.cn, adhering to China’s censorship policies until March 2010.
July 15: Twttr (later renamed Twitter) is released. “Tweets” can only be 140 characters.
September 5: Facebook News Feed launches and displays activity from a user’s network.
September 10: Google delists Inquisition21, a website seeking to challenge potentially incorrect child pornography convictions in the UK. Google implies the delisting is because Inquisition21 tried to manipulate search results.

2007

January 10: Facebook launches mobile site m.facebook.com.
April 16: Google’s Terms of Service unveiled, including provisions granting Google “perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which [users] submit, post or display on or through, the Services.”

2008

October 7: Apple launches iOS App Store.
October 22: Android OS Google Play store launches.
December 30: Facebook removes a photo of a mother breastfeeding babies, leading to protests.

2009

February 4: Facebook’s Terms of Service altered to remove the automatic expiry of Facebook’s license to use individuals’ names, likenesses, and images if an account was deleted.
February 24: WhatsApp, a mobile messaging app company, is founded, and the app is released in May of 2009.

2010

January 14: Links to Encyclopedia Dramatica’s “Aboriginal” article removed from Google after complaint; Google defended decision on grounds that the content represented a violation of Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act.
March 22: Google announces it will no longer adhere to Chinese censorship policies by redirecting Chinese users to its Hong Kong domain.
October 6: Instagram, a photo-based social network, is released.
October 21: News Corporation axes “Project Alesia,” a potential competitor to Google News, over concerns about cost and readiness of proposed partners.

2011

September 26: Snapchat, a mobile app for disappearing messages, is released.
October 12: iOS Apple Newsstand app to read a variety of publications is released.
November 2: Twitter begins to “curate” results on its timeline.

2012

February 16: Facebook’s internal “Abuse Standards” leaked, including policy to filter out content containing images of maps of Kurdistan and of burning Turkish flags.
March 1: Fundamental rewrite of Google’s Terms of Service, adding rights for Google to “use, host, [and] store” any content submitted by users.
April 9: Facebook buys Instagram for $1 billion.
May 31: Google launches a feature that informs Chinese users which keywords are censored. (The feature is removed in early December.)

2013

January 19: After backlash, Instagram scales back earlier announcement on changing Terms of Use to allow for selling user data.
June 20: Announcement that video is coming to Instagram
October 1: Canadian photographer Petra Collins’ Instagram account deleted because of a selfie which displayed visible pubic hair beneath her bikini bottom; challenged by Collins as it did not break Instagram’s terms.
October 3: Snapchat Stories, a compilation of “snaps” a user’s friends see, launches.
November 11: Update to Google’s Terms of Service, clarifying how profile name and photo might appear in Google products.
November 20: Android OS Google Play Newsstand app to read a variety of publications launches.

2014

January 30: Facebook launches Paper, an effort at personalized news, and Trending.
February 19: WhatsApp bought by Facebook for $19 billion.
April 1: Algorithm introduced on Instagram to tailor the “Explore”/“Popular” tab to each user.
April 14: Update to Google’s Terms of Service, including provision to automatically analyze content such as emails when content is sent, received, and stored.
April 24: Launch of Facebook Newswire, powered by Storyful. While it was eventually folded, it allowed publishers to embed “newsworthy” content from Facebook into own material, use platform for newsgathering and storytelling.
May 19: In Russia, Twitter blocks pro-Ukrainian accounts following threats to bar the service if it did not delete tweets violating Russian law.
May 30: Google launches tool that enables Europeans to request “right to be forgotten” in response to ruling by European Court of Justice.
June 13: Google ordered by Canadian court to remove search results that linked to websites of Datalink, which sold technology alleged to have been stolen from a competitor.
June 17: Snapchat Our Story, a public Story aggregating many users’ activity around an event launches.
June 23: Facebook News Feed algorithm altered to increase priority of video.
July 15: Geofilters on Snapchat are released.
July 25: Twitter blocks an account belonging to @boltai, a hacker collective that leaked internal Kremlin documents.
August 25: Facebook News Feed algorithm altered to reduce priority of clickbait.
October 22: German publishers concede defeat to Google in long-running dispute over attempt to charge license fees.
December 18: Google removes links to articles that criticized Australian organization Universal Medicine, an alleged cult.

2015

January 12: Instagram deletes account of Australian photo and fashion agency due to a photograph with pubic hair outside bikini bottoms. (Account reactivated January 21.)
January 20: Facebook News Feed algorithm altered to “show fewer hoaxes.”
January 21: WhatsApp Web launches.
January 27: Snapchat Discover launches. Selected publishers create a daily Discover channel, like a mini interactive magazine with an advertising revenue split arrangement where publishers can sell for 70 percent of revenue, or let Snapchat sell for 50 percent.
March 3: Instagram carousel ads launch.
March 9: Twitter acquires live streaming app Periscope.
March 31: Twitter rolls out Curator, which allows publishers to search and display tweets based on hashtags, keywords, location, and other specific details.
April 13: Snapchat gets rid of brand stories, also known as sponsored stories, after six months.
April 21: Facebook tweaks News Feed to emphasize family and friends because people are worried about “missing important updates.”
April 27: Snapchat hires Peter Hamby from CNN and announces plans to hire more journalists for the election.
April 27: Google announces Digital News Initiative with eight European publishers.
May 7: Facebook releases internal research on filter bubbles that finds “most people have friends who claim an opposing political ideology, and that the content in peoples’ News Feeds reflect those diverse views.”
May 7: Snapchat will charge advertisers 2 cents per view for ten second ads in between Discover slides (up to four slots) and during videos. This plan is called Two Pennies. It was previously 15 cents.
May 12: Facebook announces Instant Articles, faster loading articles on Facebook for iPhone,and original launch partners. Ads are embedded in article, and there is a 70/30 revenue share with publishers if Facebook sells the ad.
June 8: Apple News app announced to replace the Newsstand app. Like Facebook Instant Articles, a 70/30 revenue share with publishers if Apple sells ads against their content.
June 15: Facebook’s News Feed algorithm updated to prioritize time spent on a story above engagement.
June 22: Google News Lab announced to support technological collaborations with journalists.
June 23: Instagram changes Explore to allow users to follow real-time news more easily by sorting by location and recency.
July 1: Automatic bans imposed on Facebook accounts using an offensive slang term for Russians. Similar Russian insults towards Ukrainians (such as ‘hohol’) were not deleted.
July 27: Snapchat axes Yahoo! and Warner Music from Discover, replaces them with BuzzFeed and iHeartRadio.
Late July: Snapchat’s ad team starts selling against Discover.
August 5: Facebook Live video launches for public figures.
August 27: Snapchat Discover expands from 12 to 15 partners. In the past, they cut old partners to add new ones so all 12 fit on one screen.
September 9: Using the Facebook ad platform technology, Instagram’s advertising platform expands globally, allows for more targeting and ad format flexibility.
September 22: Facebook allows publishers to create Instant Articles in their own content management systems.
September 23: Facebook releases 360 video. Users can move their phones for a spherical view within a video.
October 6: Twitter Moments, curated tweets around top stories, launches.
October 7: Google announces Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project, which will allow publishers’ stories to load more quickly from search results.
October 21: Twitter announces partnerships with firms such as Spredfast, Wayin, Dataminr, ScribbleLive, and Flowics at its developer conference.
October 22: Google announces it has signed up over 120 news organizations for its Digital News Initiative, including the BBC, The Economist, and Der Spiegel.
October 27: Twitter announces it will discontinue video-sharing app Vine.
October 28: Snapchat Terms of Service updated: requests right to reproduce, modify, republish, and save users’ photos, specifically in relation to Live Stories.
October 29: Instagram allows businesses to use Facebook’s Ads Manager and to run campaigns across Facebook and Instagram.
October 31: Instagram conducts its first video curation for Halloween.
November 10: Instagram partner program launches; a group of 40 adtech, content marketing, and community management companies that work to help businesses on Instagram.
November 11: Facebook Notify, a real-time notification news app, is launched.
November 13: Snapchat launches Official Stories, Stories from verified brands or influencers.
November 23: Snapchat launches Story Explorer, which allows users to focus on a specific moment from a story, but from additional users and perspectives.
November 30: Snapchat allows publishers to deep link back to Snapchat content from elsewhere, like other social platforms.
December 3: Facebook releases Live video to the public.
December 9: Facebook tweaks News Feed so it works with poor connections, like 2G. Facebook also allows publishers to sell Instant Article ad campaigns instead of having to make those ads part of their own site package, to have one ad for every 350 words of an Instant Article (up from one ad per 500 words), and to control link outs at bottom of Instant Articles.
December 2: Snapchat makes a Story for live/breaking news during San Bernardino.
December 9: Google announces AMP rollout timeline; pages will go live in February.
December 15: German government strikes deal with outlets who agree to delete hate speech from their sites within 24 hours, in response to increasing racism online.

2016

January 5: Digiday reports that Snapchat, up to 23 Discover partners, is rumored to be building their own ad interface API, like Facebook, to target ads to users instead of publications.
January 11: Instagram publishes its first live video curation for the Golden Globes.
January 19: Nielsen expands Twitter TV Ratings to include Facebook conversations around TV shows, called Social Content Ratings.
January 21: Facebook opens Audience Optimization to publishers to target specific readers.
January 26: The Facebook Audience Network can be used by publishers to sell ads on their mobile sites.
January 26: Apple plans to make subscription-only content available in the News app; publishers can only post free articles or excerpts that drive people to subscribe.
January 27: Facebook reveals forthcoming “reactions” in the US, which had already been tested elsewhere in the world.
January 28: Facebook Live expands to all iPhone users.
January 28: Snapchat launches a show called “Good Luck America” with Peter Hamby.
February 4: WhatsApp increases group chat user limit to 256 people, aiming to increase enterprise appeal, including to publishers.
February 9: Google AMP announces solutions for subscription-supported publications, and Adobe Analytics integration.
February 10: Twitter changes algorithm to make sure users see tweets they are likely to care about.
February 10: On Instagram, publishers can now see video views and can do account switching. Instagram hits 200,000 advertisers, and 75 percent are outside of the US.
February 12: Reports that Snapchat will let users subscribe to Discover channels and that it will go from logo button to magazine cover look by May.
February 24: Google AMP articles go live.
February 25: Snapchat partners with Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings to measure, transparently, the effectiveness of ad campaigns.
February 26: Facebook Live rolled out to all Android users.
February 28: Snapchat Live Stories, beginning with the Oscars, will be viewable on the web for special occasions.
March 1: Facebook changes algorithm to prioritize Live Video, especially Live video that is broadcasting.
March 15: Instagram announces that starting in May users’ feeds will be algorithmically driven, instead of real-time.
March 15: Apple News app opens to all publishers.
March 24: On Facebook, publishers can see daily activity around a video.
March 29: Snapchat Terms of Service updated to add the potential to incorporate third-party links and search results in Snapchat services.
March 31: Facebook creates option for publishers to autoplay and non-autoplay video ads in Instant; can have pre-roll video ads in any editorial video; and can have one more ad unit at the base of articles.
April 5: Twitter announces live video deal to stream NFL games, and begins pushing for live video deals with publishers.
April 7: Facebook allows Live Video within groups and events, live reactions from viewers, live filters, the ability to watch live with friends, a live map, and also live video in trending and search.
April 8: Branded content will be allowed as Facebook Instant Articles with the sponsor tagged.
April 12: Facebook makes several announcements at F8 that are relevant to publishers: the Live video API will be open for publishers who want to experiment/innovate; Instant Articles is open to all publishers; publishers will be able to use messenger bots to distribute stories.
April 21: Facebook tweaks the algorithm to focus on articles people are likely to spend time viewing.
April 28: Twitter moves to the News category in the Apple app store.
May 9: Gizmodo reveals details that Facebook’s Trending Topics is actively curated by people who “suppressed” conservative news.
May 12: Facebook releases a 28-page internal document outlining guidelines for staff curating Trending Topics, in response to media reporting suggesting potential bias.
May 19: Instagram adds video to carousel ads.
May 23: Facebook’s general counsel responds to Congress Republicans concerned about bias with a letter; the previous week, Facebook’s legal team met with Chairman of the US Senate Commerce Committee John Thune.
May 24: Instagram adds media buying as fourth advertising partner category.
May 24: Facebook says it will revise the way it curates its Trending topics section, including no longer using external websites to validate a story’s importance.
May 24: Twitter announces changes to simplify Tweets including what counts toward your 140 characters, @names in replies and media attachments (like photos, GIFs, videos, and polls) will no longer “use up” valuable characters.
May 26: Facebook allows for their Audience Network to be used for ads to be seen off-Facebook, a move seen as competitive with Google.
June 2: Facebook Notify is shut down.
June 2: Google AMP launches in France, Germany, Italy, UK, Russia, and Mexico.
June 7: Google announces preliminary results from AMP showing that 80 percent of publishers are seeing higher viewability and 90 percent are seeing higher engagement.
Between June 6 and 12: Intel becomes the first brand to publish content directly to Instant Articles.
June 9: Facebook launches 360 photo. Users can move their phones for a spherical view within a photo.
June 16: Snapchat announces an online magazine called Real Life.
June 21: Twitter Engage launches, allowing for better insights and data. Also, the length of user video is increased from 30 to 140 seconds.
June 22: The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook has made deals worth more than $50 million with 140 video creators, including publishers, to use Live, since those partnerships were first announced in March.
June 29: Facebook’s algorithm changes to place further emphasis on family and friends and on creating a feed that will “inform” and “entertain.”
July 6: Snapchat introduces Memories.
July 14: Facebook Instant Articles can be posted to Messenger.
July 19: Google announces AMP for ads, to bring ads to the same load time as AMP articles.
July 11—12: Twitter announces multiple live video deals, including with CBS, Wimbledon, and Bloomberg.
August 2: Instagram Stories launches. A compilation of updates a user’s friends see; a Snapchat Stories clone.
August 4: Facebook tweaks the News Feed to reduce clickbait.
August 9: Facebook blocks ad blockers.
August 11: Facebook’s News Feed is modified to place emphasis on “personally informative” items.
August 26: Facebook Trending becomes fully algorithmically driven.
August 27: Apple changes its Spotlight feature so that articles open in-app, hurting publishers.
September 7: Snapchat axes Local Stories.
September 8: Google releases a study of more than 10,000 mobile domains showing that speed matters for engagement and revenue.
September 12: Twitter announces a live streaming partnership with Cheddar.
September 15: Publishers can sell subscriptions within the Apple News app; Apple keeps 30 percent of subscriptions made through the app, and 15 percent of renewals.
September 15: Improvements are made to call to action button on Instagram ads to make them more visible; with video, though, the destination URL opens first within Instagram with the video continuing to play at the top.
September 20: All Google search results, not just the carousel, now show AMP pages.
September 23: Snapchat announces Spectacles and becomes Snap, Inc.
September 29: Twitter opens Moments to everyone.
September 30: Updates to Google AMP so it better supports a variety of ad sizes.
October 12: Facebook also allows for additional ad formats for publishers in Instant Articles.
October 17: Signal, for newsgathering on Facebook, will include a Live Video column.
October 18: Snapchat switches from a revenue sharing arrangement with publishers on Discover to an up-front licensing arrangement.
October 20: Facebook allows 360 photo and video within Instant Articles.
October 28: Facebook rolls out a voting planner for users where they can view and save the initiatives and candidates they will select.
November 10: Instagram introduces ability to add “see more” links to Instagram Stories.
November 11: After controversy, Facebook will curb ethnic affinity marketing by advertisers focused on, for example, credit or housing, who target users based on whether Facebook has determined they are likely Latino or Asian American, for example.
November 11: Facebook buys CrowdTangle, which is used by publishers for analytics.
November 11: Vertical ads are allowed on Instagram.
November 16: Facebook will work with more third parties to ensure the integrity of their metrics after they miscounted publisher performance.
November 19: In response to post-election pressure, Mark Zuckerberg addresses Facebook’s role in fake news.
November 21: Instagram Stories introduces Live Stories for live video streaming.
November 22: To be allowed into China, Facebook built a censorship tool into its platform.
December 5: Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube partner to address terrorism content online.
December 5: In an effort to combat misinformation, Facebook prompts users to report “misleading language.”
December 5: Google updates its search bar so that there is no longer an autocomplete that reads “are Jews evil.”
December 12: Facebook launches Live 360 video. Users can have a spherical view of live video.
December 14: Facebook begins talks with video producers and TV studios for original content.
December 20: Facebook launches Live Audio. Allows for formats like news radio.
December 22: Business Insider reports that Twitter inadvertently inflated video ad metrics.

2017

January 9: Recode reports that Facebook will allow mid-roll video ads, with 55 percent of revenue going to publishers.
January 11: Facebook announces the Facebook Journalism Project, to work with publishers on product rollouts, storytelling formats, promotion of local news, subscription models, training journalists, and, on the fake news front, collaborating with the News Literacy Project and fact checking organizations. On the same day, TechCrunch reports Facebook agrees to censor content in Thailand at government’s request.
January 11: Instagram Stories will now have ads, and insights are increased, as the platform hits 150 million users.
January 12: Snapchat releases a universal search bar.
January 17: News that Facebook will end Live video deals with publishers in favor of longer more premium video.
January 19: Snapchat will allow ad targeting using third-party data.
January 23: Snapchat updates publisher guidelines: content must be fact checked and cannot be risqué, and will offer some an “age gate” and will require graphic content warnings.
January 24: Instagram makes Live Stories available globally.
January 25: News that Facebook begins testing Stories, like those on Instagram and Snapchat, at the top of the mobile app in Ireland. Facebook also updates Trending to show publisher names, identify trends by number of publishers and not engagement on a single post, and show everyone in a region the same content. In Thailand and Australia, Facebook will have ads like the ones that are in News Feed inside of Messenger.
January 25: Recode reports that more than 200 publishers have been banned from Google’s AdSense network in an effort to combat fake news.
January 26: Facebook’s News Feed algorithm will reward publishers/videos that keep people watching and mid-roll ads won’t play until 90 seconds.
January 26: Twitter’s Explore tab will allow users to see trends, Moments, Live, and search.
January 30: Twitter’s VP of engineering announces an effort to combat harassment.
January 30: Snapchat announces IPO.
January 31: Facebook updates the algorithm to prioritize “authentic” content and will surface posts around real-time/breaking news. Facebook also announces new and expanded partnerships with Nielsen, ComScore, DoubleVerify (for a total of 24 third-party entities) to give better insights into performance of ads.
February 1: Instagram introduces Albums feature in limited release. Widespread release later in the month.
February 2: Snapchat IPO documents show that media partners were paid $58 million, and that Snap-sold ad revenue was 91 percent.
February 6: Google allows for AMP articles URL to indicate the publisher’s name and not just Google.
February 6: News surfaces that a Syrian refugee identified as a terrorist pursues legal action against Facebook on grounds of “fake news.”
February 7: Twitter continues efforts to combat harassment and improve quality, by “stopping the creation of new abusive accounts, bringing forward safer search results, and collapsing potentially abusive or low-quality Tweets.”
February 8: News surfaces that French publishers complain of effort required for anti-fake news partnership with Facebook.
February 10: Facebook further pushes for transparency around ads and says it will allow for a third-party audit.
February 13: The Washington Post joins Snapchat Discover as Discover shifts to allow for breaking news.
February 13: TechCrunch reports that Twitter will reduce its support for ad products that are not drawing advertisers.
February 14: Facebook announces an app for Apple TV and Amazon Fire that will allow people to watch Facebook videos on their TVs.
February 14: Autoplay videos on Facebook will play with sound.
February 14: Google pulls two anti-Semitic sites off its ad platform.
February 16: Mark Zuckerberg writes a nearly 6,000 word manifesto, “Building Global Community,” on the future of Facebook and global civil society.
February 17: Facebook invites media companies to its offices to talk about products to come throughout the year.
February 20: Facebook allows users to send photos and videos from the in-app camera.
February 20: WhatsApp launches Snapchat clone, Status.
February 23: Mid-roll video ads begin on Facebook, following an announcement in January.

#journalisme
#médias_sociaux

Trump Intensifies His Attacks on Journalists and Condemns F.B.I. ‘Leakers’ - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/us/politics/white-house-sean-spicer-briefing.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017/02/25/us/25press/25press-facebookJumbo-v2.jpg

Reporters from The Times, BuzzFeed News, CNN, The Los Angeles Times, Politico, the BBC and The Huffington Post were among those shut out of the briefing. Aides to Mr. Spicer admitted only reporters from a group of news organizations that, the White House said, had been previously confirmed.

Those organizations included Breitbart News, the One America News Network and The Washington Times, all with conservative leanings. Journalists from ABC, CBS, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and Fox News also attended.

Reporters from The Associated Press and Time magazine, who were set to be allowed in, chose not to attend the briefing in protest of the White House’s actions. The Washington Post did not send a reporter to the session.

Still, the Committee to Protect Journalists, which typically advocates press rights in countries with despotic regimes, issued an alarmed statement on Friday about Mr. Trump’s escalating language.

“It is not the job of political leaders to determine how journalists should conduct their work, and sets a terrible example for the rest of the world,” said the group’s executive director, Joel Simon. “The U.S. should be promoting press freedom and access to information.”

Mr. Trump, in his attack on the news media at the conservative gathering, complained at length about the use of anonymous sources in news stories, charging that some reporters were fabricating unnamed sources to level unfair charges against him.

“They shouldn’t be allowed to use sources unless they use somebody’s name,” Mr. Trump said. “Let their name be put out there.”

At another point, he said, “A few days ago, I called the fake news the enemy of the people because they have no sources — they just make it up.” He added that his “enemy of the people” label applied only to “dishonest” reporters and editors.

#journalisme #USA #Trump

The Wall Street Journal to close Google loophole entirely
▻http://digiday.com/publishers/wall-street-journal-close-google-loophole-entirely

The Journal tested turning off the feature with 40 percent of its audience last year. But the eye-popping moment was when the Journal turned it for off four sections for two weeks, resulting in a dramatic 86 percent jump in subscriptions. The Journal said the full turnoff is a test, but didn’t say how long it would last.

[...]

While it’s ending Google first click free for now, which lets subscription publications be indexed by Google search, the Journal is increasing its exposure to new audiences by letting people read for free links that are shared on social media by subscribers and staffers. Since making that change, the Journal has seen a 30 percent boost in traffic from social media, primarily from Facebook. The Journal is treating the social sharing ability like a perk for subscribers, like the other ones they get from a free subscriber membership program that the Journal launched in 2014, WSJ+.

Donald Trump Plans to ‘Pare Back’ Top U.S. Spy Agency
▻http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/01/donald-trump-plans-to-slim-down-top-u-s-spy-agency.html

Donald Trump has spent much of the past month assailing America’s intelligence agencies over Twitter. But now, he’s plotting to hit them where it hurts – right in their budgets.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the president-elect is working with his top advisors on a plan to “restructure and pare back” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which they believe has become “bloated and politicized.”

Trump’s team is also, reportedly, drafting a similar plan for the CIA – one that would cut staffing at the agency’s Virginia headquarters and send more agents out into the field.

“The view from the Trump team is the intelligence world [is] becoming completely politicized,” an individual close to Trump’s transition operation told the Journal. “They all need to be slimmed down. The focus will be on restructuring the agencies and how they interact.”

L’article du WSJ est sous #paywall

Donald Trump Plans Revamp of Top U.S. Spy Agency - WSJ
▻http://www.wsj.com/articles/lawmakers-officials-frown-on-donald-trumps-dismissal-of-u-s-intelligence-148355

President-elect Donald Trump, a harsh critic of U.S. intelligence agencies, is working with top advisers on a plan that would restructure and pare back the nation’s top spy agency, people familiar with the planning said.

Noam #Chomsky Unravels the Political Mechanics Behind His Gradual Expulsion From Mainstream #Media | Alternet
▻http://www.alternet.org/media/noam-chomsky-unravels-political-mechanics-behind-his-gradual-expulsion-mai

http://www.alternet.org/files/story_images/chomsky_media_room.jpg

The irony of Chomsky’s media criticism being dismissed by the media is not lost on the former MIT professor, who remains in awe of America’s level of censorship. 

“Any one of the former Bush-Cheney warmongers like Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton and others have gotten far more press after they’ve left federal positions; in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post,” Nader said.

And unlike Chomsky, “They’ve been on television public television, NPR and they have a record of false statements; they have record of deception, they have record of pursuing policies are illegal under our Constitution, under international law and under federal statutes such as criminal invasion of Iraq and other adventures around the world,” Nader pointed out.

But the media problem permeates other industries, like #education and government. 

“Now, a society that operates in a way where propaganda is not only emanating from the major media but it gets into our schools, the kind of courses are taught, the content of the history, is a society that’s not going to be mobilized for its own survival, much less the survival of other countries whose dictators we have for decades supported to oppress their people,” explained Nader.

#propagande #censure #Etats-Unis #MSM

#Wall_Street_Journal editorial board member endorses #Clinton
▻http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/298648-wall-street-journal-editorial-board-member-endorses

A member of The Wall Street Journal’s traditionally conservative editorial board has endorsed Hillary Clinton for president,

L’Inde a vécu la plus grande grève de l’histoire humaine
▻http://www.directmatin.fr/monde/2016-09-03/linde-vecu-la-plus-grande-greve-de-lhistoire-humaine-737701

Selon les syndicats, ce seraient ainsi près de 180 millions de travailleurs, hommes et femmes, qui ont manifesté pour s’opposer à la politique économique du gouvernement. L’Inde comptant environ 1,250 milliards d’individus, ce serait donc un septième de la population qui a arrêté le travail pour une journée. Mais ces chiffres n’ont toutefois pas pu être vérifiés de façon indépendante.

The Biggest Strike in World History ? No Thanks, We’re Focusing on the New iPhone
▻http://fair.org/home/the-biggest-strike-in-world-history-no-thanks-were-focusing-on-the-new-iphone

And yet there was virtually no coverage of the strike in commercial US media, according to searches of the Nexis news database. Not a word on ABC, CBS or NBC. No mention on the main cable news networks—CNN, Fox and MSNBC—either. (The Intercept‘s Zaid Jilani—9/6/16—noted that there was one mention on CNN International, when “the CEO of the human resources consulting firm ManpowerGroup cited the Indian strike as part of global concerns about technology suppressing wages.”) Neither the PBS NewsHour nor NPR touched the story.

Not a single US newspaper found in the Nexis database—which includes most of the major papers, like the New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today—reported an original story on the strike. (Associated Press had a brief, 289-word report, which ran on the New York Times‘ website and was doubtless picked up by other papers.) The Wall Street Journal, whose full text isn’t on Nexis, also skipped the Indian strike story.

That’s an example of the kind of story US corporate media don’t care about. What do they care about? Well, Apple is planning to release a new version of the iPhone next week. That’s already making news: CBS did a segment on its Money Watch program (9/7/16) previewing the phone, as did NPR‘s Morning Edition and All Things Considered (9/7/16); the product was front-page news in USA Today (9/8/16) and the Wall Street Journal (9/8/16), while you had to turn to page A12 in the Washington Post (9/7/16) or the first page of the business section in the New York Times (9/8/16) to get your future cellphone news.

A hundred million or more workers striking for their rights hold no interest for the news managers in US corporate media. But a new gadget from a prominent advertiser? Now, that’s the news that’s fit to print.

La « #réalité » telle que façonnée par les #MSM