person:sheryl sandberg

Facebook a temporairement supprimé les publications d’Elizabeth Warren appelant à la dissolution des grandes entreprises technologiques
▻http://www.fredzone.org/facebook-a-temporairement-supprime-les-publications-delizabeth-warren-appe

http://www.fredzone.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/emploi-facebook.jpg

Un porte-parole de Facebook a effectivement expliqué le même jour que les annonces de Warren avaient enfreint la politique de Facebook en utilisant son logo d’entreprise.

[...] Selon le porte-parole, Facebook a remis les annonces en ligne pour assurer un débat plus solide.

[...]

Les publicités de Warren soulignaient le fait qu’#Amazon, #Google et #Facebook détiennent une #influence considérable sur la #démocratie, la #concurrence, les #consommateurs et l’#économie. Outre le fait que la plupart des personnes utilisent ces trois services, la sénatrice déclare que le problème, c’est que « dans leur ascension au #pouvoir, ils ont détruit la concurrence (…) et ont fait pencher la balance en leur faveur ».

Warren took tech’s money while ripping its biggest players - POLITICO
▻https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/12/elizabeth-warren-tech-amazon-google-facebook-donations-1216417

https://static.politico.com/0d/64/13cb1670427db8c18e370e8a7fab/190311-warren-ap-773.jpg

While Sen. Elizabeth Warren was railing against big tech companies, she was taking their money — plenty of it.

The Massachusetts Democrat, who is powering her presidential campaign with a bold proposal to break up the likes of Amazon, Google and Facebook, in September accepted a $2,700 contribution from Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer. But Sandberg, whose donation went unnoticed at the time, was just the biggest name from Silicon Valley to give to the senator: Warren took at least $90,000 from employees of Amazon, Google and Facebook alone between 2011 and 2018.

#incohérence #états-unis

The Shadow Workforce of Facebook’s Content Moderation
▻http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/the-shadow-workforce-of-facebooks-content-moderation.html

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As in Omelas, however, the joyousness of Facebook’s hundreds of thousands of advertisers depends wholly on the misery of a small number of other people: its content moderators. For his article, Newton spoke with several current and former employees of Cognizant, a “professional services vendor” contracted by Facebook to moderate its platform, removing the content that violates Facebook’s terms of service. In practice, this can mean spending your days scrolling through post after post of graphic porn, hate speech, and videos of death and violence. “People develop severe anxiety while still in training,” Newton writes, “and continue to struggle with trauma symptoms long after they leave,” but are given minimal support and job stability — each employee gets nine “wellness time” minutes per day, to be used if they feel traumatized and need to stop moderating. Meanwhile, “the conspiracy videos and memes that they see each day gradually lead them to embrace fringe views.” For their trouble, they are paid $28,800 a year, around 12 percent of the average salaried Facebook employee’s total compensation of $240,000.
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The moderators sign nondisclosure agreements that prevent them from talking about what they’d done for Facebook — or even, apparently, that they’d worked for Facebook at all. This theoretically protects private Facebook user data from leaking out. But it also has the effect of hiding the 1,500 content moderators from the outside world, preventing them from even describing the difficulty of their jobs, let alone agitating for better working conditions. Even full-time Facebook employees are apparently unaware of the extent to which Facebook contracts out its content moderation, and the conditions under which that moderation is taking place, despite its importance. “Why do we contract out work that’s obviously vital to the health of this company and the products we build?” one employee asked on an internal company message board.

Rather than address its various mounting content issues with dedicated staff hires, the company farmed out moderation work to contractors, needing to maintain a cost structure that relied on low labor costs, and believing that eventually an “engineering solution” could be developed to keep the platform clean and safe. This bargain has worked out well for Facebook, which by 2016 was raking in an incredible $600,000 per full-time employee in net profit. It has worked out rather less well for the rest of us — particularly the contactor moderators with PTSD-like symptoms. (Facebook’s profit margins have been thinning over the last two years, naturally, as it expands its “security” team, which includes moderators.)

The idea that you can keep your labor costs low by relying on software automation, creating the eye-popping profit margins that venture capitalists approvingly call “software margins,” is a foundational belief of 21st-century Silicon Valley. Albergotti quotes the mantra COO Sheryl Sandberg brought to Facebook from Google: “People don’t scale.” And it’s true that there are some tasks — like selling and placing digital ads — that are more efficiently and profitably done by software programs. But there aren’t that many tasks that programs can do as well as human beings, and not many programs that can be automated without the help and work of humans. Which means that any company bragging about automated solutions is likely hiding a much larger shadow workforce supporting those solutions, like the one Facebook employs through Cognizant.

Such arrangements are endlessly common in Silicon Valley. Magically convenient services and devices are often subsidized not just by money-burning investors but also by exploitative labor arrangements. Amazon purchases arrive quickly in part because the company’s warehouse workers are relentlessly tracked and don’t take bathroom breaks; Uber rides are cheap in part because the median hourly wage of an Uber driver is $10. Obviously, being a paid Uber driver is no closer to being a chained-up child than riding in an Uber is to being in paradise, but you can begin to understand the bargain being struck by the citizens of Omelas in Le Guin’s story.

The truth is that “software margins” (or what investors hope will eventually be software margins) are rarely achieved solely through automation and innovation. Most Silicon Valley titans, especially the software giants that have arisen over the last two decades, have become adept at externalizing their costs. Users contribute content for free. Contractors work for cheap. The burden of moderating content has for the last ten years been borne by someone — in some cases under-compensated contractors, in some cases users moderating content themselves for free, in some cases the victims of abuse or harassment, and, in some cases, the public sphere as as whole. Just rarely Facebook. If Facebook’s shadow-workforce practices — which have been widely reported by journalists and studied by academics well before the Verge’s story this week, and which are no different than content-moderation practices on many social networks — are being singled out now, it may be because the platform’s conveniences no longer seem worth the full social cost.

#Digital_Labor #Facebook #Modération #Externalisation

We are all victims of #facebook manipulation
▻https://hackernoon.com/we-are-all-victims-of-facebook-manipulation-925fe5d2f8f0?source=rss----3

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/660/0*wdr-5ajiB28t4ARj.jpg

Facebook has taken a battering recently, and what many users have spotted is that there is a massive gap between how the company operates and the PR messages it sends to the world.Look at some of the messages that Mark Zuckerberg sent out in 2012, the year it acquired Instagram and brought Sheryl Sandberg to its boardroom table:“Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life.”“I am committed to working every day to make Facebook better for you, and hopefully together we will be able to connect the rest of the world too.”“At Facebook we believe that the need to open up and connect is what makes us human. It’s what brings us together. It’s what brings meaning to our lives.”It all sounds very warm and worthy. Yet there were other things (...)

#facebook-motherboard #facebook-manipulation #facebook-android-update #internet

Zuckerberg or Sandberg : Who should Facebook unfollow first ?
▻https://www.zdnet.com/article/zuckerberg-or-sandberg-who-should-facebook-unfollow-first

Opinion : A devastating New York Times investigation reveals a Facebook in which its two top officials behave in troubling ways. Zuckerberg and Sandberg, meet iceberg. There had always been suspicions that Facebook was a peculiar company, run by peculiar people in peculiar ways. A New York Times investigation published on Wednesday, however, reveals a Facebook in which its two top executives — CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg — seem to have very strange instincts that may not be (...)

#Facebook #manipulation #domination

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Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis - The New York Times
►https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-election-racism.html

En partie de la manière suivante,

Matt Stoller sur Twitter : “#Facebook is an impressive company. They both went after our coalition group @FacebookBreakup as Soros-funded AND worked with the Anti-Defamation League to accuse us of anti-semitism. ▻https://t.co/MGZLJZO6hv” / Twitter
▻https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/1062816375046135808

Delay, Deny and Deflect : How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis
►https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-election-racism.html

Sheryl Sandberg was seething. Inside Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, top executives gathered in the glass-walled conference room of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. It was September 2017, more than a year after Facebook engineers discovered suspicious Russia-linked activity on its site, an early warning of the Kremlin campaign to disrupt the 2016 American election. Congressional and federal investigators were closing in on evidence that would implicate the company. But it wasn’t (...)

#CambridgeAnalytica #Facebook #élections #manipulation #données #BigData #lobbying

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Comment la Silicon Valley est devenue hostile aux femmes - Le Temps
▻https://www.letemps.ch/economie/silicon-valley-devenue-hostile-aux-femmes
▻https://assets.letemps.ch/sites/default/files/styles/share/public/media/2018/10/06/file727c0m3mv461ii4j97ov.jpg.png?itok=zbd-ux0T

« Quand vous écrivez une ligne de code, vous affectez beaucoup de gens », soulignait Sheryl Sandberg, directrice opérationnelle de Facebook, qui s’engage beaucoup pour l’égalité et a écrit En avant toutes. Les #femmes, le travail et le pouvoir en 2013. En réalité, le mal a déjà été fait, souligne encore Emily Chang, à travers les jeux vidéo violents et sexistes, le #harcèlement subi par les femmes sur les #réseaux_sociaux contre lequel (pratiquement) rien n’est fait, etc. Autre exemple ? Jusqu’en 2016, si vous disiez à Siri ou à un autre assistant numérique que vous étiez en train de faire une crise cardiaque, elle vous donnait des instructions ; si vous lui disiez que vous étiez en train de vous faire violer ou frapper par votre mari, elle vous disait : « Je ne comprends pas de quoi il s’agit. » Des robots à l’intelligence artificielle, la technologie, qui va déterminer notre avenir, risque d’être aussi inégalitaire que les entreprises qui les fabriquent. En outre, ajoute Alaina Percival, « toute l’économie est en train de devenir technologique, il ne s’agit plus d’un petit secteur ».

#Silicon_Valley #informatique #code #sexisme

Du réseau de l’élite aux scandales en série : brève histoire de Facebook | InaGlobal
▻https://www.inaglobal.fr/numerique/article/du-reseau-de-l-elite-aux-scandales-en-serie-breve-histoire-de-facebook-102

https://www.inaglobal.fr/sites/default/files/images/histoire-facebook.jpg

par le toujours excellent Nikos SMYRNAIOS

En 15 ans, Facebook est devenu l’arène centrale de l’espace public numérique, et Mark Zuckerberg, son patron, l’un des hommes les plus influents de la planète. Influent, mais controversé. Le média de masse le plus populaire accumule les scandales. Plongée dans les coulisses de cette mutation.

Le chemin parcouru par Mark Zuckerberg apparaît ainsi très impressionnant : en l’espace de quinze ans, il est passé du statut d’étudiant bidouillant des sites aguicheurs dans sa chambre à l’un des hommes les plus influents de la planète. D’un club virtuel privé pour les étudiants de Harvard, Facebook est devenu le média de masse le plus populaire dans l’histoire de l’humanité avec plus de deux milliards d’utilisateurs dans le monde. Mais comment s’est passée cette mutation ? Par la suite, je vais tenter de retracer de manière critique les différentes étapes de cette évolution en m’appuyant sur une approche socio-économique.

Les deux principales caractéristiques de cet Internet nouvelle génération, promu par O’Reilly, est la « plateformisation » et la participation. Facebook est un service participatif par excellence. Une coquille technique — contraignante mais vide — que remplissent les utilisateurs, générant ainsi de la valeur publicitaire pour un moindre coût[+]. Il est donc tout à fait en adéquation avec le modèle du Web 2.0, raison pour laquelle il a très vite attiré le soutien des plus grands détenteurs de capital dans l’industrie de l’internet, comme Peter Thiel. La plateformisation allait se mettre en œuvre progressivement par la suite.

Cela a introduit une nouvelle façon de créer des réseaux qui ne reposait pas sur des relations mutuelles entre deux propriétaires de profil mais sur une relation unilatérale, le propriétaire du profil devenant « fan » d’une Page afin de suivre son actualité.

D’un point de vue politique, cette évolution ajoute à la fonction de réseau social celle d’un espace public numérique, où des individus et des instances collectives s’adressent à un public de masse dans le but d’influencer ses représentations sociales. Facebook est probablement le premier à avoir fusionné ces deux fonctions au sein d’un seul service en ligne, massivement utilisé.

2012 est une année charnière pour Facebook. D’une part, l’explosion de l’usage de smartphones lui offre un champ de développement sans précédent. D’autre part, son introduction en Bourse accentue la pression des investisseurs et des observateurs sur ses performances économiques. Si Facebook est à l’équilibre depuis le deuxième trimestre de 2009, le taux de monétisation de son offre publicitaire avant 2012 reste faible. C’est surtout l’augmentation exponentielle du nombre d’utilisateurs qui augmente les revenus publicitaires et permet à la société d’être rentable.

Pour répondre aux exigences des investisseurs, des efforts significatifs sont déployés par Facebook, sous la houlette de Sheryl Sandberg, pour améliorer sa monétisation, parfois au détriment de ses partenaires et utilisateurs. Par exemple, à partir de 2012, une fois les Pagesdevenues un standard populaire, Facebook commence à diminuer ce qu’il appelle organic reach, c’est-à-dire le pourcentage de « fans » effectivement touchés par les publications d’une page à laquelle ils sont abonnés. De 100 % avant 2012 ce pourcentage a baissé à 16 %, puis à 6,5 % en 2014 et jusqu’à 2 % pour les pages les plus populaires. La seule solution pour accroître ce ratio est désormais de payer Facebook. Les explications que ce dernier donne pour cette évolution font appel, comme toujours, à la supposée amélioration de l’« expérience utilisateur » à travers la hiérarchisation et la sélection algorithmique du contenu qui apparaît sur son News Feed saturé au fur et à mesure que les statuts des « amis » et les publications des Pages « likés » s’accumulent.

Néanmoins, l’objectif économique de cette nouvelle politique est évident. Elle fait partie d’une stratégie publicitaire centrale pour Facebook, à savoir le développement des formats « natifs », comme les posts sponsorisés. La publicité « native » est l’un des segments de ce marché qui croît le plus vite, car son efficacité est réputée supérieure en termes de retour sur investissement. En effet, en jouant sur la confusion entre publicité et contenu éditorial, les annonceurs ont plus de chances que leur promotion soit vue et retenue par l’internaute.

L’affaire Snowden ne va pourtant pas freiner le développement de la société. Fort d’une capitalisation gigantesque, qui atteint son record en juillet 2018 à 629 milliards de dollars, Facebook opère ainsi une intégration horizontale en rachetant des services populaires comme Instagram, en avril 2012, pour un milliard de dollars et WhatsApp en février 2014 pour dix-neuf milliards. Dans le même temps, Facebook devient progressivement la première source de trafic pour les sites d’information, dépassant pour la première fois Google en mai 2012. Cette tendance pousse les éditeurs de sites à adapter leur stratégie afin de bénéficier de cet effet d’aubaine, accentué par les nouveaux formats comme Instant Articles et le Livevidéo lancés respectivement en 2015 et 2016.

Ces pressions poussent Facebook, comme Google et Twitter, à exercer un contrôle de plus en plus contraignant sur les contenus considérés à risque, dont fait partie aussi l’expression politique. C’est ainsi que le trafic orienté vers les médias baisse drastiquement à partir de janvier 2017, suite à la décision de Facebook de moins mettre en avant les contenus d’actualité via son algorithme et de favoriser les publications de nature personnelle de ses utilisateurs. Mais en basculant dans une politique fortement interventionniste, décidée et implémentée en totale opacité, Facebook exerce, de fait, une censure massive dans la sphère publique numérique qu’il contrôle. Les cas de suppression injustifiée de contenus mais aussi de blocage de comptes se sont ainsi multipliés depuis quelques mois.

Cette crise politique s’est rapidement muée en crise financière quand les investisseurs ont réalisé qu’une modération de contenu efficace nécessite des moyens humains et techniques conséquents. Elle représente donc un coût important.

#Facebook #Histoire_numérique

Les réseaux sociaux à la peine contre la manipulation de l’information
▻https://www.franceinter.fr/emissions/geopolitique/geopolitique-06-septembre-2018

Sheryl Sandberg, la patronne de Facebook, et Jack Dorsey, le fondateur de Twitter, ont témoigné mercredi devant la Commission du Renseignement du Congrès à Washington. Au coeur des questions, la manipulation de l’information sur leurs réseaux sociaux. Quand les dirigeants des réseaux sociaux Facebook et Twitter sont convoqués au Congrès américain, ces temps-ci, ce n’est pas pour discuter business ou technologie. C’est pour parler manipulation de l’information et désinformation en période électorale. (...)

#Facebook #Twitter #manipulation

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Sheryl Sandberg Misled Congress About Facebook’s Conscience
▻https://theintercept.com/2018/09/05/facebook-senate-hearing-sheryl-sandberg

Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg draped herself in the star-spangled banner of American principles before today’s Senate Select Intelligence Committee hearing on social media. Sandberg proclaimed that democratic values of free expression were integral to the company’s conscience. “We would only operate in a country where we could do so in keeping with our values,” she went on. Either this was a lie told under oath, or Facebook has some pretty lousy values. “We would only (...)

#Facebook #Twitter #algorithme #censure

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Behind the Messy, Expensive Split Between Facebook and WhatsApp’s Founders

▻https://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-the-messy-expensive-split-between-facebook-and-whatsapps-founders-152820

After a long dispute over how to produce more revenue with ads and data, the messaging app’s creators are walking away leaving about $1.3 billion on the table​
By Kirsten Grind and
Deepa Seetharaman
June 5, 2018 10:24 a.m. ET

How ugly was the breakup between Facebook Inc. FB 0.49% and the two founders of WhatsApp, its biggest acquisition? The creators of the popular messaging service are walking away leaving about $1.3 billion on the table.

The expensive exit caps a long-simmering dispute about how to wring more revenue out of WhatsApp, according to people familiar with the matter. Facebook has remained committed to its ad-based business model amid criticism, even as Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has had to defend the company before American and European lawmakers.

The WhatsApp duo of Jan Koum and Brian Acton had persistent disagreements in recent years with Mr. Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, who grew impatient for a greater return on the company’s 2014 blockbuster $22 billion purchase of the messaging app, according to the people.

Many of the disputes with Facebook involved how to manage data privacy while also making money from WhatsApp’s large user base, including through the targeted ads that WhatsApp’s founders had long opposed. In the past couple of years especially, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg pushed the WhatsApp founders to be more flexible on those issues and move faster on other plans to generate revenue, the people say.

Once, after Mr. Koum said he “didn’t have enough people” to implement a project, Mr. Zuckerberg dismissed him with, “I have all the people you need,” according to one person familiar with the conversation.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified about privacy issues and the use of user data before a Senate committee in April.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified about privacy issues and the use of user data before a Senate committee in April. Photo: Alex Brandon/Press Pool

WhatsApp was an incongruous fit within Facebook from the beginning. Messrs. Acton and Koum are true believers on privacy issues and have shown disdain for the potential commercial applications of the service.

Facebook, on the other hand, has built a sprawling, lucrative advertising business that shows ads to users based on data gathered about their activities. Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg have touted how an advertising-supported product makes it free for consumers and helps bridge the digital divide.

When Facebook bought WhatsApp, it never publicly addressed how the divergent philosophies would coexist. But Mr. Zuckerberg told stock analysts that he and Mr. Koum agreed that advertising wasn’t the right way to make money from messaging apps. Mr. Zuckerberg also said he promised the co-founders the autonomy to build their own products. The sale to Facebook made the app founders both multibillionaires.

Over time, each side grew frustrated with the other, according to people in both camps. Mr. Koum announced April 30 he would leave, and Mr. Acton resigned last September.
Big Bet
Facebook paid substantially more for WhatsApp than any other deal.

Facebook’s five largest deals*

WhatsApp (2014)

$21.94 billion

Oculus VR (2014)

$2.30 billion

Instagram (2012)

$736 million

Microsoft† (2012)

$550 million

Onavo (2013)

$120 million

*price at close of deal †approximately 615 AOL patents and patent applications

Source: Dealogic

The WhatsApp co-founders didn’t confront Mr. Zuckerberg at their departures about their disagreements over where to take the business, but had concluded they were fighting a losing battle and wanted to preserve their relationship with the Facebook executive, people familiar with the matter said. One person familiar with the relationships described the environment as “very passive-aggressive.”

Small cultural disagreements between the two staffs also popped up, involving issues such as noise around the office and the size of WhatsApp’s desks and bathrooms, that took on greater significance as the split between the parent company and its acquisition persisted.

The discord broke into public view in a March tweet by Mr. Acton. During the height of the Cambridge Analytica controversy, in which the research firm was accused of misusing Facebook user data to aid the Trump campaign, Mr. Acton posted that he planned to delete his Facebook account.

Within Facebook, some executives were surprised to see Mr. Acton publicly bash the company since he didn’t seem to leave on bad terms, according to people familiar with the matter. When Mr. Acton later visited Facebook’s headquarters, David Marcus, an executive who ran Facebook’s other chat app, Messenger, confronted his former colleague. “That was low class,” Mr. Marcus said, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Acton shrugged it off. Mr. Marcus declined to comment.
Staff at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. Small cultural disagreements between Facebook and WhatsApp staffs, involving issues such as noise, size of desks and bathrooms, created friction.

Staff at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. Small cultural disagreements between Facebook and WhatsApp staffs, involving issues such as noise, size of desks and bathrooms, created friction. Photo: Kim Kulish/Corbis/Getty Images

The posts also prompted an angry call from Ms. Sandberg to Mr. Koum, who assured her that Mr. Acton didn’t mean any harm, according to a person familiar with the call.

When Mr. Acton departed Facebook, he forfeited about $900 million in potential stock awards, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Koum is expected to officially depart in mid-August, in which case he would leave behind more than two million unvested shares worth about $400 million at Facebook’s current stock price. Both men would have received all their remaining shares had they stayed until this November, when their contracts end.

The amount the two executives are leaving in unvested shares hasn’t been reported, nor have the full extent of the details around their disagreements with Facebook over the years.

“Jan has done an amazing job building WhatsApp. He has been a tireless advocate for privacy and encryption,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in May at the company’s developer conference about Mr. Koum’s departure. He added he was proud that Facebook helped WhatsApp launch end-to-end encryption a couple of years after the acquisition.

In many ways, Facebook and WhatsApp couldn’t have been more different. Facebook from its beginning in 2004 leveraged access to user information to sell targeted advertising that would be displayed as people browsed their news feeds. That business model has been hugely successful, driving Facebook’s market value past half a trillion dollars, with advertising accounting for 97% of the firm’s revenue.
A sign in WhatsApp’s offices at Facebook headquarters. Some Facebook employees mocked WhatsApp with chants of ‘Welcome to WhatsApp—Shut up!’

A sign in WhatsApp’s offices at Facebook headquarters. Some Facebook employees mocked WhatsApp with chants of ‘Welcome to WhatsApp—Shut up!’

It is also the antithesis of what WhatsApp professed to stand for. Mr. Koum, a San Jose State University dropout, grew up in Soviet-era Ukraine, where the government could track communication, and talked frequently about his commitment to privacy.

Mr. Koum, 42, and Mr. Acton, 46, became friends while working as engineers at Yahoo Inc., one of the first big tech companies to embrace digital advertising. The experience was jarring for both men, who came to regard display ads as garish, ruining the user experience and allowing advertisers to collect all kinds of data on unsuspecting individuals.

WhatsApp, which launched in 2009, was designed to be simple and secure. Messages were immediately deleted from its servers once sent. It charged some users 99 cents annually after one free year and carried no ads. In a 2012 blog post the co-founders wrote, “We wanted to make something that wasn’t just another ad clearinghouse” and called ads “insults to your intelligence.”

Text MeWorld-wide monthly active users for popularmessaging apps, in billions.Source: the companiesNote: *Across four main markets; iMessage, Google Hangoutsand Signal don’t disclose number of users.

WhatsAppFacebookMessengerWeChatTelegramLine*00.511.52

The men are also close personal friends, bonding over ultimate Frisbee, despite political differences. Mr. Koum, unlike Mr. Acton, has publicly expressed support for Donald Trump.

When Facebook bought WhatsApp in February 2014, the messaging service was growing rapidly and had already amassed 450 million monthly users, making it more popular than Twitter Inc., which had 240 million monthly users at the time and was valued at $30 billion. WhatsApp currently has 1.5 billion users.

The deal still ranks as the largest-ever purchase of a company backed by venture capital, and it was almost 10 times costlier than Facebook’s next most expensive acquisition.

Mr. Zuckerberg assured Messrs. Koum and Acton at the time that he wouldn’t place advertising in the messaging service, according to a person familiar with the matter. Messrs. Koum and Acton also negotiated an unusual clause in their contracts that said if Facebook insisted on making any “additional monetization initiatives” such as advertising in the app, it could give the executives “good reason” to leave and cause an acceleration of stock awards that hadn’t vested, according to a nonpublic portion of the companies’ merger agreement reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The provision only kicks in if a co-founder is still employed by Facebook when the company launches advertising or another moneymaking strategy.

Mr. Acton initiated the clause in his contract allowing for early vesting of his shares. But Facebook’s legal team threatened a fight, so Mr. Acton, already worth more than $3 billion, left it alone, according to people familiar with the matter.

Some analysts in the tech community said a clash was inevitable. Nate Elliott, principal of Nineteen Insights, a research and advisory firm focused on digital marketing and social media, said the WhatsApp founders are “pretty naive” for believing that Facebook wouldn’t ultimately find some way to make money from the deal, such as with advertising. “Facebook is a business, not a charity,” he said.

At the time of the sale, WhatsApp was profitable with fee revenue, although it is unclear by how much. Facebook doesn’t break out financial information for WhatsApp.
David Marcus, vice president of messaging products for Facebook, spoke during the company’s F8 Developers Conference in San Jose on May 1.

David Marcus, vice president of messaging products for Facebook, spoke during the company’s F8 Developers Conference in San Jose on May 1. Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News

Facebook’s hands-off stance changed around 2016. WhatsApp topped one billion monthly users, and it had eliminated its 99 cent fee. Facebook told investors it would stop increasing the number of ads in Facebook’s news feed, resulting in slower advertising-revenue growth. This put pressure on Facebook’s other properties—including WhatsApp—to make money.

That August, WhatsApp announced it would start sharing phone numbers and other user data with Facebook, straying from its earlier promise to be built “around the goal of knowing as little about you as possible.”

With Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg pushing to integrate it into the larger company, WhatsApp moved its offices in January 2017 from Mountain View, Calif., to Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters about 20 minutes away. Facebook tried to make it welcoming, decorating the Building 10 office in WhatsApp’s green color scheme.

WhatsApp’s roughly 200 employees at the time remained mostly segregated from the rest of Facebook. Some of the employees were turned off by Facebook’s campus, a bustling collection of restaurants, ice cream shops and services built to mirror Disneyland.

Some Facebook staffers considered the WhatsApp unit a mystery and sometimes poked fun at it. After WhatsApp employees hung up posters over the walls instructing hallway passersby to “please keep noise to a minimum,” some Facebook employees mocked them with chants of “Welcome to WhatsApp—Shut up!” according to people familiar with the matter.

Some employees even took issue with WhatsApp’s desks, which were a holdover from the Mountain View location and larger than the standard desks in the Facebook offices. WhatsApp also negotiated for nicer bathrooms, with doors that reach the floor. WhatsApp conference rooms were off-limits to other Facebook employees.

“These little ticky-tacky things add up in a company that prides itself on egalitarianism,” said one Facebook employee.

Mr. Koum chafed at the constraints of working at a big company, sometimes quibbling with Mr. Zuckerberg and other executives over small details such as the chairs Facebook wanted WhatsApp to purchase, a person familiar with the matter said.

In response to the pressure from above to make money, Messrs. Koum and Acton proposed several ideas to bring in more revenue. One, known as “re-engagement messaging,” would let advertisers contact only users who had already been their customers. Last year, WhatsApp said it would charge companies for some future features that connect them with customers over the app.

None of the proposals were as lucrative as Facebook’s ad-based model. “Well, that doesn’t scale,” Ms. Sandberg told the WhatsApp executives of their proposals, according to a person familiar with the matter. Ms. Sandberg wanted the WhatsApp leadership to pursue advertising alongside other revenue models, another person familiar with her thinking said.

Ms. Sandberg, 48, and Mr. Zuckerberg, 34, frequently brought up their purchase of the photo-streaming app Instagram as a way to persuade Messrs. Koum and Acton to allow advertising into WhatsApp. Facebook in 2012 purchased Instagram, and the app’s founders initially tried their own advertising platform rather than Facebook’s. When Instagram fell short of its revenue targets in its first few quarters, Facebook leadership pushed the founders to adopt its targeted advertising model, and the transition was relatively seamless, according to current and former employees. Today, analysts estimate that Instagram is a key driver of Facebook’s revenue, and its founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, remain with the company. The men didn’t respond to requests for comment.

“It worked for Instagram,” Ms. Sandberg told the WhatsApp executives on at least one occasion, according to one person familiar with the matter.
Attendees used Oculus Go VR headsets during Facebook’s F8 Developers Conference.

Attendees used Oculus Go VR headsets during Facebook’s F8 Developers Conference. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Other high-profile acquisitions such as developer platform Parse, ad tech platform LiveRail and virtual-reality company Oculus VR have fallen short of expectations, people familiar with those deals say.

The senior Facebook executives appeared to grow frustrated by the WhatsApp duo’s reasons to delay plans that would help monetize the service. Mr. Zuckerberg wanted WhatsApp executives to add more “special features” to the app, whereas Messrs. Koum and Acton liked its original simplicity.

Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg also wanted Messrs. Koum and Acton to loosen their stance on encryption to allow more “business flexibility,” according to one person familiar with the matter. One idea was to create a special channel between companies and users on WhatsApp to deal with issues such as customer-service requests, people familiar with the matter said. That setup would let companies appoint employees or bots to field inquiries from users and potentially store those messages in a decrypted state later on.

Last summer, Facebook executives discussed plans to start placing ads in WhatsApp’s “Status” feature, which allows users to post photo- and video-montages that last 24 hours. Similar features exist across Facebook’s services, including on Instagram, but WhatsApp’s version is now the most popular with 450 million users as of May.

Mr. Acton—described by one former WhatsApp employee as the “moral compass” of the team—decided to leave as the discussions to place ads in Status picked up. Mr. Koum, who also sat on Facebook’s board, tried to persuade him to stay longer.

Mr. Koum remained another eight months, before announcing in a Facebook post that he is “taking some time off to do things I enjoy outside of technology, such as collecting rare air-cooled Porsches, working on my cars and playing ultimate Frisbee.” Mr. Koum is worth about $9 billion, according to Forbes.

The next day, Mr. Koum said goodbye to WhatsApp and Facebook employees at an all-hands meeting in Menlo Park. An employee asked him about WhatsApp’s plans for advertising.

Mr. Koum responded by first alluding to his well-documented antipathy for ads, according to people familiar with his remarks. But Mr. Koum added that if ads were to happen, placing them in Status would be the least intrusive way of doing so, according to the people.

Some people who heard the remarks interpreted them as Mr. Koum saying he had made peace with the idea of advertising in WhatsApp.

In his absence, WhatsApp will be run by Chris Daniels, a longtime Facebook executive who is tasked with finding a business model that brings in revenue at a level to justify the app’s purchase price, without damaging the features that make it so popular.

Among WhatsApp’s competitors is Signal, an encrypted messaging app run by a nonprofit called the Signal Foundation and dedicated to secure communication, with strict privacy controls and without advertising. Mr. Acton donated $50 million to fund the foundation and serves as its executive chairman.

Corrections & Amplifications
Facebook Messenger has 1.3 billion monthly users. An earlier version of a chart in this article incorrectly said it had 2.13 billion users. (June 5, 2018)

Write to Kirsten Grind at kirsten.grind@wsj.com and Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com

#Facebook #Whatsapp

L’humiliation de Mark Zuckerberg, convoqué devant le Congrès

▻http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2018/04/10/l-humiliation-de-mark-zuckerberg-convoque-devant-le-congres_5283156_3232.htm

L’heure des comptes a sonné pour le PDG de Facebook, attendu mardi 10 avril au Sénat et le lendemain à la Chambre des représentants, analyse la correspondante du « Monde » à San Francisco Corine Lesnes.

http://img.lemde.fr/2018/04/10/473/0/4444/2222/644/322/60/0/0478370_17762-9kephk.ymwun.jpg

La série culte Silicon Valley, qui a repris fin mars sur HBO, n’a pas manqué de se moquer. Au générique, elle montre maintenant le logo de Facebook… en cyrillique. Même malin plaisir du côté du rival Snapchat. Pour le 1er avril, l’application préférée des ados a proposé un filtre imitant la mise en page de la plateforme de Mark Zuckerberg. Les photos y sont aimées par « votre maman » et « un bot » russe, l’un des 50 000 faux comptes déployés par la Russie pour influencer l’élection présidentielle de 2016 aux Etats-Unis…

Dans la Silicon Valley, les malheurs de Facebook ont été parfois durement commentés. « C’est une crise de confiance », a jugé Marc Benioff, le PDG du géant du logiciel Salesforce, qui, comme Elon Musk, de Tesla, s’est désinscrit du réseau social. Tim Cook a tancé son alter ego. Apple aussi aurait pu « faire des tonnes d’argent si elle avait transformé son client en produit, a-t-il pointé. Nous avons choisi de ne pas le faire ». « Zuck » a reconnu que Facebook monétise les données de ses usagers auprès des publicitaires. Mais à l’en croire, c’est par pur esprit humanitaire : pour offrir un service « qui ne soit pas accessible qu’aux riches ».

Rares sont ceux, aujourd’hui aux Etats-Unis, qui défendent le réseau social aux 2 milliards d’inscrits, emblème, il y a peu encore, de la réussite planétaire des géants des technologies. Depuis la découverte des interférences russes dans l’élection de Donald Trump, Facebook est devenu le symbole de l’irresponsabilité globale des milliardaires du numérique – et la preuve des effets pervers du modèle économique de gratuité des réseaux sociaux.

Le scandale Cambridge Analytica – du nom de la firme britannique de marketing politique liée à M. Trump qui a aspiré les données de 87 millions de comptes de Facebook en 2015 – a été la débâcle de trop. La Federal Trade Commission a ouvert une enquête qui pourrait valoir à Facebook une amende record. L’action a perdu 15 % en trois semaines (mais son cours avait doublé en trois ans).

Depuis, chaque jour apporte un nouvel aveu. Oui, Facebook scanne les messages de tous les particuliers sur son application Messenger. Oui, Facebook suit les internautes, même quand ils n’ont pas téléchargé l’application (grâce au « mouchard » qui figure sur les sites qu’ils visitent). Selon une note interne de 2016 qui vient de fuiter, montrant à quel point l’affaire commence à éroder la culture d’une entreprise réputée pour sa cohésion, la croissance du nombre d’abonnés était devenue une obsession. Connecter toute la planète, l’ambition suprême. Et cela, « même si quelqu’un meurt dans une attaque terroriste coordonnée grâce à nos outils », précise cette note.

Un genou à terre

Zuckerberg-le-surdoué a un genou à terre. Selon un sondage publié le 2 avril par le site Axios, le taux de popularité de Facebook a chuté de 28 points entre octobre et mars (–12 pour Google et –13 pour Amazon). Le « nerd » asocial multiplie les interviews à un rythme effréné, alors qu’il n’en donnait jamais. Zuckerberg, qui se retranchait derrière son adjointe, Sheryl Sandberg, pour faire des politesses à Washington ou Bruxelles, a été obligé d’accepter de se présenter lui-même devant le Congrès : mardi 10 avril au Sénat, le lendemain à la Chambre.

Deux jours d’audition. Ce sera une première pour un jeune milliardaire qui était revenu un jour de Washington en expliquant à ses employés, médusés, qu’il avait manifesté la « quantité de respect qui convenait » aux élus de la Nation : à savoir sa tenue habituelle, jean et tee-shirt. Aujourd’hui, l’indulgence risque d’être inversement proportionnelle à l’arrogance d’hier, même si Zuckerberg portera la cravate. Selon le New York Times, il a été « coaché » par une firme juridique, qui lui a enseigné à être « humble et agréable » dans ses réponses.

La commission sénatoriale du commerce entend interroger le fondateur de Facebook sur son plan pour « regagner la confiance perdue », « sauvegarder la confidentialité des données des usagers » et « mettre fin à une série de réponses tardives à des problèmes importants ». « Zuck » aura du mal à restaurer sa crédibilité. Le magazine Wired s’est amusé à faire la liste de ses « excuses » : des dizaines depuis la création en 2003 à Harvard d’un site rassemblant les photos d’étudiantes piratées dans l’intranet de l’université. Quinze ans plus tard, il n’est pas à même de garantir que les données des 2 milliards d’inscrits n’ont pas été consultées à leur insu par des tiers.

Mark Zuckerberg est-il de taille à affronter la crise ? Plusieurs actionnaires se sont interrogés publiquement sur son aptitude à diriger une compagnie devenue aussi tentaculaire. Le chef du fonds de pension de la ville de New York, Scott Stringer, l’a appelé à démissionner pour permettre à Facebook d’entamer « un deuxième chapitre, celui de l’amélioration de sa réputation ». Même analyse de la part du responsable du service économique du San Francisco Chronicle, Owen Thomas : « Le consensus qui se développe à Washington, dans la Silicon Valley et dans le reste du monde est que Facebook a besoin d’un changement radical, au-delà de l’avalanche d’annonces et de mises à jour des règles sur la vie privée. »

Zuckerberg, septième fortune du monde (l’affaire Cambridge Analytica lui a coûté deux places), n’est certainement pas du style à s’effacer. « J’ai lancé cet endroit. Je le dirige », a-t-il signifié. Il a pris soin de conserver le contrôle du conseil d’administration et de 60 % des droits de vote des actionnaires. Nul ne peut l’écarter. A 33 ans, il préside une compagnie qui se retrouve en position d’arbitre du processus démocratique mondial. Cela, sans avoir de comptes à rendre à personne, à moins que le Congrès ne décide qu’il est temps de s’en mêler.

Marck Zuckerberg ne souhaite pas se présenter devant la commission parlementaire britannique
▻http://www.lemonde.fr/entreprises/article/2018/03/27/donnees-personnelles-bruxelles-veut-des-reponses-de-facebook-d-ici-a-deux-se

Le patron de Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, ne souhaite pas se présenter devant la commission parlementaire britannique qui veut l’interroger sur le détournement de données personnelles de près de 50 millions d’utilisateurs, et il propose d’envoyer l’un de ses adjoints à sa place, selon un courrier dévoilé mardi 27 mars en Grande-Bretagne.

Les députés britanniques ont immédiatement refusé cette proposition. Le président de la commission sur le numérique, la culture et les médias, Damian Collins, a estimé qu’il était « approprié » qu’il vienne s’expliquer lui-même, au vu de la gravité des accusations.
[…]
De son côté, la Commission européenne a demandé à Facebook d’apporter des réponses « dans les deux prochaines semaines » aux questions soulevées par le scandale, afin de savoir notamment si les données personnelles d’Européens ont été touchées.

L’exécutif européen souhaite également que le réseau social l’informe des mesures qu’il envisage de prendre. « Je vous écris pour mieux comprendre comment les données d’utilisateurs de Facebook, y compris potentiellement celles de citoyens de l’UE, sont tombées dans les mains de tierces parties à leur insu et sans leur consentement », a écrit la commissaire à la justice européenne, Vera Jourova, dans un courrier adressé au numéro deux de Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg.

From Sex Object to Gritty Woman : The Evolution of Women in Stock Photos - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/upshot/from-sex-object-to-gritty-woman-the-evolution-of-women-in-stock-photos.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017/09/08/upshot/00up-women1/00up-women1-facebookJumbo.jpg

The change from women lounging naked (or perhaps laughing alone with salad) to women demonstrating physical or professional prowess was driven in part by the Lean In collection, which Getty developed in 2014 with Sheryl Sandberg’s nonprofit to seed media with more modern, diverse and empowering images of women. The collection, now with 14,000 photos, has the unofficial tagline, “You can’t be what you can’t see.”

Je reste sceptique, ça semble une bonne occasion de se faire de la pub, à voir sur le long terme #getty #photos #femmes_images

Facebook’s Frankenstein Moment - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/21/technology/facebook-frankenstein-sandberg-ads.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017/09/22/business/22ROOSE3/22ROOSE3-facebookJumbo.jpg

On Wednesday, in response to a ProPublica report that Facebook enabled advertisers to target users with offensive terms like “Jew hater,” Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer, apologized and vowed that the company would adjust its ad-buying tools to prevent similar problems in the future.

As I read her statement, my eyes lingered over one line in particular:

“We never intended or anticipated this functionality being used this way — and that is on us,” Ms. Sandberg wrote.

Facebook is fighting through a tangled morass of privacy, free-speech and moderation issues with governments all over the world. Congress is investigating reports that Russian operatives used targeted Facebook ads to influence the 2016 presidential election. In Myanmar, activists are accusing Facebook of censoring Rohingya Muslims, who are under attack from the country’s military. In Africa, the social network faces accusations that it helped human traffickers extort victims’ families by leaving up abusive videos.

Few of these issues stem from willful malice on the company’s part.

But as Facebook has grown into the global town square, it has had to adapt to its own influence. Many of its users view the social network as an essential utility, and the company’s decisions — which posts to take down, which ads to allow, which videos to show — can have real life-or-death consequences around the world. The company has outsourced some decisions to complex algorithms, which carries its own risks, but many of the toughest choices Facebook faces are still made by humans.

“They still see themselves as a technology middleman,” said Mr. García Martínez. “Facebook is not supposed to be an element of a propaganda war. They’re completely not equipped to deal with that.”

Alex Stamos, Facebook’s security chief, said last month that the company shuts down more than a million user accounts every day for violating Facebook’s community standards.

#Facebook #Post_truth

#Domination scolaire des filles : l’ère numérique rebat-elle les cartes ? - Telos
▻https://www.telos-eu.com/fr/societe/domination-scolaire-des-filles-lere-numerique-reba.html

https://www.telos-eu.com/medias/articles/domination3.jpg

L’innovation #informatique demeure une chasse gardée masculine et les #femmes, plutôt que de s’y engager peu à peu comme elles le font pour d’autres secteurs, tendent à la déserter, ou à s’en tenir à distance. Certes, on note une petite amélioration dans la présence des femmes dans les fonctions managériales des entreprises du Net, telle Sheryl Sandberg, directrice générale de Facebook, Nunu Ntshingila qui dirige Facebook Afrique ou Meg Whitman, directrice générale de Hewlett Packard Entreprise. Les femmes pénètrent progressivement l’univers économique du Web – par exemple, en France, le métier de Community Manager est occupé à près de 60% par des femmes[8] . Soulignons néanmoins qu’elles marquent le pas dans l’expertise des Computer Sciences – les raisons de ce rejet sont bien documentées et mériteraient un autre article.

La cause semble entendue : dans le design du futur les hommes sont aux manettes. De surcroît, s’ils marquent de leur imagination créatrice les infrastructures du numérique, ils imposent tout aussi subrepticement leur pouvoir dans les nouveaux systèmes de gouvernance, tant ils détiennent un magistère technique qu’il est presque impossible de défier.

Marlène Schiappa, secrétaire d’Etat aux Droits des Femmes, complice des masculinites
(par Stéphanie Lamy sur son twitter : ▻https://twitter.com/WCM_JustSocial/status/865288468175433728 )
J’ai de grandes inquiétudes quant au sérieux que @MarleneSchiappa va pouvoir amener à la lutte pour les Droits réels des femmes
Schiappa c’est le #féminisme à la Sheryl Sandberg qui fonctionne à merveille pour les femmes blanches nanties (capital social & économique)
Un féminisme qui sur-responsabilise les femmes quant-à leur « succès » (pro uniquement, bien sûr). Si elles échouent, ce serait de leur faute
C’est un « féminisme » qui à aucun moment remet en cause la domination masculine. Un « féminisme safe » pour les hommes. Mais du coup...
Est-ce encore du féminisme ? En 2014 Schiappa signait la tribune d’une pro-masculiniste du collectif de la Grue Jaune
▻http://www.liberation.fr/societe/2014/01/13/des-femmes-en-faveur-de-la-garde-alternee_972479
S’est rebiffée lorsque @mascuwatch l’épingla et se justifiait par une « erreur de lecture » de la part de l’auteure ▻http://yahoo.mamantravaille.fr/maman_travaille/2014/01/peut-on-%C3%AAtre-f%C3%A9ministe-et-pour-la-garde-altern%C3%A9e

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https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DANdNhOUAAEjFUD.jpg

Demain, la Silicon Valley ira embrasser la bague de Trump - ElectronLibreElectronLibre
▻http://electronlibre.info/demain-silicon-valley-ira-embrasser-bague-de-trump

Peter Thiel - le libertarien fondateur de Pay-Pal et seul dans la Valley à avoir soutenu Trump avant son élection - qui aurait aidé l’équipe de Trump à organiser le meeting. Parmi les présents, Tim Cook d’Apple, Sheryl Sandberg de Facebook ou encore Elon Musk de Space X. On connait l’agenda de Donald Trump : il souhaite offrir un taux d’imposition très bas à la Valley pour qu’elle rapatrie aux États-Unis son cash gagné pour l’essentiel en Europe. En échange, il veut que ces sociétés créent des emplois aux États-Unis, en y implantant des usines par exemple. Publiquement, la Valley tente de garder ses distances avec Donald Trump, mais fera, on n’en doute pas, ce qu’il faut pour plaire au nouvel homme le puissant de la planète.

#silicon_valley #évasion_fiscale #États-Unis

12月11日のツイート
▻http://twilog.org/ChikuwaQ/date-161211

http://img.twi-log.com/img-dir/r/rt-icon.gif

Top story: FBI and CIA give differing accounts to lawmakers on Russia’s motives… www.washingtonpost.com/world/national…, see more tweetedtimes.com/ChikuwaQ?s=tnp posted at 13:57:20

Top story: Tim Cook, Larry Page, Sheryl Sandberg — and maybe even Jeff Bezos — … www.recode.net/2016/12/10/139…, see more tweetedtimes.com/ChikuwaQ?s=tnp posted at 12:07:10

My Tweeted Times tweetedtimes.com/ChikuwaQ?s=rgp - top stories by @datagoodies, @michikokakutani posted at 12:00:08

RT @YumeNekoHonpo: ちゅーるの歌って、歌詞がちゃんと全部あるんですね? 夢ちゃんはトップバッターで登場します✨ MV「ちゅ〜るしよ！」 youtu.be/6j6NsLMUDEg #猫 #猫モフー #ちゅーる pic.twitter.com/EZhD8wMCDO posted at 10:32:54

RT @BuzzFeedJapan: 答えがわかったら天才！ pic.twitter.com/toNSxQMSdz posted at 10:27:48

RT @TAPthePOP: 本日12月10日はオーティス・レディングの命日。バーケイズのメンバーとともにツアー中だった1967年12月10日、次の公演地へと向かう途中に自家用飛行機の墜落事故により26歳の若さでこの世を去りました。 (...)

Les féministes blanches et aisées aiment un peu trop le capitalisme | Slate.fr
▻http://www.slate.fr/story/122573/alliance-feminisme-capitalisme

http://www.slate.fr/sites/default/files/styles/500x229/public/sheryl_sandberg.jpg

After firestorm, Facebook training employees to check political biases
▻http://thehill.com/policy/technology/284576-facebook-will-offer-employees-training-to-combat-political-biases

#Facebook will train employees to deal with their political biases, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said at an event Wednesday evening.

“We think a lot about diversity at Facebook,” she said. “And we have a managing-bias class that all of our leaders and a lot of our employees have taken that I was part of helping to create, and we’ve focused on racial bias, age #bias, gender bias, national bias, and we’re going to add in a scenario now on political bias.”

“So that, as part of [how] we think about helping people understand different points of view and being open to different points of view, we’re dealing with political bias as well going forward.”

Many Silicon Valley companies have turned to unconscious bias training in recent years as they seek to address the tech industry’s lack of diversity in hiring. Among other tactics, they have also started to disclose more about demographics of their workforces.

A spokesperson for Facebook said the training in question is mandatory for all employees.

The decision to include a segment on political biases was sparked by allegations, which Facebook says are unfounded, that editors for the social network’s trending topics feature systematically downplayed news stories and sources popular with conservatives.

Sandberg made the comments Wednesday at an event held by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. In addition to the steps Facebook has taken since the bias controversy, she discussed the company’s emerging businesses and “Lean In,” her best-selling book on how women can thrive in the workplace.

Throughout the discussion, she reiterated Facebook’s main argument on many political matters: that it is a neutral platform where users of all political stripes can make their voices heard.

“We don’t have a point of view, we’re not trying to make you have a point of view,” she said.

L’argent de poche a-t-il un sexe ? - Les Nouvelles NEWS
▻http://www.lesnouvellesnews.fr/argent-de-poche-ecart-sexe

Au Royaume-Uni, « les garçons reçoivent significativement plus d’argent de poche que les filles ». C’est ce qui ressort de la dernière étude annuelle menée par la banque Halifax, auprès de 1 202 enfants de 8 à 15 ans et leurs parents, et publiée vendredi 3 juin.

Les garçons britanniques reçoivent en moyenne 6,93 £ (9 euros) d’argent de poche par semaine, contre 6,16 £ (8 euros) pour les filles, soit un écart de 12%.

Un chiffre sans doute à relativiser, toutefois. En 2015, l’écart garçons/filles était quasi-inexistant : 1,2%. Reste que la tendance apparaît, chaque année, toujours favorable aux garçons. En 2014, l’écart à leur avantage était de 5%, comme en 2013, de 6% en 2012.

L’enquête de 2015 relevait aussi que les parents demandaient davantage aux garçons qu’aux filles d’effectuer des tâches (non précisées) en échange de cet argent de poche : 22% d’entre eux doivent donner du leur, contre 19% d’entre elles. Mais en 2014, c’était l’inverse : 28% des filles étaient sollicitées, contre 21% des garçons. Des chiffres très fluctuants, donc.

Au fil des années, une seule tendance reste relativement stable : les garçons sont pourtant plus nombreux à estimer qu’ils ne reçoivent pas assez (en 2016, c’est le cas de 44% d’entre eux, contre 39% des filles).

En janvier dernier, à Davos, Sheryl Sandberg évoquait le concept de « toddler wage gap », qu’on pourrait traduire par « inégalités salariales dès le berceau ». L’auteure de Lean In expliquait que les différentes attentes et attitudes à l’égard des hommes et des femmes dans le monde du travail sont inscrites dès l’enfance, au sein de la famille : « Nous assignons des tâches à nos enfants [en fonction de leur sexe] aux Etats-Unis, et ça peut être pire dans d’autres endroits du monde… les garçons sortent les poubelles, ce qui prend moins de temps que faire la vaisselle, et ils reçoivent plus d’argent de poche que les filles. »

#argent #discrimination #éducation #sexisme #genre #enfance

How to write an anti-feminist profile in six easy steps
▻https://medium.com/athena-talks/how-to-write-an-anti-feminist-profile-in-six-easy-steps-14ca9b885f39
Ce qui est drôle dans cet article c’est la naïveté de son autrice. Aujourd’hui, ça n’arriverait pas, non, non.

So today, in this brave new era of feminist hashtags such as #everydaysexism, #rapecultureiswhen, and #freethenipple; of online publications such as Lenny, Jezebel, Bitch, Bust, Rookie, Feministe, Feministing; of smart feminist role models such as Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Amy Schumer, Lena Dunham, Beyoncé, Cheryl Strayed, Taylor Swift, Roxane Gay, Jill Soloway, Sheryl Sandberg, shonda rhimes, Jennifer Lawrence, Eva Longoria, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi, Emma Watson, Meg Wolitzer, Katie Roiphe, Rachel Sklar, Ayelet Waldman, Nell Scovell, Liza Featherstone, and Angelina Jolie — just to name a few! — all of whom are out there, in one way or another, speaking the formerly unspeakable, I present, from its analog vault, this ancient artifact of anti-feminist rhetoric, to remind us all that, just fifteen years ago today, it was okay, in a mainstream publication, to blame a woman for her rape and call her a slut.

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*BaFqL3wAlTs_uH4qLkCHHw.jpeg

Pando : #Silicon_Valley vs Civilization
▻https://pando.com/2015/11/17/silicon-valley-vs-civilization/446c5504d796dfc506200e27a414235ccdd356dd

https://assets.pando.com/uploads/hug.jpg

Late in September, Mark Zuckerberg was pictured hugging India prime minister Narendra Modi at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters.

About the same time, on the other side of the world in Modi’s India, a Hindu lynch mob broke into a local Muslim family’s home and bludgeoned to death 50-year-old Mohammad Akhlaq by smashing in his skull, and then dragged him through the streets of Bisara, a village just 30 miles north of the capital New Delhi. The mob also bashed in his 22-year-old son’s head, leaving him in a coma with severe brain damage, and sexually assaulted the dead man’s daughter.

It was just the latest in a series of increasingly gruesome attacks by Hindu extremists, reportedly inspired and encouraged by Modi’s far-right political party, and affiliated grassroots organizations like the notorious RSS, a paramilitary group established in the 1920s explicitly modeled after Mussolini’s and Hitler’s paramilitaries, through the ranks of which Modi rose to power. For weeks, Modi kept menacingly quiet about the lynching, one of several this year, while his ministers and party officials fanned the flames.

Modi’s culture minister dismissed the lynching as an “accident” in which no one was at fault — even though a local Hindu temple priest admitted he organized the mob at his temple through announcements over the loudspeaker falsely accusing the only Muslim family in the village of killing a cow. Modi’s culture minister then claimed that the father had died of “shock” after being wrongly told that his son had been killed. This is the father whose head was crushed by bricks in front of his family, and whose body was dragged through the streets of the village.

Other members of Modi’s party threatened riots and worse if any of the lynch mob murderers were prosecuted. Another BJP party official called for the prosecution of the Muslim family’s survivors for allegedly killing the cow.

After two weeks, Modi finally issued a statement so vague and tepid that it worked more like gasoline than cold water. Which was exactly the point. As many have explained already, it was Modi himself who began exploiting cow-slaughtering and beef-eating as a way to whip up hatred and rearrange the political divisions along communal religious lines rather than along class and caste lines.

(For an excellent rundown of how Modi has spent years cultivating and whipping up communal violence with speeches about minorities slaughtering cows and political rivals waging a “pink revolution” [i.e. raw meat] read this Quartz article, “How Narendra Modi spread anti-beef hysteria in India”.)

While Silicon Valley swoons over Modi’s talk of Digital India and SmartCities and bullet trains and the rest, back at home Modi has talked up a very different and very violent, far-right game. And it seems just about everyone in the world who isn’t a far-right Hindu chauvinist understands just how bad and how dangerous Modi is. 

Everyone, that is, apart from Silicon Valley’s “smartest guys in the room.”

The New York Times editorial board has been sounding the alarm over Modi’s dangerous lean towards violent sectarianism, authoritarianism and censorship for the past half year (see here, here, here, here, and here). Meanwhile, India under Modi now leads the world in Facebook censorship, and well surpassed Putin in shutting down progressive western NGOs and foundations (excluding Omidyar Network, which has played a hugely supportive role in helping Modi to power). Indian Nobel laureate Amartya Sen was forced out as chancellor of Nalanda University, set up by a consortium of Asian governments on the site of what was one of the oldest universities in the world, as Modi’s allies have cracked down on academics and intellectuals across the country who don’t adhere to the ruling party’s line. In an unprecedented protest for India, dozens of leading writers have been returning the most prestigious literary award from India’s National Academy of Letters, citing intolerance and violence against intellectuals and minorities.

Salman Rushdie spoke about what writers are facing in India under Modi:

“There are attacks on ordinary liberties, the ordinary right to assembly, the ordinary right to organize an event in which people can talk about books and ideas freely and without hostility.”
Last month, Rushdie tweeted,

“Alarming times for free expression in India.”
And it isn’t just intellectuals and minorities who have been complaining. The head of India’s central bank, Raghuram Rajan—long a respected favorite of the global neoliberal elites, and a quiet supporter of Modi’s election victory—made a rare and unusual public criticism of Modi’s intolerance. And Moodys, the ratings agency, issued a warning to Modi that his ruling party’s violent intolerance could jeopardize business and investments.

None of this, however, seems to have put even the slightest damper on Silicon Valley’s love affair with their favorite world leader.

It’s not hard to imagine how Zuckerberg’s photo gleefully bro-hugging the far-right Indian leader — or Pierre Omidyar’s top India partner in Omidyar Network becoming Modi’s Minister for Finance after spending years helping to elect Modi using his Omidyar perch — will come back to haunt them.

Zuckerberg especially should be worried. There are those rare photos in history that can capture something dark and contrary that can never be erased from a public figure’s image: Donald Rumsfeld shaking Saddam’s hand a few years before the Iraqi dictator gassed Kurdish villages; Milton Friedman advising Gen. Pinochet even as his concentration camps were torturing tens of thousands of Chilean students, intellectuals and labor union activists.

Ignorance is no defense; particularly when you pride yourself in being boy-geniuses, with the best information of anyone in the world. Silicon Valley’s Modi problem is apparent to everyone in the world but Silicon Valley’s billionaires. Now, even Modi’s own citizens in India are revolting against him. In the recent election in the state of Bihar, Modi’s party suffered a shocking, crushing defeat to a socialist-led rival. In the campaign before the election, Modi and his top party officials tried inciting communal violence for electoral gain, but locals overwhelmingly rejected it. Now Modi’s own party is openly criticizing him.

It’s not like Pando hasn’t been warning about the Modi danger since he was first elected in May 2014. Modi crossed our radar precisely because he was such a favorite of so many big-name Silicon Valley leaders — Pierre Omidyar, Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Sheryl Sandberg, Tim Cook. . . .

And yet, what we’re seeing is that one of the most divisive, intolerant and dangerous leaders in the world has charmed the socks off of Silicon Valley’s best and brightest, against all information and opinion and evidence out there. Our tech leaders are literally the last people in the world to get it.

Quand les biais se retournent contre nous - New York Times
▻http://alireailleurs.tumblr.com/post/105590715866

Adam Grant (@adammgrant), professeur à la Wharton School de l’université de Pennsylvanie et auteur de Give & Take, et Sheryl Sandberg (@sherylsandberg), directrice des opérations de Facebook et fondatrice de LeanIn, un réseau pour promouvoir la réussite des femmes, viennent d’entamer une passionnante série sur la discrimination à l’encontre des femmes au travail pour le New York Times. Le premier volet de leur enquête revient sur les biais de #genre et commence par évoquer une petite histoire assez connue. 

"Un père et son fils ont un accident de voiture. Le père est tué et le fils gravement blessé. Le fils est transporté à l’hôpital où le chirurgien déclare : « je ne peux pas opérer, parce que ce garçon est mon fils ». 

40 à 75% des gens ont du mal à comprendre cette histoire. Et ceux qui la résolvent ont (...)

#cognition #psychologie #économie_comportementale