Facebook Scraps Plans For AI Concierge In Messenger

Facebook's standalone, concierge bot M will soon be no more.

On January 19, Facebook is sunsetting the initial version of M, which has been available in closed beta since fall 2015. M's context-based suggestions will live on inside Messenger conversations, but the original concept for a personal, AI-powered assistant that can perform actions on your behalf appears finished.

The company says M — which was able to make restaurant reservations, book plane tickets and, for a short time, draw pictures — has largely served its purpose.

“We launched this project to learn what people needed and expected of an assistant, and we learned a lot,” Facebook said in a statement to BuzzFeed News. “We're taking these useful insights to power other AI projects at Facebook. We continue to be very pleased with the performance of M suggestions in Messenger, powered by our learnings from this experiment.”

This is something of a change in course as Facebook clearly hoped to roll M out broadly when the feature first went into beta. “I think we have a good chance [at scaling], otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it,” Facebook Messenger head David Marcus told BuzzFeed News in November 2015.

Now, a few years later, the company seems content with a more dialed-back approach: “M suggestions,” an M-trained feature that hops into Messenger conversations and suggests certain actions based on context. It prods you to share your location when someone asks “Where are you?” or offers simple pre-written replies within conversations, and more. But while M could perform tasks (like arguing with your cable company) M suggestions is simply a contextual recommendation feature.

M suggestions in action

M's AI system was supposed to learn from interactions with humans. When people interacted with the bot, the system would provide a response which was then reviewed by a contractor. If the AI-generated message made sense, the contractor would pass it along to the person conversing with M, indicating to the AI it was a good response. When the message didn't make sense, the contractor would write a new message and send that one, indicating to the AI that there was a better way to answer the query.

Facebook believed that with enough experience and tweaking, it might be possible to someday roll M out to its broader user base. But ultimately, whatever happened on the backend gave Facebook reason to reconsider. The company invested serious resources in the project — M and the contractors behind it spent more than two years responding to queries 24/7. Facebook says it will offer new roles to those contractors now that the project is winding down and it has plenty of openings; it's in the process of adding 4,000 content moderators to its current staff of 3,500.

So M, the concierge, is dead. But for a moment, it was a delightful, occasionally eerie peek into a future that's perhaps a bit further away than its creators hoped.

When M debuted, it was mind blowing:

It drew some incredible pictures (or, more accurately, the humans behind it drew them):

M

It sent parrots to a rival news organization:

Cara Rose DeFabio

And it deftly parried human attempts to break its will:

In April 2016, when Facebook began talking about opening M's technology to developers, rather than continuing it as an internal project, the writing was on the wall: M was on the way out. It lasted just another year and a half.

Looking back, perhaps M was a relic of a more optimistic technological moment. Back in 2015, Facebook could pour resources into artificial intelligence moonshots without a second thought. Indeed, in 2016 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg even made his annual challenge entirely about building his own, personal AI (he succeeded).

But now that Facebook's platform has been undermined by fake news, graphic violent content, and a Kremlin-linked campaign to sow chaos ahead of the US presidential election, there are more pressing issues. In 2018, Zuckerberg's challenge is working to fix its most serious problems such as abuse, hate, and foreign interference.

A conversation with M from April 2016

Quelle: <a href="Facebook Scraps Plans For AI Concierge In Messenger“>BuzzFeed

Warnings Are Being Made Against Eating Romaine Lettuce After A Big E. Coli Outbreak

Ruth Hartnup / Via Flickr: ruthanddave

Consumer Reports is advising people to avoid romaine lettuce after an E. coli outbreak that sickened at least 17 people in the US and 41 people in Canada since November. One person in the US and one in Canada have died.

Canadian health authorities said “exposure to romaine lettuce has been identified as the source of the outbreak.” While the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has “not identified a source of the infections,” it said, “preliminary results show that the type of E. coli making people sick in both countries is closely related genetically, meaning the ill people are more likely to share a common source of infection.”

James Rogers, director of Food Safety and Research at Consumer Reports, a consumer advocacy group, said in a post, “Even though we can’t say with 100% certainty that romaine lettuce is the cause of the E. coli outbreak in the US, a greater degree of caution is appropriate given that lettuce is almost always consumed raw.”

E. coli infections are commonly linked to raw vegetables. The bacteria live in the intestines of livestock like cattle and poultry and can contaminate fruits and vegetables through soil, water, animals, or manure, as well as during the handling, storing, and transporting process, or during meal prep. Symptoms include severe stomach cramps, diarrhea (often bloody), and vomiting, and the worst infections can cause kidney failure and death.

Last year, there was an E. coli outbreak linked to I.M. Healthy brand SoyNut Butter, and in 2016, Gold Medal brand flour was blamed for sickening 63 people. In 2015, an outbreak was traced back to the burrito chain Chipotle.

Chipotle Sales Are Tumbling, As E. Coli Outbreak Worsens

Two People Have Died After Eating Trendy Cheese Made From Raw Milk

Quelle: <a href="Warnings Are Being Made Against Eating Romaine Lettuce After A Big E. Coli Outbreak“>BuzzFeed

A Trademark War Almost Tore Apart The Adult Baby Community

Rearz brand diapers for adults.

rearz.ca

A company that makes diapers for the adult baby/diaper lover fetish community (known as ABDL) gave up on its attempt to trademark the term “ABDL” on Thursday after message boards for the community exploded in anger last week.

Rearz, a Canadian-based supplier of adult diapers with cutesy patterns and other adult baby accessories, like pacifiers, told BuzzFeed News, “we had no malicious or strange intentions in trying to register it, but obviously it struck a nerve with people. This is a community we love and serve, and we don't want to make people feel less valuable.”

Adult babies/diaper lovers are, as their name suggests, adults who enjoy role-playing as babies or simply wearing diapers. For some people, this is sexual; for others, it’s not. There’s a wide spectrum of ABDLs — some people want to role-play as babies; some are only interested in the diapers and not the rest of the age-play. Some want to wear the diapers, some want to just see others wearing them. There are teen ABDLs and older ones, and the community includes people of all gender identities and sexual orientations.

Rearz filed to trademark “ABDL” in October 2017, but it was only this week that someone in the community noticed. At this discovery, the /r/ABDL subreddit filled with angry threads about Rearz’s trademark filings. “This is scummy. Period,” wrote one user. In another thread, angry ABDL redditors planned to ruin Rearz’s standing on Facebook by rating it one star on its business page. On a forum for adult babies called ADISC.org, one adult baby said, “Rearz is now off my shopping list.” People even made memes about the scandal.

reddit.com

The owner of Rearz, a woman named Laurie who asked to use her first name only to protect her family’s privacy, says this is all a misunderstanding. After learning of the community outrage, Rearz wrote a now-deleted blog post on its website explaining that it filed for the trademark to help the company’s online sales:

“Over the last several years we have faced many challenges using the term ABDL in major online marketplaces. We have ads and accounts permanently blocked on Facebook, eBay, Kijiji, Google ads with payment processors and more simply from using the term.”

Laurie said that, starting about two years ago, eBay, which had previously accounted for about 20% of her company’s business, started taking down items because it classified them as “adult content.” Sometimes Rearz’s listings for items like adult diapers and adult-size baby clothes would be allowed to stay up, but certain keywords would get the stuff delisted. eBay does allow adult items to be sold, but its policy isn’t specific about ABDL items.

In the past, Rearz’s credit card processor for its website, as well as PayPal, blacklisted Rearz. Credit card processors have varying policies about whether they will take on clients that sell adult items or pornography. Facebook has also removed Rearz’s ads. Currently, Rearz sells directly from its website, and people can visit its brick-and-mortar location outside Toronto.

Laurie believes that if she trademarked the term “ABDL,” it would help keep her ads and eBay listings online. “In order to be able to push back to some of these larger corporations that are blacklisting it, we can say, ‘hey, this isn’t just a term; this is a trademark term we have,’” Laurie told BuzzFeed News. “Because it becomes your brand name, and they don’t blacklist brand names. If we don’t have it as a brand name, then we have nothing to stand on.”

Rearz also claims that it had no plans to enforce the trademark in a way that would hurt the community. Its blog post says, “we promise to always be good stewards of the mark and to use it to build and improve the community.”

Joshua Jarvis, a trademark lawyer at the firm Foley Hoag, points out that “[Rearz’s] purported willingness ‘to allow others to have free use of the ABDL trademark’ doesn’t seem consistent with trademark ownership, which as you may know requires that a trademark owner diligently police and enforce its trademark rights so as to avoid consumer confusion.”

Rearz also pointed out they’re not the first to trademark the term — another seller, TheABDLShop.com had already trademarked the term “The ABDL Shop” for the use of selling apparel. But that trademark has some legal quirks. In their filing, TheABDLShop.com’s lawyer says that “ABDL” has no significance or meaning, even though it is a somewhat well-known term in a community of people. It’s possible that Rearz’s trademark application would have been rejected since the term is well known for a community of people interested in the world of diapers.

Several hours after BuzzFeed News spoke with Laurie about the ABDL community wrath, she told us that she had read through the message boards and decided to drop the trademark. “These are customers we care deeply about, and we don’t want to make them feel like we’re trying to take something away from them that they value.”

Quelle: <a href="A Trademark War Almost Tore Apart The Adult Baby Community“>BuzzFeed

Twitter Just Explained Why It Doesn't Block World Leaders Like Trump

Alex Kantrowitz

On Friday, amid increasingly vocal calls for the company to ban President Donald Trump from its service, Twitter defended its policies against censoring world leaders on its platform.

“Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial Tweets would hide important information people should be able to see and debate,” the company wrote in a blog post. “It would also not silence that leader, but it would certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.”

The post didn't call out Trump or the increasingly vocal protests by name.

Twitter also did not say definitively that it would never ban Trump, or any other world leader. “We review Tweets by leaders within the political context that defines them, and enforce our rules accordingly,” its post said. The post, headlined “World Leaders on Twitter,” also did not define what a world leader is.

In recent months, people have been protesting outside Twitter's headquarters and demanding that the company ban Trump. On Wednesday, protesters projected angry messages on Twitter's headquarters after Trump taunted North Korea leader Kim Jong Un about the size, power, and operational status of his “Nuclear Button.”

This wasn't Trump's first provocative tweet aimed at North Korea. In September, Trump seemed to threaten the annihilation of the country, tweeting: “Just heard Foreign Minister of North Korea speak at U.N. If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket Man, they won't be around much longer!” North Korea said the tweet was a declaration of war.

Here's the full blog post:

There’s been a lot of discussion about political figures and world leaders on Twitter, and we want to share our stance.

Twitter is here to serve and help advance the global, public conversation. Elected world leaders play a critical role in that conversation because of their outsized impact on our society.

Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial Tweets would hide important information people should be able to see and debate. It would also not silence that leader, but it would certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.

We review Tweets by leaders within the political context that defines them, and enforce our rules accordingly. No one person's account drives Twitter’s growth, or influences these decisions. We work hard to remain unbiased with the public interest in mind.

We are working to make Twitter the best place to see and freely discuss everything that matters. We believe that’s the best way to help our society make progress.

Quelle: <a href="Twitter Just Explained Why It Doesn't Block World Leaders Like Trump“>BuzzFeed

Fire And Fury Is The First Book Of The Post-Truth Social Media Era

Via Facebook

Fire and Fury, the controversial Trump White House tell-all by Michael Wolff may very well be the first book to achieve best-seller status by virtue of viral Twitter screenshot.

Since the moment the first quotes from the book leaked online via The Guardian, social media has been flooded by big blocks of Wolff’s prose excerpted from advance copies of the book and magazine excerpts. For days now, the hunks of text, each one a different incendiary quote or observation from the tome, have been screenshotted and breathlessly shared by journalists, pundits and activists on either side of the aisle.

The result is a political Rorschach test of sorts. For those on the left, Wolff’s observations are vindication: reported proof of any number of long-suspected, but unproven theories. Bannon thinks talks with Russia were treasonous! The president’s own staff think he’s mentally unstable! Trump never wanted to be president! His wife hates him! The commander-in-chief spends his evenings eating cheeseburgers in bed and screaming at the television! Similarly, Trump’s most ardent online defenders have taken to sharing chunks of the book in an effort to discredit its claims. Liberal fan fiction! Of course the president knows who John Boehner is! What about Hillary's health?!

Adding to the drama are questions of the author himself, a controversial media gadfly with a dubious reputation that includes allegations as to whether his reporting can be trusted. Errors spotted by journalists and pundits of all political persuasions have already cast doubt on what’s true in Fire and Fury and what has been inferred or even imagined by Wolff cobbling together unconfirmed anecdotes and rumored speculation.

All of which makes Wolff’s book the perfect chronicle for 2018’s fractured and toxic media ecosystem. More than that, Fire and Fury is, in many ways, the first real book of the post-truth hyperpartisan social media era: an incendiary piece of factually debatable content that’s perfectly engineered for virality and, depending on your side, a confirmation of every politically motivated suspicion.

The most obvious online comparison for Wolff’s book might be the hyperpartisan Facebook pages, which became infamous during and after the 2016 election for, as the New York Times’ John Herrman wrote, “cherry-picking and reconstituting the most effective tactics and tropes from activism, advocacy and journalism into a potent new mixture.” Like these pages, which are painstakingly optimized to appeal to partisan emotions (and share widely), Fire and Fury blends honest reporting — real access and real quotes — with gossip, rumor and, most importantly, a feeling: a bone-deep suspicion fueled by endless reporting and coverage whose confirmation is often just out of reach. Some of the screenshots are even reminiscent of 2016's more conspiratorial posts (if you're eagerly tweeting screenshots and claiming with certainty that Trump has dementia, are you that different from your uncle sharing fake Facebook news of a Clinton health crisis?). To those who’ve long-suspected the Trump White House is even more dysfunctional than has been reported, Wolff’s book does more than just scratch the itch — it’s not just true, it’s truer than true.

You can see this on Twitter where journalists are grasping publicly with Wolff’s reporting and trying to make sense of what to believe. Earlier this week political columnist Ana Marie Cox mused that “My guess about accuracy of Wolff’s book: It’s based on *something.* I believe with my whole heart Trump is in bed by 6:30, randomly calling people he thinks are his friends and gossiping about other people he thinks are his friends. They are the sources. They are not his friends.” Similarly, in a subsequent thread, Cox and writer Mary H.K. Choi grappled with the central issue of the contested claims in the book: their total plausibility. “The three screens plus cheeburger is SO plausible,” Choi tweeted. To which Cox replied, “I can make myself sick thinking about it, it sounds so true.”

To anyone following — and trusting — the palace intrigue reporting coming from the White House in 2017, the book sounds so true. Like a good post from a hyperpartisan Facebook page or a viral twitter pundit, Fire and Fury gives just enough credible evidence to support some of its astonishing claims before moving into the territory of wishful thinking; It muddies the waters just enough to make them virtually impossible to debunk or fact check. As the Times’ Maggie Haberman — whose reporting from inside Trump’s inner circle has helped add plausibility to even the most salacious claims in Wolff’s book — remarked on Twitter “even if some things are inaccurate/flat-out false, there’s enough notionally accurate that people have difficulty knocking it down.”

Thanks to a deeply fractured media environment, in which pro- and anti-Trumpers each live in parallel universes of information, Fire and Fury works on all the same levels for the far-right. Just as the book fulfills many a liberal fantasy about the Trump administration, its publication is in many ways a justification of the pro-Trump media’s long-standing criticisms of the mainstream media. While the left got the reporting it craved, the right got what seemed to them like confirmation that mainstream reporting is biased, deceitfully obtained, salacious, and loose with the truth but hidden behind the veneer of rigorous reporting. Previous claims — from mainstream media outlets, no less — that Wolff “acknowledges that conventional reporting isn’t his bag” are bandied about on Twitter as proof that the author has no scruples. Sloppy factual errors are pointed out in support of the argument that none of the book’s claims can be trusted. Trump acolytes mentioned in the book have claimed — in viral tweets of their own —that the book is so much more fake news — I was there; It didn't happen that way. Each denial becomes its own viral piece of evidence of a corrupt and reckless mainstream media.

Since portions of it first began appearing online, Fire and Fury has sucked all the air out of a very mercurial news cycle. In a matter of days, it's prompted extensive discussion across all possible media; it's caused the president to viciously disavow his former chief strategist and call for the book to be banned; it's reignited a new narrative around Trump’s mental health and its effects on his presidency. And yet, despite all the upheaval, nobody seems any closer to knowing what in the book is true and what’s not. But that’s not stopping anyone from sharing its revelations.

Which is why Fire and Fury might be the perfect chronicle for not just the Trump era, but the social media era entire. For Wolff’s book, the truth seems almost a secondary concern to what really matters: engagement. In a hyperpartisan online age, Wolff seems to have understood for years what the Facebook’s hyperpartisan page operators found out in 2016. “The point,” Herrman wrote about thoe pages for the Times, “is not to get them to click on more stories or to engage further with a brand. The point is to get them to share the post that’s right in front of them. Everything else is secondary.”

Now, in the post-truth Facebook era, it appears the same can be true for books like Wolff’s as well. On Wednesday — as the leaked excerpts rolled out across the internet — Fire and Fury went from number 48,449 on Amazon's best selling books list to number one.

Quelle: <a href="Fire And Fury Is The First Book Of The Post-Truth Social Media Era“>BuzzFeed

Myspace Looked Like It Was Back. Actually, It Was A Pawn In An Ad Fraud Scheme.

Myspace — the iconic social network of the early 2000s — seemed to be experiencing a resurgence this summer when millions of visitors flocked to its new video page, potentially generating a wave of ad revenue for the site’s troubled parent company, Time Inc.

But Myspace shut the page down this week after a BuzzFeed News investigation revealed that the surge in traffic came primarily from suspect sources that racked up fraudulent ad impressions. Myspace says it was completely unaware of and didn’t profit from any fraudulent traffic or impressions, and that the video page in question was hosted and managed by a partner and not by Myspace itself.

“Myspace did not agree to, participate in or condone any ad fraud activity,” said Daniella Krieger, the VP of marketing and communications for Viant, the Time Inc. subsidiary that acquired Myspace in 2011 for $35 million.

The fraud on the Myspace video page was part of a larger scheme that also found a home on GateHouse Media, a publisher of more than 600 local newspapers in 36 states. The video pages hosted on roughly 150 of its websites also saw a surge in suspect traffic and associated fraudulent ad impressions. GateHouse told BuzzFeed News it was not aware of any fraud being committed, and like Myspace it said the video pages in question were operated by a partner.

This is the latest in an ongoing catalog of fraud in programmatic advertising that continues to shake confidence in the digital media industry. Last week a BuzzFeed News investigation revealed that ad industry insiders profited from a network of “zombie websites” that used special code to trigger an avalanche of fraudulent views of video ads. The growing awareness of ad fraud among brands and agencies is causing major advertisers to pull back budgets and demand more accountability from their partners. Industry leaders expect more than $16 billion to be stolen by fraudsters this year alone.

Prior to being shut down this week, the Myspace video page — trendingvideos.myspace.com — streamed videos licensed from reputable publishers. But for months the ad fraud investigators at Social Puncher, a consulting firm, worked with BuzzFeed News reporters to track and document significant amounts of suspicious traffic being referred to that page as well as other publishers.

Once on the page, this traffic triggered automatic redirects and page refreshes that generated massive amounts of video ad impressions without any human involvement. It’s similar to how the “zombie websites” generated ad revenue, and represents a new form of ad fraud that researchers say can rack up impressions quickly and under the radar.

Audience data from web analytics firm SimilarWeb shows that between May and the end of September, trendingvideos.myspace.com received 9.7 million visits that generated over 450 million pageviews. That video page did not exist prior to April.

Fraud detection vendor DoubleVerify also independently identified the same scheme being run on Myspace and GateHouse subdomains as part of a separate investigation, and the company shared its findings with BuzzFeed News.

Alain Begun, the vice president of marketing for GateHouse, told BuzzFeed News the company is in the process of shutting down the relevant video pages on its websites and was only made aware of the issue last week when DoubleVerify warned ad exchanges about the traffic on them.

“Fraud follows the money.”

“We take any alleged impropriety very seriously and have been engaged in discussion with our programmatic exchange partners,” he said.

The focus on video ads in this scheme reinforces how important video has become for publishers — and how it can cause them to launch questionable products in the hunt for video impressions and revenue. Thanks to higher ad rates for video and an appetite for the format among brands, many publishers have enacted a so-called pivot to video strategy to capture the audience and ad dollars available. And so have fraud operations, according Wayne Gattinella, the CEO of DoubleVerify.

“Fraud follows the money. Video CPMs [cost per thousand impressions] are much higher than display, so [fraudsters are] clearly focused on where the larger dollars go,” he told BuzzFeed News. This particular fraud operation is designed “to capitalize on this incredible demand for video,” he said.

Myspace and GateHouse both point to audience vendors, video platform partners, and external malicious actors as those accountable for any fraud taking place on the video subdomains. The partners in turn say their traffic was verified by reputable verification companies and that they too are unaware of any fraud taking place, or any system that triggers automatic redirects or similar behavior.

But Social Puncher, DoubleVerify, and a third independent ad fraud researcher separately documented the malicious automatic redirects and refreshes taking place on these websites. Social Puncher alone recorded more than 200 hours of video of ads being fraudulently displayed on the Myspace and GateHouse subdomains. This footage often shows multiple video players playing at once on a single page, redirects happening between different websites without any user action, and/or editorial content being cut off by automated page refreshes in order to display more ads. All of the aforementioned activity is fraudulent because it takes place without any human activity.

“You’ve got websites that are getting some sort of inbound traffic and then this begins a cycle of autoplaying videos with ad pages refreshing and sometimes redirecting to other pages,” Roy Rosenfeld, DoubleVerify’s VP of product management, told BuzzFeed News.

This video shows what the experience looked like on the Myspace subdomain:

View Video ›

video-player.buzzfeed.com

Social Puncher recorded ads being shown during fraudulent sessions for major brands such as Coca-Cola, Fios (Verizon), State Farm, Hershey’s, the Home Depot, Chase, and at least 14 brands belonging to Procter & Gamble, such as Tide and Always.

Social Puncher

Krieger of Myspace told BuzzFeed News the trending videos subdomain was set up and hosted by a company called ScreenRush in order to test driving paid traffic to the site. The traffic was to be sourced from a website called Swagbucks that enables people to earn reward points for engaging in activities such as watching online videos.

“We contracted to purchase a limited test of traffic specifically from Swagbucks through a company called ScreenRush,” said Krieger, adding that the video subdomain “was natively hosted by ScreenRush and integrated into the Swagbucks site.”

Myspace’s goal was to pay less to acquire traffic from Swagbucks than it would earn by showing those people video ads.

This week BuzzFeed News and Social Puncher provided Myspace with information, including data from SimilarWeb, showing that hundreds of millions of pageviews had been generated on the video site from sources other than Swagbucks.

“After reviewing all of the information you provided combined with our own internal review, we have suspended the test with Swagbucks and ScreenRush, effective immediately,” said Krieger.

Similar to Myspace, Begun told BuzzFeed News that Tout, an online video platform, operates the video subdomains attached to roughly 150 of its websites. Begun said GateHouse is in the process of ending its relationship with Tout.

“We’ve been working to wind down our relationship with Tout for close to a year based on player performance issues and a poor user experience including slow load times which affected overall page load times,” he said.

As part of the relationship with Tout, GateHouse earned revenue from the ads being shown in the Tout video player. Begun said the traffic on the Tout video pages was low, as was the resulting revenue. Both GateHouse and Myspace say they were not aware of any significant spikes in traffic on these pages.

“We aren’t privy to how traffic is driven to those pages,” Begun said. “That’s probably a question better fielded thru Tout.”

“Nobody wants to disclose or be responsible for where the money of these advertisers went.”

In statements to BuzzFeed News, Tout and ScreenRush both say the traffic coming to the video pages they manage is verified by multiple reputable traffic verification companies, and they too deny any knowledge of, or participation in, fraud.

“We work closely with our publishing partner sites, brand safety vendors and multiple 3rd party verification services to confirm that Tout inventory consists of real users and is of premium quality,” wrote Trinh Bui, Tout's vice president of client services, in an email to BuzzFeed News.

Tout said it sourced some traffic for the GateHouse websites through ScreenRush, making the latter the only source of paid traffic for both Myspace and GateHouse video pages.

The finger-pointing between publishers and partners once fraud has been uncovered is common in the industry, according to Vlad Shevtsov, the director of investigations for Social Puncher. His company has been publishing fraud investigations at SadBotTrue.com for more than a year.

“Nobody wants to disclose or be responsible for where the money of these advertisers went,” Shevtsov told BuzzFeed News.

In order to execute the scheme, the suspicious traffic flowing to the video pages on Myspace and GateHouse sites was directed to special URLs that download code, which tells a web browser how long to stay on the page, when to refresh to start new ads, or when to trigger a redirect to another site in the fraud scheme so it can show video ads. The result was that the pages generated a massive number of video ad impressions with no human interaction. That’s fraud, according to definitions from the Media Rating Council, the key industry body.

The scheme is set up so a regular user visiting the websites in question is not exposed to the automatic redirects. A visitor to trendingvideos.myspace.com, for example, was shown a normal video player that displays ads only after the editorial content is completed. This is where the real traffic from Swagbucks or other reward sites was directed, researchers say.

“No user would actually spend time looking at that. A human being will not sit through this.”

But when the special URL is accessed on these subdomains, the experience is completely different. BuzzFeed News used URLs identified by Social Puncher and DoubleVerify to trigger the redirect scheme. In one case, the browser was redirected to trendingvideos.myspace.com where a video ad began to play. Over the ensuing minutes, ads played for Gillette, Spectrum (multiple times), the University of Phoenix, and for the upcoming Thor movie from Marvel Entertainment. The page automatically refreshed to show another ad before editorial content played, in effect creating a near-constant loop of ads. At times, more than one video played at the same time, further increasing the money being stolen.

“No user would actually spend time looking at that,” said Rosenfeld of DoubleVerify. “A human being will not sit through this.”

At the core of the scheme is technology that enables it to eliminate the need for human activity or even complicated bots in order to trigger ad impressions. Once a page is loaded the sites go on autopilot and rack up ad views in a constant loop until being redirected, or until a browser crashes.

It’s the same on GateHouse sites. Social Puncher and DoubleVerify separately analyzed the traffic flowing to the video subdomains on these sites and found they are benefitting from the same fraudulent traffic as Myspace. These video pages are in some cases responsible for the vast majority of traffic going to the entire site, though GateHouse says it does not factor this traffic into its audience reporting. (Myspace also said it did not install analytics tracking on its video subdomain due to the fact that it was controlled by ScreenRush.)

Still, the traffic is being measured by external analytics services. For example, the videos.salina.com page for the Salina Journal in Kansas is currently responsible for 92% of its total traffic, according to data from SimilarWeb.

Alexa, another web analytics service, shows a similar percentage. The chart showing the site’s Alexa traffic rank also illustrates how a recent surge in traffic to the video page led the Salina Journal to become one of the top 5,000 most-visited sites in the US:

Alexa

To put that into perspective, Salina has a population of just under 50,000 people, according to US Census data.

In the case of Myspace’s trending videos page, the influx of new traffic helped the site temporarily reverse an ongoing decline in its traffic rank:

Alexa

Notably, the vast majority of this new traffic to Myspace came from desktop users, which had previously made up a minority of Myspace’s visits. These new visitors also watched a huge number of videos and, by extension, ads on the videos page.

SimilarWeb found that from its launch to the end of September the average visitor to trendingvideos.myspace.com spent over 23 minutes and viewed more than 58 pages. To put that into perspective, SimilarWeb’s data for YouTube shows the average user spends 20 minutes and views an average of just under 10 pages. This means the Myspace video page run by ScreenRush almost instantly became more addictive than YouTube in terms of average time spent, and caused people to view more than five times the average number of pages.

Along with the high session time and number of pages viewed, SimilarWeb found that these new desktop visitors were referred from the same group of websites, and accounted for close to 100% of Myspace's referral traffic from May to September.

These sites had not previously referred significant traffic to Myspace. As a result, they provided the path that ad fraud researchers and BuzzFeed News followed to identify where the traffic is coming from. This helped determine whether it was the result of humans engaging with Myspace and other sites, or fraudulent traffic according to industry standards.

Prior to May, Myspace’s biggest sources of referral traffic were Wikipeda and PeekYou, an online people-search tool. “They were responsible for an average of 27% of the site's referral traffic between September and April,” according to a SimilarWeb report for BuzzFeed News. (Roughly half of Myspace’s total traffic comes from search, and another close to 30% of visitors go directly to Myspace.)

But in June and July, Wikipedia and PeekYou only accounted for a tiny percentage of all referral traffic because this new network of referral sites suddenly began throwing millions of desktop visitors and pageviews at the Myspace video page. (The company told BuzzFeed News its internal traffic logs and comScore reports did not reflect this increase in referral traffic. As noted, the video page was operated by ScreenRush and did not have Myspace analytics tracking installed.)

BuzzFeed News / SimilarWeb

The biggest group of these new referrers is more than 20 online arcade websites that were registered on similar dates and are clones of one another. They offer the same games and largely use the same website template, albeit with different colors. The source code of each site also includes the same boilerplate text in the description, “Welcome to SiteGenerator.” This shows they were all created using the same product.

Social Puncher

Traffic rank data from Alexa also shows that many of the arcade sites share identical patterns, suggesting they are receiving the exact same visitors at the exact same times, which researchers say is a telltale sign of fraudulent traffic. (Identical Alexa traffic rank patterns were also present in the sites exposed by BuzzFeed News last week.)

Social Puncher

Quelle: <a href="Myspace Looked Like It Was Back. Actually, It Was A Pawn In An Ad Fraud Scheme.“>BuzzFeed

Here's How Facebook Will Soon Let You See Who Paid For Political Ads

Facebook plans to make political advertisers register for the program, and will track down anyone trying to avoid inclusion.

Almost a month ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised in a Facebook Live video that the company would require a new level of transparency for political ads. This came in response to outcry over the company’s disclosure that Russian trolls bought more than 3,000 ads on the platform.

The known Russian troll factory spent more than $100,000 to buy the ads before and after the 2016 election. A portion of the ads were targeted by interest or geography, meaning that only the people who fit the ad parameters could see them in their News Feed.

After initially keeping them private, Facebook recently handed over the ads over to congressional investigators. And today it announced the specifics of how it plans to change the way political sponsored posts will be shown in the News Feed, and the information they will disclose.

Facebook: zuck

Facebook also announced a new measures that will affect all non-political sponsored posts. Every page will soon have a “View Ads” option that will enable you to see the current campaigns it has running.

This starts rolling out in Canada next month, and will eventually move to the US and other markets. This general ads page will only show current campaigns. But a Facebook executive said the company plans to build an archive for election ads.

“However, when we expand to the United States we plan to begin building an archive of federal-election related ads so that we can show both current and historical federal-election related ads,” wrote Rob Goldman, Facebook's VP of Ads, in a blog post provided to BuzzFeed News in advance.

The post said that Facebook's efforts to change political sponsored posts will begin in the US for the 2018 federal election cycle. It will then be rolled out in other countries. The election ad archive will be collected into four year cycle

Facebook

Once rolled out, political sponsored posts will carry a “Political Ad” label under the name of the page that placed it. There will also be an “i” icon you can click to reveal more information about the entity that paid for the ad.

Facebook

Once clicked, the “i” icon pops up a card of information about the purchaser, gives you a link to view their other ads, or enables you to follow them.

One big question is how Facebook will determine what is and isn't a political ad.

“As part of the documentation process, advertisers may be required to identify that they are running election-related advertising and verify both their entity and location,” Goldman wrote.

After a page is verified as a political advertiser, its ads will show the additional information about who they are, and their ads will go into a database of all election ads for that election. Facebook will also enable people to search and see how much money is being spent by the advertiser, the number of ad impressions being generated, and information about how ads were targeted.

As for pages that try to avoid being part of the political ads program and tracking, Facebook is planning to track them down.

“For political advertisers that do not proactively disclose themselves, we are building machine learning tools that will help us find them and require them to verify their identity,” Goldman wrote.

The company has not said whether it will roll out similar transparency features for sponsored posts on Instagram, which it also owns.

Facebook

Quelle: <a href="Here's How Facebook Will Soon Let You See Who Paid For Political Ads“>BuzzFeed

The SEC Just Fined A Unicorn Startup For The First Time

The Securities and Exchange Commission, which polices bad behavior by publicly traded companies, has for the first time taken action against a privately held Silicon Valley “unicorn” startup for misleading its investors, according to a release on Thursday.

The human resources startup Zenefits and its co-founder Parker Conrad have agreed to pay a combined $980,000 to settle accusations by the SEC that they made “materially false and misleading statements and omissions” to investors over their compliance with state insurance laws, the agency said.

The settlements, following separate deals with insurance regulators from 49 states and the District of Columbia, help Zenefits and Conrad conclude a nearly two-year legal cleanup that started after a BuzzFeed News report in November 2015.

Joshua Stein, Zenefits' general counsel, said in an emailed statement: “This settlement closes the chapter on a journey we began 18 months ago to transform Zenefits through new values and leadership. We are pleased that the SEC clearly acknowledged our cooperation, our extraordinary remedial efforts, and our commitment to compliance.”

Conrad, in a statement emailed by a spokesperson, said: “I’m pleased to have reached an agreement with the SEC regarding Zenefits, and I’m incredibly proud of what we built there and grateful to have worked with such a talented group of people.”

For the broader startup world, the Zenefits case is a clear sign that the SEC sees itself as a new cop on the Silicon Valley beat. Such an enforcement action by the agency against a prominent privately held startup appears to be unprecedented.

The SEC has relatively limited authority in the world of private companies; by law, it can only really police misrepresentations and fraud in the sale of private company stock. Historically, part of the reason the SEC has left startups alone is that investors in such companies are considered both wealthy and “sophisticated,” meaning they understand the risks and can take care of themselves. It's when a company goes public, this thinking goes, that it can pull a fast one on naive investors.

Zenefits and Conrad did not admit or deny the SEC's findings, according to the agency. The company agreed to pay $450,000 to the SEC — a small penalty compared with the over half a billion dollars it has raised. Conrad agreed to pay nearly $534,000, of which $160,000 is a penalty and $350,000 represents the disgorgement of ill-gotten gains.

Zenefits has separately agreed to pay over $11 million in penalties to state regulators, and — in deal with its investors last year — it agreed to reduce its valuation to $2 billion from $4.5 billion.

Zenefits co-founder and former CEO Parker Conrad.

Steve Jennings / Getty Images

The SEC previously cracked down on Silicon Valley a decade ago, after The Wall Street Journal revealed that tech companies were backdating stock option grants to increase CEO payouts. But the companies caught up in the options backdating scandal were all publicly traded.

The corporate world has since changed, with many significant tech companies choosing to remain private. The SEC telegraphed last year that it would be keeping a watchful eye on these unicorns — private companies worth at least $1 billion.

“It is axiomatic that all private and public securities transactions, no matter the sophistication of the parties, must be free from fraud,” Mary Jo White, then the SEC's boss, said in a speech in March 2016.

San Francisco-based Zenefits, a health insurance broker that makes human resources software for other startups, achieved its $4.5 billion valuation just two years after its 2013 debut. But in pursuit of rapid growth, Zenefits allowed employees to sell health insurance without the necessary state licenses. Conrad, further, created and shared with employees a program to cheat on California insurance broker licensing requirements. He was forced to resign as CEO in February 2016.

The SEC now asserts that Zenefits and Conrad, when they sold shares to investors in 2014 and 2015, failed to adequately disclose their knowledge of these compliance lapses. While investor documents in the 2015 financing included a reference to possible licensing issues, the SEC said the startup's disclosures were “misleading,” since they did not represent the full extent of the problem.

One investor in the 2015 financing round asked for more information about the licensing issue, according to the SEC, but Zenefits said in response that it was “above 90% compliance” at the time, and that any past violations could incur only small penalties between $5,000 and $10,000. In reality, the agency says, Zenefits lacked adequate licensing policies and had learned just a month earlier that employees had done business in Washington state without local licenses.

Conrad also sold $10 million of his personal shares to a big investor in 2015, but, according to the SEC, he didn't provide any disclosures about compliance beyond what investors were told in the primary financing rounds.

“Zenefits was not compliant with state insurance licensing laws, and its controls were insufficient to ensure compliance,” the SEC said in its order. “Zenefits and Conrad failed to fully disclose these facts to investors.”

Zenefits, the SEC noted, has since overhauled its compliance by implementing new controls, replacing top leadership, and requiring employees to complete training.

Conrad, for his part, has started a new company, Rippling, which stores worker information to help companies onboard new employees. He said in the emailed statement that he “could not be more excited about my new company.”

Zenefits may not be the last Silicon Valley unicorn to be chastised by the SEC. The agency has also been investigating whether the embattled blood-testing startup Theranos made deceptive statements to investors, The Wall Street Journal reported last year. The SEC hasn't announced any enforcement actions in that case.

An SEC investigation doesn't always result in enforcement. The agency looked into a product buyback program by the vegan mayo maker Hampton Creek but closed that inquiry this year.

Quelle: <a href="The SEC Just Fined A Unicorn Startup For The First Time“>BuzzFeed

Here's How To Report Someone For Harassing DMs On Instagram

At a recent press event, Instagram founder and president Kevin Systrom talked about how his impending fatherhood has informed his commitment to curbing abuse on the platform. “We want to build a world where my daughter can grow up and feel safe and not bullied,” Systrom said.

The company recently rolled out new features meant to protect users, including more comment moderation options, support for more languages for its AI-powered comment filter, and the ability to allow only the people you follow to comment on your public account.

But while this effort has focused on comments, there's a whole other place where harassment on Instagram often takes place: DMs. But reporting someone who's harassing you in private messages on Instagram is much more complicated than you might expect.

There's no obvious button to report a DM. You can report DMs, but the way you do it works differently than other harassment reporting features on the app. You have to do a “long tap” press over the message, and you'll see two options that pop up.

Press the actual message with your finger, and hold down for a few seconds. You’ll see two options pop up – Copy and Report.

Here's the other ways you might have encountered the “report” function:

1. To report someone's photo you see in your feed, you tap the “…” at the top corner, and the Report option pops up at the bottom.

2. To report a person in general, you tap the “…” at the top corner of their profile page.

3. To report an abusive comment on your own photo, you swipe sideways on the comment, and you get the option to delete it or report it.

4. To report or block a person from inside your DMs, tap the “i” at the top corner (but this will only report their photos, not their messages).

Note that NONE of these four options involve a long press! That's a totally weird different motion.

When I asked my fellow tech reporters here at BuzzFeed News if they could figure out how to report a private message on Instagram, only one out of 12 of them could figure it out. And these are people who are professional technology writers! In theory we're supposed to know this stuff!

In my humble opinion (ok, honestly not THAT humble) Instagram has fallen short of making an intuitive, obvious UI design that helps people report abusive messages.

Instagram does have some logic for this choice. A rep told BuzzFeed News that the reason for this was that the long press is a gesture used in other messaging apps (although it's not used anywhere else in Instagram). The idea was that people using DMs would be familiar with this as a messaging feature. Ok!

So even though the feature for reporting abusive messages isn't new, it's pretty likely you didn't know.

Stay safe out there, people!

giphy.com

Quelle: <a href="Here's How To Report Someone For Harassing DMs On Instagram“>BuzzFeed