Emojis Are Becoming Hyper-Realistic And That Is A Bad Thing

Via Twitter: @Opimi1

This week, Apple released a preview of iOS 10, which includes some big updates to some of your favorite emojis. There are a number of new additions (facepalm! selfie&033;) but the biggest change is largely aesthetic. Emojis are getting hyper-realistic.

Take this comparison of everyone’s favorite dancing lady emoji, who now has a lot more details like a mouth and nose and is now flashing what feels like maybe a weird amount of leg for an emoji:

Emojipedia

Or just have a look at what’s happened to the poor ambiguous canine, who, as if by some kind of demonic puberty, evolved over night into a formidable gray wolf:

And how about the newest emojis, like “female farmer” and “female firefighter,” which you’d be forgiven for mistaking for background extras in a forgettable Pixar film:

Apple is hardly alone in evolving its emojis from goofy yellow disembodied heads into increasingly lifelike, skeuomorphic three-dimensional characters. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter have consistently tweaked, detailed — and, in a few cases, completely overhauled — some of the original emojis.

And I, for one, am furious.

Things change. Software updates. But what’s happening to emojis represents the worst kind of gentrification of the internet. It’s unnecessary, sterilizing, and maybe even a little bit dangerous for the future of the beloved character set.

Arguably the biggest reason for emojis' success has to do with their lovable weirdness and limitations — the constraints that forced its users to get creative and turn emojis into a language of their own. Emoji originated in Japan, and its culturally specific character set, with inscrutable inclusions (at least to non-Japanese users) like a video game controller, two (two&033;) compact discs, a bunch of fax machines, and lots of plugs and microscopes and envelopes with arrows all over them made the glyphs feel like a cool, weird discovery. (There’s something genuinely delightful about a limited set of illustrations that decides it is absolutely crucial to immortalize the eggplant ahead of most other foods.)

“They are trying to hard to be something they will never be.”

More frequently though, emoji’s constraints led its earliest adopters to assign their own meaning to individual emojis — little iMessage Rorschach tests with hidden meanings to interpret. Some characters’ meanings evolved completely into new near-universal standards (the eggplant became a dick and the peach a butt, and the youngs giggled and sexted and all was good) while others took on their own significance as inside jokes or shorthand. Definitions varied with one important constant: Emojis were a fun, joyful emerging form of self-expression. Slowly, at first and then very quickly, emoji began to transcend its status as a set of strange little pictures and became something not unlike its own almost-language — by the vegetable sexters and for the vegetable sexters.

But the ambiguity that helped turn emoji into its own means of expression is being quickly eroded. In Apple’s latest update, the peach emoji has shed its cartoonish shape for a realistic fruit skin and detailed leafing. A crucial rotation of the peach has all but eliminated its cleft, thereby calling its near-universal status as a set of juicy glutes into question. Or, as one co-worker said, “It still looks like a butt, BUT *whispers* it&039;s no longer a booty.”

The same goes — though arguably to a lesser extent — with the canine emoji’s transformation; Apple has taken away the option to assign one’s own interpretation to the glyph by changing its design specifically so that it is now, undeniably, a wolf. And that sucks. Many emojis are best employed to to convey an abstract feeling, rather than a well-defined, literal thing; one colleague explained using the dancing lady to express “a sort of nonspecific joie de vivre.” Of course that’s harder to do now, she said, “now that she looks like a real-life salsa dancer with a face.” By removing all uncertainty, Apple — and all the other big tech emoji purveyors — have stripped emojis of the ambiguity and weirdness that made emojis so different and fun. Simply put: It’s impossible to make emojis your own when the meanings are being so clearly rewritten and defined.

And then there’s the addition of dozens and dozens of new, specific items like foods like the burrito or avocado and cultural norms like the selfie and the facepalm. These aren’t so much diversity initiatives as they are user requests but they, too, mark a shift in emojis from the symbolic to the literal — from fun hieroglyphics to something more like a complete language. A good bit of emojis&039; charm comes from using imprecise emojis to convey a feeling or object (one colleague pointed out a clever example on Venmo in which somebody used the green tea emoji as a stand-in for guacamole. Ingenuity&033;).

From a design standpoint, emoji’s realistic evolution feels corporate — another example of the technology’s evolution from grassroots art toward more professional, marketing department–approved images. The new images — especially many of the human emojis — feel not just sterilized but off-putting with their large, longing, unblinking eyes. One designer who has worked with emoji summed up the problem with the new emojis in two words: “uncanny valley.”

Jennifer 8. Lee, a Unicode emoji subcommittee member, suggested that the realism of the new emojis is a betrayal of the medium’s original promise. “As they get more sophisticated, they become more photo-like, but the whole idea is that they were in a place between letters and images,” she said. “They are trying to hard to be something they will never be.” It’s a notion that touches on the most frustrating part of these new changes, which is that we didn’t ask for this. It feels utterly inconceivable that a normal human at any point ever stared down at the red dancing lady on their phone, longingly wishing for her to sprout a nose and mouth.

Via maggiethevaliant.tumblr.com

As of now, the exact reasons for the changes are unclear, and Apple did not respond to questions about it. Jeremy Burge, a Unicode member who runs the exhaustive emoji blog Emojipedia, suggested suggested improving tech might be the reason behind the decision to re-draw. “It’s clear that Apple&039;s old emoji images weren’t scaling well to retina screens, with all kinds of blurry lines and odd shadows showing,” he said of the changes. Another possibility: Emojis on iOS 10 now display three times larger (another product tweak nobody asked for&033;), which means more room for unnecessary detail. There’s also speculation that the realism trend could be meant to create more differences between male and female emojis to make room for a third, gender-neutral emoji set.

Others suggest perhaps it’s an unforeseen result of emojis&039; (very welcome and universally praised) diversification — that adding new combinations of skin tones and gender has led to a demand for more detail, which, in turn, has rather bizarrely resulted in more careful shading and texturing on the pit of the avocado emoji. Indeed, it’s possible that the Unicode Consortium’s admirable decision to make emojis more representative of their users — and their desires (which include the addition of the burrito, the selfie, and avocado, among many others) opened the door for emojis&039; evolution for better and for worse.

Emojipoems / Via buzzfeed.com

But still, it’s hard not to stare into the dead eyes of the farmer emoji or count the meticulously shaded ruffles on dancing lady’s red dress and feel like something essential is being lost. One co-worker compared emoji&039;s changes to when worried parents got together and forced entire neighborhoods to have their children trick-or-treat in the broad daylight of the afternoon — sure, it maybe makes sense, and it’s a bit hard to claim it’s actively harmful, but it still sucks and undermines the original spirit of the thing.

This argument isn’t lost on those close to emoji world — Burge, for example, supports the new emojis, but is sympathetic toward these frustrations. “Apple’s quirky artwork was certainly one reason many people fell in love with [emojis],” he said. “Over time as the emoji set has become more diverse and more detailed, I can see how this in some ways is less fun, even if it does arguably make emoji more useful.”

The issue here is a feeling of a sort of remodeling that&039;s all too common with weird pockets of the internet and technology. It&039;s the sanding off of the edges and imperfections that gave shape to and defined emojis. Maybe we should have seen it coming: Emojis&039; explosive popularity meant not only more scrutiny but marketability. Custom emojis have become their own cottage industry; emojis have been made their way onto T-shirts and pillows and news organization front pages and, soon, the big screen. There’s an argument to be made that as with most beloved, insanely popular things online, the brands and corporations discovered emojis and pounced, making them more mainstream, while driving away their earlier devoted crowd.

But emoji’s case is different. Emojis are not some great unknown bar suddenly overrun by douches after an article in the paper, or a hilarious fringe meme ruined by seeing your Aunt share it on Facebook — emojis were already universal. But what made them special is that, unlike so many universal things, we got to decide what they meant and how to use them. Emojis are meaningful because they’re personal and they’re personal because they’re not clearly defined. And now that’s changing and it’s probably only a few months now before Exxon builds a VR simulation where I can visit EmojiLand™ and go ballroom dancing with Cheryl The Red Dress Lady™ and take up birdwatching with Timmy The Friendly Poop Emoji™. I dunno, man, I just don’t like it one bit.

Quelle: <a href="Emojis Are Becoming Hyper-Realistic And That Is A Bad Thing“>BuzzFeed

Here's What Some Women In Tech Would Tell The Next President

At Grace Hopper, an annual conference that celebrates women in tech, BuzzFeed&#8217;s own tech team asked fellow attendees what they thought our next president can do for women in STEM. Here&8217;s what they said.

What should the next president do for women in STEM?

Fifteen thousand women descended on Houston, TX last week to attend the Grace Hopper conference. The event, which has been taking place for more than 20 years, both celebrates the careers of women working in technology, and serves as a space to discuss the unique challenges faced by woman engineers, developers, coders, hackers, designers, programmers, product managers, and more.

Those challenges are significant. This year, a study using data from Glassdoor found that male computer programmers earn 28.3% more than their female counterparts. According to a report published by the Harvard Business Review, 41% of women end up abandoning careers in tech, compared to only 17% of men.

Five of us: Jane Kelly, Director of Data Products, Phil Wilson, GM of Minneapolis office, Paola Mata, iOS Engineer, Jennifer Wolner, Sr. Project Manager, and Swati Vauthrin, Director of Engineering, went to Grace Hopper to represent BuzzFeed. We had a few goals in mind that included building our BuzzFeed Technology brand, meet individuals in industry to talk about their work, and also talk about the challenges that women in technology often encounter. While we were there, we chatted with women from Google, Microsoft, General Assembly and more about what they think the next president of the United States could do to make tech an easier and better career choice for women.

(The photos below were taken by Jennifer Wohlner, Jane Kelly, Paola Mata, and Swati Vauthrin.)

Increase funding

Katlyn Edwards, a software engineer at Google, loves cats, computers and coffee, and hopes the next U.S. president increases funding for women in STEM&#033;

More transparency around diversity

From left to right, Stefanie Swift and Sophie Cooper are software engineers at CourseHero, Aracely Payan is a student at USC and Malvika Nagpal also works at CourseHero. They want to the next US president to push companies to publish more data around diversity in tech.

Equal pay for men and women

From bottom left, Paula Paul of AmWINS Group Inc., Joey Capolongo of Lending Tree, Hannah Lehman of General Assembly, Simone Battiste-Alleyne of the Tax Management Association, and Felicia Jacobs of Microsoft want the next president to help women to earn the same salary as men doing the same job.

Says Paul, “I&#039;m a bad ass coding goddess&033;”

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Quelle: <a href="Here&039;s What Some Women In Tech Would Tell The Next President“>BuzzFeed

Here's What Tech Leaders Think About Trump

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors spoke about Trump both onstage and to BuzzFeed News at Vanity Fair&#8217;s New Establishment Summit in San Francisco.

Anne Wojcicki, CEO and cofounder of 23andMe

“I think this election has been a force in [highlighting] much bigger issues about how we think about women and immigration. It&#039;s gotten people engaged. I also think the creative energy that&039;s come out about women — there&039;s really the beginning of true change and true movement. And I give Trump thanks for that,” she said, smiling. Issues that affect women, such as sexual assault, were “already starting to reach crescendo,” and have now become national conversations.

Brad Barket / Getty Images

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post

“I think the United States is incredibly robust. We’re not a new democracy, we’re very robust, but it is inappropriate for a presidential candidate to erode that around the edges. They should be trying to burnish it instead of erode it. And when you look at the pattern of things, it’s just not going after the media and threatening retribution for people who scrutinize him, it is also saying that he may not give a graceful concession speech if he loses the election. That erodes our democracy around the edges. Saying that he might block his opponent if he wins
erodes our democracy around the edges. These aren’t acceptable behaviors, in my opinion.

Alex Wong / Getty Images

Tim Draper, venture capitalist

“We have a duopoly in government and it&039;s not working … We&039;re just an ATM and our vote doesn&039;t even seem to count. Washington seems to get a lot more out of California than California gets out of Washington. We have a huge problem. We need a new system. We need a third party. We’re given two candidates and that&039;s the best we can do?&#033;”

Danny Moloshok / Reuters

Chamath Palihapitiya, founder and CEO of Social Capital

“The short-term impacts [on the stock market if Trump is elected] are probably overstated and the long-term impacts are probably underestimated. Most of us who have public market exposure are getting an emotive risk off going into November 8th, and so a lot of the volatility is going to be short term and relatively muted if he wins. I just think you have to take a bigger step back and say: It’s like you’re just repudiating all the good things that make America awesome — and the long-term implications of that. People like us, people like me — I immigrated to this country and I pour enormous amounts of capital, I pay enormous amounts of taxes. I want to be here, I want to help this team win.”

Mike Windle / Getty Images

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Quelle: <a href="Here&039;s What Tech Leaders Think About Trump“>BuzzFeed

Inside The Strange, Paranoid World Of Julian Assange

Carl Court / Getty Images

On 29 November 2010, then US secretary of state Hillary Clinton stepped out in front of reporters to condemn the release of classified documents by WikiLeaks and five major news organisations the previous day.

WikiLeaks&#039; release, she said, “puts people’s lives in danger”, “threatens our national security”, and “undermines our efforts to work with other countries”.

“Releasing them poses real risks to real people,” she noted, adding, “We are taking aggressive steps to hold responsible those who stole this information.”

Julian Assange watched that message on a television in the corner of a living room in Ellingham Hall, a stately home in rural Norfolk, around 120 miles away from London.

I was sitting around 8ft away from him as he did so, the room’s antique furniture and rugs strewn with laptops, cables, and the mess of a tiny organisation orchestrating the world’s biggest news story.

Minutes later, the roar of a military jet sounded sharply overhead. I looked around the room and could see everyone thinking the same thing, but no one wanting to say it. Surely not. Surely? Of course, the jet passed harmlessly overhead – Ellingham Hall is not far from a Royal Air Force base – but such was the pressure, the adrenaline, and the paranoia in the room around Assange at that time that nothing felt impossible.

Spending those few months at such close proximity to Assange and his confidants, and experiencing first-hand the pressures exerted on those there, have given me a particular insight into how WikiLeaks has become what it is today.

To an outsider, the WikiLeaks of 2016 looks totally unrelated to the WikiLeaks of 2010. Then it was a darling of many of the liberal left, working with some of the world’s most respected newspapers and exposing the truth behind drone killing, civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq, and surveillance of top UN officials.

Now it is the darling of the alt-right, revealing hacked emails seemingly to influence a presidential contest, claiming the US election is “rigged”, and descending into conspiracy. Just this week on Twitter, it described the deaths by natural causes of two of its supporters as a “bloody year for WikiLeaks”, and warned of media outlets “controlled by” members of the Rothschild family – a common anti-Semitic trope.

The questions asked about the organisation and its leader are often the wrong ones: How has WikiLeaks changed so much? Is Julian Assange the catspaw of Vladimir Putin? Is WikiLeaks endorsing a president candidate who has been described as racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, and more?

These questions miss a broader truth: Neither Assange nor WikiLeaks (and the two are virtually one and the same thing) have changed – the world they operate in has. WikiLeaks is in many ways the same bold, reckless, paranoid creation that once it was, but how that manifests, and who cheers it on, has changed.

Julian Assange in the grounds of Ellingham Hall in December 2010.

Carl Court / AFP / Getty Images

The cable release

Clinton’s condemnation of WikiLeaks and its partners’ release of classified cables was a simple requirement of her job. Even had she privately been an ardent admirer of the site – which seems unlikely – doing anything other than strongly condemning the leak was nonetheless never an option.

That’s not how it felt to anyone inside WikiLeaks at that moment, though. It was an anxiety-inducing time. WikiLeaks was the subject of every cable TV discussion and every newspaper front page, and press packs swarmed the gates of every address even tenuously connected to it. Commentators called for arrest, deportation, rendition, or even assassination of Assange and his associates.

At the same time, WikiLeaks was having its payment accounts frozen by Visa and Mastercard, Amazon Web Services pulled hosting support, and Assange was jailed for a week in the UK (before being bailed) on unrelated charges relating to alleged sexual offences in Sweden.

Inside WikiLeaks, a tiny organisation with only a few hundred thousand dollars in the bank, such pressure felt immense. Most of the handful of people within came from a left-wing activist background, many were young and inexperienced, and few had much trust of the US government – especially after months of reading cables of US mistakes and overreactions in the Afghan and Iraq war logs, often with tragic consequences.

How might the US react, or overreact, this time? WikiLeaks was afraid of legal or extralegal consequences against Assange or other staff. WikiLeakers were angry at US corporations creating a financial blockade against the organisation with no court ruling or judgments – just a press statement from a US senator.

And the figurehead of this whole response was none other than Hillary Clinton. For Assange, to an extent, this is personal.

Hillary Clinton in 2010, giving remarks condemning WikiLeaks&039; release of classified embassy cables.

Win Mcnamee / Getty Images

In the room

It’s unfair, or at least an oversimplification, to say Assange is anti-American. He would say he supports the American people but believes its government, its politics, and its corporations are corrupt.

A result of this is that he doesn’t see the world in the way many Americans do, and has no intrinsic aversion to Putin or other strongmen with questionable democratic credentials on the world stage.

This shows in some of his supporters. A few days after Assange arrived with me and a few others at Ellingham Hall, an older man, introduced to us as “Adam”, turned up. Assange had invited independent freelance journalists from around the world to the country house to see cables relating to their country – usually no more than a few thousand at a time.

“Adam” was different: He immediately asked for everything relating to Russia, eastern Europe, and Israel – and got it, more than 100,000 documents in all. A few stray comments of his about “Jews” prompted a few concerns on my part, dismissed quickly by another WikiLeaker – “don’t be silly… He’s Jewish himself, isn’t he?”

A short while later, I learned “Adam”&039;s real identity, or at least the name he most often uses: He was Israel Shamir, a known pro-Kremlin and anti-Semitic writer. He had been photographed leaving the internal ministry of Belarus, and a free speech charity was concerned this meant the country’s dictator had access to the cables and their information on opposition groups in the country.

Assange showed no concern at these allegations, dismissing and ignoring them until the media required a response. Assange simply denied Shamir had ever had access to any documents.

This was untrue, Assange knew it was untrue, and I knew it was untrue — it was me, at Assange’s instructions, who gave them to him. A few days later, a reporter at a Russian publication wrote to WikiLeaks.

“I really can&039;t understand why Wikileaks is just cooperating with the magazine Russian reporter which never had a record of even slightly critising [sic] the Russian government,” they wrote.

“I contacted the person responsible for contacts with Wikileaks in Russia (Israel Shamir) but he told me we could not look at the cables ourselves and requested money which is not very convenient for us (not because of money but because we would like to go through the files as well).”

Anti-Semitism never seemed a major part of Assange’s agenda – I never heard him say a remark I caught as problematic in this way – but it was something he was happy to conveniently ignore in others. Support for Russia or its strongmen eastern European allies was much the same: tolerable for those who otherwise are allies of WikiLeaks and do as Assange says.

WikiLeaks has never had a problem with Russia: not then, not now.

A supporter of Julian Assange outside Ecuador&039;s London embassy at a protest in 2012.

Oli Scarff / Getty Images

A certain resemblance

Assange is routinely either so lionised by supporters or demonised by detractors that his real character is lost entirely.

Far from the laptop-obsessed autist he’s often seen as, he’s a charismatic speaker with an easy ability to dominate a room or a conversation. He may have little interest in listening to those around, but he can tell whether or not he has your attention and change his manner to capture it. He has, time and again, proven to be a savvy media manipulator, marching the mainstream media up the hill and down again to often damp-squib press conferences. His technical skills are not in doubt.

What’s often underestimated is his gift for bullshit. Assange can, and does, routinely tell obvious lies: WikiLeaks has deep and involved procedures; WikiLeaks was founded by a group of 12 activists, primarily from China; Israel Shamir never had cables; we have received information that [insert name of WikiLeaks critic] has ties to US intelligence.

At times, these lies are harmless and brilliant. When, on the day the state cables launched, WikiLeaks’ site wasn’t ready (we hadn’t even written the introductory text), the site was kept offline after a short DDoS attack, so Assange took the opportunity to tweet that the site was under an unprecedentedly huge attack to give us time to get the site together.

Six hours later, when we were done, all eyes were looking: What was so bad in the cables that someone was working so hard to keep the site offline? The dramatic flourish worked, but other lies were dumb and damaging – and quickly eroded any kind of trust for those trying to work closely with him.

Redaction – possibly one of the clearest apparent changes between 2010 and 2016 WikiLeaks – became one of these trust issues. For Assange, redacting releases was essentially an issue of expediency: It would remove an attack line from the Pentagon and state, and keep media partners onside. For media outlets, it was the only responsible way to release such sensitive information.

These days, WikiLeaks routinely publishes information without redaction, and seemingly with only minimal pre-vetting. This is merely a change in expediency: There are no longer newspaper partners to keep onside. The results are a partial vindication for both sides – while it&039;s hard to dispute that some of WikiLeaks&039; publication of private data has been needlessly reckless and invasive, there remains no evidence of any direct harm coming to someone as a result of a WikiLeaks release.

Conversely, Assange often trusts strangers more than those he knows well: He dislikes taking advice, he dislikes anyone else having a power base, and he dislikes being challenged – especially by women. He runs his own show his own way, and won’t delegate. He’s happy to play on the conspiratorial urges of others, with little sign as to whether or not he believes them himself.

There are few limits to how far Assange will go to try to control those around him. Those working at WikiLeaks – a radical transparency organisation based on the idea that all power must be accountable – were asked to sign a sweeping nondisclosure agreement covering all conversations, conduct, and material, with Assange having sole power over disclosure. The penalty for noncompliance was £12 million.

I refused to sign the document, which was sprung on me on what was supposed to be a short trip to a country house used by WikiLeaks. The others present – all of whom had signed without reading – then alternately pressured, cajoled, persuaded, charmed, and pestered me to sign it, alone and in groups, until well past 4am.

Given how remote the house was, there was no prospect of leaving. I stayed the night, only to be woken very early by Assange, sitting on my bed, prodding me in the face with a stuffed giraffe, immediately once again pressuring me to sign. It was two hours later before I could get Assange off the bed so I could (finally) get some pants on, and many hours more until I managed to leave the house without signing the ridiculous contract. An apologetic staffer present for the farce later admitted they&039;d been under orders to “psychologically pressure” me until I signed.

And once you have fallen foul of Assange — challenged him too openly, criticised him in public, not toed the line loyally enough — you are done. There is no such thing as honest disagreement, no such thing as a loyal opposition differing on a policy or political stance.

To criticise Assange is to be a careerist, to sell your soul for power or advantage, to be a spy or an informer. To save readers a Google search or two, he would tell you I was in WikiLeaks as an “intern” for a period of “weeks”, and during that time acted as a mole for The Guardian, stole documents, and had potential ties to MI5. Compared to some who’ve criticised Assange, I got off fairly lightly.

Those who have faced the greatest torments are, of course, the two women who accused Assange of sexual offences in Sweden in the summer of 2010. The details of what happened over those few days remain a matter for the Swedish justice system, not speculation, but having seen and heard Assange and those around him discuss the case, having read out the court documents, and having followed the extradition case in the UK all the way to the supreme court, I know it is a real, complicated sexual assault and rape case. It is no CIA smear, and it relates to Assange&039;s role at WikiLeaks only in that his work there is how they met.

Assange&039;s decision – and it was a decision – to elide his Swedish case with any possible US prosecution was a cynical one. It led many to support his cause alongside those of Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden. And yet it is more difficult, not easier, to extradite Assange to the US from Sweden than from the UK, should Washington even wish to do so.

Assange coming to believe his own spin may be what&039;s been behind six years of effective imprisonment for him. No one is keeping him in the Ecuadorian embassy – where he has fallen out with his hosts – but himself, and a fear of losing face. But the women who began the case have lost at least as much, becoming for months and years two of the most hated figures on the internet, smeared as “whores”, “CIA spies”, and more. They will never get their time back.

Four photos of Julian Assange&039;s room in Ecuador&039;s London embassy, prepared for an internal report following an incident in which officials believe Assange toppled a bookshelf.

Ecuadorian government report / Via buzzfeed.com

How it ends

All of this is the cocktail of ingredients that produces 2016’s incarnation of WikiLeaks. Julian Assange mistrusts the US government, dislikes Hillary Clinton, and has spent years trapped in a small embassy flat in west London, in declining physical and psychological health, monitored minute-by-minute in reports filed by his wary Ecuadorian hosts.

Assange would not, in my view, ever knowingly be a willing tool of the Russian state: If Putin came and gave him a set of orders, they’d be ignored. But if an anonymous or pseudonymous group came offering anti-Clinton leaks, they’d have found a host happy not to ask too many awkward questions: He’s set up almost perfectly to post them and to push for them to have the biggest impact they can.

The poet Humbert Wolfe wrote, “You cannot hope to bribe or twist / (thank God&#033 the British journalist. / But, seeing what the man will do / unbribed, there&039;s no occasion to.” Such is Russia’s good fortune with Assange. If it is indeed Russia behind the leaks, as US intelligence has reported, he will need no underhanded deals or motives to do roughly as they’d hope. He would do that of his own free will.

The question is whether Assange will end up disappointed. Assange believes WikiLeaks was a primary driver of the Arab Spring, which led to major uprisings in around a dozen countries. This is the stage on which Assange believes he plays — the equal of a world leader, still the biggest story in the world.

For a time, he was. While the extent of WikiLeaks&039; role in the Arab Spring remains a matter for debate, Assange was at the forefront of an information revelation. His attempts to regain the spotlight in the meantime have largely failed.

WikiLeaks has republished public information as if a leak, published hacks obtained by Anonymous and Lulzsec for only moderate impact, and released email caches of private intelligence companies of much less significance than what went before. Even Assange&039;s attempt to aid Edward Snowden was largely botched, leaving the whistleblower stranded in a Moscow airport for weeks. In recent weeks, Snowden has publicly clashed with Assange over the latter&039;s handling of the Democratic National Committee leaks.

Assange&039;s approach has taken WikiLeaks from the most powerful and connected force of a new journalistic era to a back-bedroom operation run at the tolerance (or otherwise) of Ecuador’s government. This is his shot at reclaiming the world stage, and settling a score with Hillary Clinton as he does so.

Assange is a gifted public speaker, with a talent for playing the media, struggling with an inability to scale up and professionalise his operation, to take advice; a man whose mission was often left on a backburner in his efforts to demonise his opponents.

These are traits often ascribed to Donald Trump, the main beneficiary of WikiLeaks’ activities through the reaction, and its modern-day champion during presidential debates. Those traits have left Assange a four-year resident of a Harrods hamper–laden single room in a London embassy.

It remains to be seen what they’ll do for Donald Trump.

Quelle: <a href="Inside The Strange, Paranoid World Of Julian Assange“>BuzzFeed

Hyperpartisan Facebook Pages Are Publishing False And Misleading Information At An Alarming Rate

Mark Davis / BuzzFeed News

Hyperpartisan political Facebook pages and websites are consistently feeding their millions of followers false or misleading information, according to an analysis by BuzzFeed News. The review of more than 1,000 posts from six large hyperpartisan Facebook pages selected from the right and from the left also found that the least accurate pages generated some of the highest numbers of shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook — far more than the three large mainstream political news pages analyzed for comparison.

Our analysis of three hyperpartisan right-wing Facebook pages found that 38% of all posts were either a mixture of true and false or mostly false, compared to 19% of posts from three hyperpartisan left-wing pages that were either a mixture of true and false or mostly false. The right-wing pages are among the forces — perhaps as potent as the cable news shows that have gotten far more attention — that helped fuel the rise of Donald Trump.

These pages, with names such as Eagle Rising on the right and Occupy Democrats on the left, represent a new and powerful force in American politics and society. Many have quickly grown to be as large as — and often much larger than — mainstream political news pages. A recent feature in the New York Times Magazine reported on the growth and influence of these pages, saying they “have begun to create and refine a new approach to political news: cherry-picking and reconstituting the most effective tactics and tropes from activism, advocacy and journalism into a potent new mixture.”

The rapid growth of these pages combines with BuzzFeed News&#039; findings to suggest a troubling conclusion: The best way to attract and grow an audience for political content on the world&039;s biggest social network is to eschew factual reporting and instead play to partisan biases using false or misleading information that simply tells people what they want to hear. This approach has precursors in partisan print and television media, but has gained a new scale of distribution on Facebook. And while it isn&039;t a solely American phenomenon — the British Labour party found powerful support from a similar voice — these pages are central to understanding a profoundly polarized moment in American life.

For example, in late September, Freedom Daily, a Facebook page with more than 1 million fans, scored a viral hit with a post that filled its audience with racial outrage.

The post linked to an article on the Freedom Daily website with the headline “Two White Men Doused With Gasoline, Set On FIRE By Blacks – Media CENSORED (VIDEO).” The text that accompanied the link on Facebook connected the attack to recent Black Lives Matter protests and urged people to share the post “if you&039;re angry as hell & aren&039;t going to take it anymore&#033;”

Freedom Daily / Facebook / Via Facebook: FreedomDailyNews

Anyone clicking on the link saw a video of the altercation, with some additional commentary. “Back in the day, when people were a lot smarter and America was great, this would have been a lot different,” the article said.

But nowhere in the article or Facebook post did Freedom Daily make it clear that this incident happened almost a year ago, and that it had absolutely no connection to Black Lives Matter.

The falsehoods continued from there: The altercation was actually between two people, a black man and his co-worker — and perhaps most importantly, the co-worker is not white. Court documents allege that the fight began with the co-worker throwing the first punch. Prosecutors also said the second man caught fire as a result of him coming into contact with the first man who was engulfed in flames. And finally, in spite of the headline&039;s claim that the incident was “CENSORED” by the media, it was widely covered by Baltimore media as well as by CNN and the Daily Mail&039;s website. (The man who allegedly set the fire, Christopher Harrison Jr., was charged with attempted first-degree murder, reckless endangerment, and first- and second-degree assault.)

But these details only stood in the way of success on Facebook. In the end, Freedom Daily&039;s largely false post was shared more than 14,000 times, generating more than 9,000 reactions and over 2,000 angry comments on Facebook.

“Not even animals would do this,” reads the most liked comment on the post. “Time to hang these people.”

Pages like Freedom Daily play to the biases of their audiences — and to those of Facebook&039;s News Feed algorithm — by sharing videos, photos, and links that demonize opposing points of view. They write explosive headlines and passages that urge people to click and share in order to show their support, or to express outrage. And in this tense and polarizing presidential election season, they continue to grow and gain influence.

“They are, perhaps, the purest expression of Facebook’s design and of the incentives coded into its algorithm,” wrote John Herrman in the New York Times Magazine.

These pages are also a constant source of dubious, misleading, or completely false information.

During the period analyzed, right-wing pages, for example, pushed a conspiracy theory about a Hillary Clinton body double, recirculated an old and false story about a Canadian mayor lecturing Muslim immigrants about integration, wrongly claimed that Obama&039;s last address at the UN saw him tell Americans they needed to give up their freedom for a “New World Government,” and falsely claimed that a football player had been told not to pray by the NFL.

Left-wing pages wrongly claimed Putin&039;s online troll factory was responsible for rigging online polls to show Trump won the first debate, falsely said that Trump wants to expel all Muslims from the US and said US women in the military should expect to be raped, claimed that TV networks would “not be fact-checking Donald Trump in any way” at the first debate, and completely misrepresented a quote from the pope to claim that he “flat out called Fox News type journalism &039;terrorism.&039;”

The bottom line is that people who regularly consume information from these pages — especially those on the right — are being fed false or misleading information.

The nature of the falsehoods is important to note. They often take the form of claims and accusations against people, companies, police, movements such as Black Lives Matter, Muslims, or “liberals” or “conservatives” as a whole. They drive division and polarization. And in doing so, they generate massive Facebook engagement that brings more and more people to these pages and their websites and into the echo chamber of hyperpartisan media and beliefs.

What We Did

BuzzFeed News selected three large hyperpartisan Facebook pages each from the right and from the left, as well as three large mainstream political news pages. All nine pages have earned the coveted verified blue checkmark from Facebook, which gives them an additional layer of credibility on the platform.

The nine pages we analyzed. Fan numbers shown for each page are as of Oct. 17, 2016.

BuzzFeed News

Over the course of seven weekdays (Sept. 19 to 23 and Sept. 26 and 27), we logged and fact-checked every single post published by these pages. Posts could be rated “mostly true,” “mixture of true and false,” or “mostly false.” If we encountered a post that was satirical or opinion-driven, or that otherwise lacked a factual claim, we rated it “no factual content.” (We chose to rate things as “mostly” true or false in order to allow for smaller errors or accurate facts within otherwise true or false claims or stories.)

We also gathered additional data: Facebook engagement numbers (shares, comments, and reactions) for each post were added from the Facebook API, and we noted whether the post was a link, photo, video, or text. Raters were asked to provide notes and sources to explain their rulings of “mixture of true and false” or “mostly false.” They could also indicate whether they were unsure of a given rating, which would trigger a second review of the same post in order to ensure consistency. Any discrepancies between the two ratings were resolved by a third person. That same person conducted a final review of all posts that were rated mostly false to ensure they warranted that rating. (For more detail on the methodology and some notes on its limitations, see the bottom of this article, and you can view our data here.)

In the end, our team rated and gathered data on 2,282 posts. There were 1,145 posts from mainstream pages, 666 from hyperpartisan right-wing pages, and 471 from hyperpartisan left-wing pages. The difference in the number of posts for each group is a result of them publishing with different frequencies.

Accuracy: Right vs. Left

BuzzFeed News

All nine pages consisted largely of content that was either mostly true or earned a “no factual content” rating.

However, during the time period analyzed, we found that right-wing pages were more prone to sharing false or misleading information than left-wing pages. Mainstream pages did not share any completely false information, but did publish a small number of posts that included unverified claims. (More on that below.)

We rated 86 out of a total 666 right-wing Facebook posts as mostly false, for a percentage of 13%. Another 167 posts (25%) were rated as a mixture of true and false. Viewed separately or together (38%), this is an alarmingly high percentage.

Left-wing pages did not earn as many “mostly false” or “mixture of true and false” ratings, but they did share false and misleading content. We identified 22 mostly false posts out of a total of 471 from these pages, which means that just under 5% of left-wing posts were untrue. We rated close to 14% of these posts (68) a mixture of true and false. Taken together, nearly a fifth of all left-wing posts we analyzed were either partially or mostly false.

One of the most common reasons we rated a post as a mixture of true and false was because the headline and/or Facebook share line introduced misinformation or was misleading to the audience. This frequently took the form of a shared link that contained accurate body text paired with a misleading headline, likely to drive social engagement and clicks.

For example, the left-wing page Addicting Info shared an article with the headline “Trump Loses Support Of Police Union After Saying Tulsa Shooting Cop ‘Choked’ (VIDEO).” But contrary to the claim in the headline, the article makes it clear that Trump didn&039;t lose an endorsement. The executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police merely gave a quote that was slightly critical of something Trump said.

On the right, Freedom Daily posted a link to an article from the website Yes I&039;m Right. It carried the headline “Australia Voted To Ban Muslims And Liberals Are Pissed.” The story correctly reports on the results of a poll that asked Australians if they would support or oppose a ban on Muslim immigration to Australia. But there was no vote to ban Muslims, making the headline completely false. (Side note: As illustrated by that headline, pages on the right and the left both love to talk about how something that happened made the other side lose their minds, freak out, get totally shut down, etc.)

BuzzFeed News

Alarmingly, we found examples of pages on the left and on the right presenting fake news articles as real. Two left-wing pages, Occupy Democrats and The Other 98%, posted a link to an article on U.S. Uncut that claimed the surgeon general of the US warned that drinking every time Trump lied during the first presidential debate could result in “acute alcohol poisoning.” That story originated on the fake news website National Report. (“Please do your fact-checking as responsibly as possible,” joked the U.S. Uncut article that unwittingly presented false information as true.)

Right Wing News, a page with 3.3 million followers, shared a link to a story that claimed authorities in Charlotte had warned would-be rioters that their food stamps and other government benefits would be revoked if they were caught looting or rioting. That story came from the Baltimore Gazette, a fake news site.

Accuracy: Mainstream Pages

This Politico exclusive spread to other mainstream outlets and saw a high number of Facebook shares. The story remains unconfirmed.

Politico / Facebook / Via Facebook: politico

Mainstream pages did not publish any mostly false content on the days we checked. We did, however, encounter one story that spread to all three mainstream pages as well as some partisan pages and remains unconfirmed to this day.

There were eight mainstream posts out of a total of 1,145 that earned the “mixture of true and false” rating. The majority of these were related to one story — the report from Politico that former President George H.W. Bush would be voting for Hillary Clinton.

Our ratings guide dictated that any posts built solely on anonymous sources or on unverified claims should be given the “mixture” rating. Since President Bush and his spokesman refused to confirm or deny the report, we rated all stories that repeated this claim the same way. Politico&039;s story about the former president was shared more than 14,000 times from its Facebook page, making it that page&039;s biggest hit during the period we analyzed. Overall, we saw a high number of Facebook shares for stories about the Bush voting claim. But the sample number is too small to make any larger conclusion about how unverified stories perform compared to true stories on mainstream pages.

Worst Offenders = High Engagement

Which pages shared the least credible information?

Freedom Daily, with its 1.3 million fans, was the most inaccurate and misleading page during the period we analyzed. It had the highest percentage of false posts of any page, at 23%, and also saw the same percentage of “mixture of true and false” posts. That means 46% — nearly half — of its total output during the seven days we studied was rated as false or misleading.

Not coincidentally, Freedom Daily put up impressive Facebook engagement stats. It had by far the highest Facebook engagement (defined as the total number of reactions, likes, and shares) per post among the right-wing pages we studied. It ranked third among all nine pages for its median number of Facebook shares per post. (We considered shares to be the most important individual engagement metric, as Facebook itself has said it plays an important role in determining the spread of a post.)

BuzzFeed News

Quelle: <a href="Hyperpartisan Facebook Pages Are Publishing False And Misleading Information At An Alarming Rate“>BuzzFeed

While You Were Watching The Debate, Trump Just Launched Trump TV

In the minutes before the third and final Presidential debate, Donald Trump went live on Facebook in what may have been the inaugural broadcast of a forthcoming Trump News Network.

A little after 8:30 P.M., Trump&#039;s official Facebook page posted the link to the live video, offering up an alternative to the mainstream broadcast. The message: “If you’re tired of biased, mainstream media reporting (otherwise known as Crooked Hillary’s super PAC), tune into my Facebook Live broadcast. Starts at 8:30 EST/5:30 PST — you won&039;t want to miss it. Enjoy&#033;”

The broadcast quickly ballooned to around 200,000 concurrent viewers but quickly fell off to around 120,000. As of the middle of the debate, the feed was holding steady at around 170,000, trailing only the ABC News debate feed on the platform.

The livestream featured punditry from retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn and former Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and in place of commercials, the feed was interspersed with pro-Trump ads and a special message from Ivanka Trump. Looking more like public access than a glitzy cable news offering, the broadcast moved slowly between guests with at least one or two hot mic off moments where the hosts discussed where the next segment was headed. There were also hints of some surprise programming after the debate ends.

While this isn&039;t Trump&039;s first livestream event — the campaign went live before the second debate during Trump&039;s press conference with Juanita Broaddrick and the Bill Clinton sexual assault accusers — but it appears to be the first attempt at some original programming and analysis.

The livestream comes on the heels of news this week that Trump&039;s son-in-law Jared Kushner was in the early phases of shopping a Trump TV network. This morning, in response to post-election Trump TV rumors, Trump campaign CEO, Steve Bannon hedged, telling CNN only that “Trump is an entrepreneur.”

As for a potential channel name? Plenty of options have been bandied about but judging by Trump&039;s own page, Trump TV might be a safe bet.

The trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Quelle: <a href="While You Were Watching The Debate, Trump Just Launched Trump TV“>BuzzFeed

Here's How Much You Should Actually Earn (According To Glassdoor)

Via Flickr: 14936293@N03

Glassdoor is putting its trove of user-reported salary data to use with a new tool that estimates an employee’s “market value.” Called Know Your Worth, the tool relies on a combination of personal information — including location, industry, education level, and years of experience — as well as the local demand for labor. It then spits out an estimated dollar amount workers can reasonably expect to earn at that moment in a given market.

The tool, which is available in beta as of Tuesday night, is powered by several million salary reports and over four million job postings, is supposed to give Glassdoor users a sense of where they stand in comparison to peers with similar levels of experience.

It also compares this figure to average pay for people in your position, and provides a chart showing how market value for workers of your experience in your location has changed over time.

BuzzFeed News calculated market value for a small group of people contacted via Twitter and Facebook prior to the tool’s beta release.

“I know I’m underpaid,” said a 26-year-old project manager working for a tech company in New York City. She earns a base salary of $95,000 a year, but Know Your Worth suggested her market value was more like $108,000. Though the tool only confirmed suspicions she already had, it could serve another purpose, she said. “I would definitely bring this into a negotiation.”

In Chicago, a project manager at a startup also making $95,000 a year echoed her sentiment, saying he plans to bring this Glassdoor data into a salary negotiation later this week. “It&#039;s always a bit unsettling to see it presented so badly: You are making less money than you should be. That being said, I knew I was a bit below market,” he said. “Seeing it just output like that with only a comparatively small amount of information needed from me is pretty neat&#033;”

Others were more surprised by the results they received. According to Glassdoor, a 26-year-old male software engineer at Uber in San Francisco with two years of experience and a bachelor’s degree from Stanford is worth more than $140,000 a year. Given these results, an engineer who is actually making $128,000 a year said he “knew the base salary was less than market, but that is a more substantial difference than I expected.” He, too, said the data from Glassdoor could play a role in future salary negotiations.

Know Your Worth was less helpful for those in less straightforwardly corporate jobs For example, a microbiologist with a doctorate working for the USDA in the Bay Area and earning $70,000 a year was surprised to find his market value was actually lower than what the government was paying him. “I had figured I was more underpaid in order to work on what I value. But it turns out, I&039;m not worth shit,” he said. “I know if I left my research job to do strictly data stuff, I&039;d be worth much more.”

Other highly educated workers felt Glassdoor’s tool underestimated their potential earnings. For example, according to Glassdoor, a thirty-year-old public defender with a law degree from Harvard earning $60,000 a year in the Bronx, has a market value of around $108,000. But she says the tool wasn’t as useful as word of mouth. Plenty of the lawyers she graduated with are already making $160,000, she said, which she knows “because in law school, all everyone talks about is the starting salary at law firms.”

Glassdoor’s new tool was also ineffective for people who aren’t traditionally employed. For example, a 35-year-old Marriage and Family Therapist who charges clients $150 an hour in a private practice was unable to get any results from Know Your Worth. Glassdoor said that the tool should work for someone who is self-employed, but did say, for now, it won’t work for a freelancer who works multiple jobs for multiple employers. “Our goal in future iterations of the tool is to take into account even more information to help all people and give them even more personal information,” said Corporate Communications Director Scott Doboroski via email.

Of course, Know Your Worth is only as strong as the data Glassdoor receives, which means people in certain jobs might not be able to get an accurate quote. The company says its data set is constantly being updated, and that those who don’t find it useful can still make sense of the more basic Salary Explorer feature.

Glassdoor says know your worth will continue to learn over time as new data enters the system, and employees can sign up for regular updates as conditions develop.

Quelle: <a href="Here&039;s How Much You Should Actually Earn (According To Glassdoor)“>BuzzFeed