Meet The Trump Movement's Post-Truth, Post-Math Anti–Nate Silver

On March 9, 2016, Mitt Romney was sitting on one of Jimmy Kimmel’s purple crushed-velvet chairs just trying to be a good sport. “This one’s from a Trump supporter,” Kimmel said as Romney accepted a stack of note cards full of PG-13 tweets calling the former Republican presidential nominee a loser. Through a pained smile, Romney read the contents of the card for the audience at home: “Donald Trump is trying to pull America back from the brink and freakin' Mitt Romney is playing with matches in the bathroom.” Romney paused a beat, flashing a tired Jim Halpert-esque smile to the camera that’s all but become our national facial expression this election cycle, and shook his head. “I’m not touching that, I’ll tell you that.”

The bit dredged up a few nostalgic laughs and would make the rounds the next day on cable news. But the real effect was felt 3,000 miles away in a house in suburban Charlotte, North Carolina, in the Twitter mentions of a 56-year-old executive recruiter named Bill Mitchell. It had been Mitchell’s tweet that Romney read aloud, and though it was after midnight on the East Coast, his phone lit up as his 20,000 followers giddily tweeted him; the Kimmel shout-out was, as the Donald might put it, “big league.” It didn’t matter that the segment was as much about laughing at the impotent vitriol of the anonymous tweeters as it was at Romney; for Mitchell, the bit was proof of concept: It was fine if people were laughing at him as long they were paying attention.

Seven months later, Bill Mitchell — or @mitchellvii, as he&039;s known on Twitter — has more than quadrupled his audience. Tweeting an average of 270 times per day, he has arguably become Donald Trump’s most unrelenting social media surrogate. Despite Trump&039;s leaked tax returns and sexual assault allegations, Mitchell isn’t just unwavering in his support, but increasingly certain of his candidate’s chances, gunslinging 140-character projections like this one into the world every few minutes:

Mitchell has become this cycle’s mascot for a specific strain of poll-unskewing, conspiracy-theorist Trump supporter — earnest enough in his mistrust of modern electoral data and disdain for basic math that many have suspected @mitchellvii is perhaps a parody account. A few of his greatest hits:

• “You notice how close Trump stands to this black man as he listens to him? No racist would ever do that.”

• “If you think about it, Hillary putting women into ‘baskets’ may be one of the most sexist things ever said in a political campaign.”

• “Trump&039;s groundgame isn&039;t in a computer, it&039;s in our hearts”

• “Imagine polls don&039;t exist. Show me evidence Hillary is winning?”

• “Jesus was perfect and the media of his day had him crucified.”

But Bill Mitchell is no performance artist and, should you meet him, he’ll tell you that unprompted. “Oh, people think this is a parody account? Well, I have 90,000 followers and a blue check, so explain that,” he told me over a recent Skype interview. (Mitchell wouldn&039;t do in-person interviews for “security reasons,” suggesting “there are those on Team Hillary who do not wish me well.”) Where many of Trump’s most visible surrogates appear worn down, hateful, or actual card-carrying bigots, @mitchellvii is an eternal optimist, hardly ever curses, and stays largely away from the language of the alt-right.

And as Trump continues to distance himself from his party and even his advisers, his increasingly paranoid message is beginning to sound like one long @mitchellvii tweetstorm. But unlike Trump&039;s operatives and surrogates, Mitchell has no campaign ties and no professional reputation to lose. He’s just a guy tweeting from his home office and, arguably, the only person alive who will come out of the 2016 presidential campaign better than he started it.

“Oh, people think this is a parody account? Well, I have 90,000 followers and a blue check, so explain that.”

Glancing at his Twitter bio page, you’d think Bill Mitchell has been around the conservative talk pundit scene for ages. His face is long, with a head of well-styled silver hair and an intense jawline and bushy eyebrows that arch at a cartoonish pitch. Alongside his headshot, his bio boasts that his show, YourVoice™ Radio, is “a number one political talk show.” No matter that the show is hosted on a DIY podcasting platform and has only a few thousand listeners per episode. “Everyone seemed to assume he was some sort of somebody — like, a longtime local radio guy or whatever,” one reporter told me when I asked if he knew where Mitchell came from.

Mitchell&039;s radio show, which streams on YouTube.

In truth, Mitchell’s only qualification seems to be that he just started tweeting a lot. “I’ve always been clever with words,” he said. “As a recruiter, I make my living as a communicator. I’m good with word images and painting pictures with a short phrase here and there that people can relate to.” When asked how much time he spends crafting his tweets, he dismissed the idea that there’s too much forethought. “I’m just firing the thoughts out as I come to them. I have an interesting take, you see. I delve into the internals and really tell people what’s going on and it’s given me some fame.”

“I’m good with word images.”

Mitchell believes he’s been able to tap into a powerful demographic of disenfranchised, underrepresented voters who feel the country is on the wrong track and in need of a savior. “These are the people who call into Rush Limbaugh who hold on the line and never get on the air. My tweets caught on because I was saying out loud and using my talent for words to say what they wanted.” According to Mitchell, he’s averaging 40,000 retweets and 10 million Twitter impressions each day.

Mitchell&039;s appeal makes sense — he&039;s one of them. Like his audience, he&039;s quick to indulge a good conspiracy theory and subscribes to a media diet free of “mainstream bias,” reading Breitbart, Conservative Treehouse, DC Whispers, the Gateway Pundit, and the occasional Drudge article. He doesn’t check mainstream sites and networks like CNN or MSNBC because “it’s all spin to me.” For a growing number of Americans who’ve defined themselves online by adding “Deplorable” to their Twitter handle, @mitchellvii is a beacon in a growing storm of bad news — a kind of post-truth, post-math Nate Silver. For everyone else, the account is an almost anthropological look at Trumpism at its most simple-minded.

Mitchell&039;s executive recruiting business website.

When we spoke, Mitchell was fighting off a nasty flu he&039;d picked up around the same time that leaked footage from Access Hollywood showed Trump bragging about groping and kissing women. But rather than let it sideline him, Mitchell saw his fever and laryngitis as a kind of divine test. “They say that opportunity knocks at inopportune times and that’s why so many people don’t live out their dreams,” Mitchell told me. “I won’t lie to you, this is fun. I’m on a mission.”

To hear Mitchell tell it, that mission started around the time he was 10 years old, putting up signs in his neighborhood for Nixon. He’s a lifelong Republican but didn’t find the spark until he watched Ross Perot run as an independent presidential candidate in 1992. For Mitchell, who’s run his own business for decades, the idea of a businessman in the White House just seemed to make sense. And in June 2015, he got his wish with Donald Trump. “Around then I was an armchair quarterback with only 100 Twitter followers,” he said. “But when he decided to run, that’s when I decided to jump in.”

Screenshots of Mitchell&039;s Yahoo! Answers activity.

Traces of Mitchell’s online presence from before he took his Trump oath of allegiance reveal an exceedingly average middle-aged man. He&039;s unmarried and has no kids. He graduated of the University of Maryland in 1982 and now runs an executive recruiting business, ExecutiveDecision.biz, which touts his “bold, pro-active style” that “empowers clients to acquire the finest staff on target, on time, every time.” His Yahoo Answers profile, stretching back more than a decade, paints a fuller picture. Across hundreds of questions and answers, Mitchell reveals a successful recovery from colon cancer, a frequent desire for feedback on whether or not to color his graying hair, and endless mundane curiosities ranging from the silly (“Why do Jack Russell owners all look like the [sic] want to kill themselves?” “Would a bumble bee the size of a man be able to fly?”) to the more existential (“What is intuition and how often is it correct?” “Why don&039;t they create a condom that covers just the top inch of your penis?”).

When he talks about polls, Mitchell’s friendly voice lowers considerably to the cadence of a condescending Little League coach. Mitchell’s take is that the polls are skewed to further silence Trump and the silent majority as a result of oversampling and overweighting Democrats. Get him going on the subject and he’ll argue that scientifically random polls conducted via landlines aren’t actually scientific or random, given the response rates; that the margins of error and small sample size tend to disqualify the national polls; and that major media polls don’t take into account built-in bias and key X factors — a favorite of Mitchell’s is “enthusiasm,” which Mitchell often calculates via tweets, yard signs, and rally sizes (Trump’s are YUGE, while Hillary struggles to put together a crowd of 200, he contends).

While in previous years this contempt for math would be roundly dismissed by all except the far fringes, today Mitchell’s message is inexplicably of the moment, casting the armchair tweeter in a different light. In a perfect world, Mitchell said, he would like to see polls abolished altogether — although he believes unscientific polls conducted via survey embeds on sites like the Drudge Report do a decent job capturing that elusive metric of enthusiasm. “If you arrived here from Mars today and you didn’t speak English but you saw Trump every single day of the week at these rallies — he’s dominating online, he’s dominating yard signs and rallies and all the physical things we can see. You’d think, This guy is winning. If it were up to me I’d make polling illegal. This is just my dream world.”

“The prize for the dumbest motherfucker on the internet goes to Bill Mitchell. This is a guy who’s proud of the fact that he doesn’t understand math.”

Pollsters and political operatives seem to agree that he’s living on a different plane of existence.

“The prize for the dumbest motherfucker on the internet — and there’s lots of competition this cycle — goes to Bill Mitchell, who’s way out ahead of the field,” Republican strategist Rick Wilson said when I asked him about Mitchell’s brand of punditry. “In the course of my 20-year career I’ve commissioned hundreds of surveys from presidential polling to state house races,” Wilson said, through intermittent, heavy sighs. “I’ve consumed a lot of polling and this is a guy who’s proud of the fact that he doesn’t understand math.”

Pollster Frank Luntz routinely takes shots at Mitchell on Twitter, calling into question Mitchell’s basic understanding of statistics. When Mitchell infamously tweeted this summer, “imagine polls don’t exist. Show me evidence Hilary is winning?” FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver had a laugh at his expense, tweeting, “Imagine there&039;s no polls/ It&039;s easy if you try/ No Pew or Quinnipiac/ On crowd size we rely.” Both Luntz and Silver did not respond to multiple requests to comment on Mitchell&039;s polling views.

Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson — who recently had Mitchell’s “groundgame is in our hearts” tweet made into a ceramic coffee mug — is perhaps as charitable toward Mitchell as any statistician could possibly be. For her part, she understands the skepticism, driven by historical and recent polling misses like the Brexit vote. “He says in 140 characters the most absolutely perfect nonsense that anyone with any understanding can dismantle entirely,” Anderson says. “But we’re living in a post-fact environment. And If you don’t like the polls, having somebody who tells you they’re wrong makes you feel good.”

Becoming the laughingstock of the Washington establishment does not appear to trouble Mitchell. “I’m making all the right enemies,” he said. “You know you’ve made it on Twitter when famous people are trolling you. Frank Luntz trolls me all the time and I enjoy when they troll me. I enjoy the battle of wits.”

“I’m making all the right enemies.”

Despite Mitchell’s retweet-happy followers, his influence, even inside the Trump-supporting fringe conservative media sphere, is unclear. Before starting his homemade podcast, Mitchell was a frequent guest on the Wayne Dupree Show, a conservative podcast with a Cleveland AM radio following. Mitchell left the show abruptly under mysterious circumstances. (He has tweeted the departure was friendly and that he wanted to strike out on his own; Dupree didn&039;t wish to comment on the departure.)

Though he’s been retweeted three or four times by Trump himself, Mitchell claims he has no direct contact with the campaign and that no money has ever changed hands in return for his tens of thousands of on-message tweets. He suggested he’s in touch with a number of individuals close to the campaign and believes that the distance is “by design, so that I can remain an independent voice.” But one conservative media source suggested that Mitchell’s outsider status might have more to do with ego issues.

“He thought he was going to be in charge of a Trump group in North Carolina months ago and when he got there, he found out he wasn&039;t and left, deciding not to be a part,” a source said. Mitchell plays this down, alleging that he volunteered to run social media for the campaign in North Carolina but quit after a few weeks, deciding his personal account was more helpful to the campaign. Still, one source believes there’s tension between Mitchell and the campaign, explaining that earlier this year, Trump’s adviser and social media director Dan Scavino unfollowed Mitchell after an incessant series of Twitter direct messages filled with “pointers about how wrong they were doing social media.” Scavino did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

But what&039;s in it for Mitchell? He says that the work that goes into his radio show and constant tweeting “hasn&039;t come without considerable personal financial cost.” Still, he claims he hasn’t given thought to what could come after Election Day. “I have friends on TV who say when all’s said and done I should pursue this. I have people who now, before they go on TV, they contact me and say, ‘This is what we’re talking about, what should I say?’ and I give them zingers.” Though Mitchell wouldn’t reveal the identities of his TV friends, his podcast show has hosted, among others, Trump surrogate Katrina Pierson and conservative activist James O’Keefe.

But Mitchell’s influence is considerable — earlier this year, the MIT Media Lab listed him as the 26th most influential Twitter account of this election cycle (the highest ranked non-politician or journalist), between Lindsey Graham and Megyn Kelly. But neither a politician with the constant pressure to win elections nor a journalist bound by network standards and practices, Mitchell appears to have very little at stake. He is free to tout conspiracy theories that Clinton cheated in the debates with elaborate signals and teleprompters or that polls are an irresponsible way to take the pulse of an electorate.

“Trump has been caused, in large part, by a daily war against reality, waged not just by people at Fox News, but the Breitbarts of the world and random talk radio hosts like Bill Mitchell,” former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau told me. “Information and media consumption is so diffuse now you have all these people on the right feeding other voters lies and alternative realities on a daily basis, and Bill is one of those people.”

Mitchell, for his part, is not worried about being wrong. After all, while the so-called experts dismissed Trump’s chances throughout the primaries, Mitchell was predicting landslide defeats with his gut, which he says is his guide. “It’s better to have tried and given it 100% than to sit back and worry about it,” he said. “I do what I think is right every day and say what I believe.”

Quelle: <a href="Meet The Trump Movement&039;s Post-Truth, Post-Math Anti–Nate Silver“>BuzzFeed

Instagram At 6: Kevin Systrom On Moments, Mission, Ads, And Stories

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom in front of a photo wall at the Blue Bottle café inside the company&#039;s new headquarters building.

Mat Honan

It’s been a hell of a year for Instagram. The photo and video sharing network shipped a slew of new features and updates in 2016, many of them controversial. In March, it irked people by changing the way it displays updates in its feed, moving from purely chronological to an algorithmic ordering. In May, it set off a ruckus with a change to the familiar Instagram logo. And in August it absolutely, positively steamed the internet by rolling out a new Stories feature that obviously cloned a marquee Snapchat feature. Along the way, Instagram also released new tools to fight trolls, went big on video, added an army’s worth of advertisers, and — just last week — moved into a new office. Phew&#033;

That&039;s a bevy of changes for a company that was once famously deliberate — perhaps even slow — at evolving its product. But they&039;ve all had a healthy effect on Instagram. It is now sitting on 500 million daily active users, 100 million of whom view its new Stories feature daily. According to the company’s leadership, people are spending far more time in the app both viewing and posting images. And because of that, Instagram now boasts more than half a million advertisers on its platform every month. That translates into a lot of revenue for a company that today turns 6 years old.

For Instagram&039;s sixth birthday, BuzzFeed News sat down with founder and CEO Kevin Systrom to talk about the company&039;s recent past and near future, and the rapid evolution it has undergone. He was upbeat — happy, even — and insistent that the changes Instagram has undertaken this year are crucial to its continued growth and relevance — even if they did provoke a backlash from users and critics.

“I think companies that fail are typically companies that look at themselves as a set of features,” Systrom said of Instagram&039;s decision to get into video and move beyond its iconic square photo. “Companies that succeed look at themselves as mission-based companies. … So if Instagram&039;s mission is to make sure that everyone can capture and share the world’s moments, and use them to form stronger relationships with one another, how do you say to someone, ‘I&039;m sorry, you can&039;t post that photo unless you crop it into a square and fit everyone in’? That&039;s a ridiculous argument.”

That kind of thinking made the decision to introduce video to Instagram an easy one. Thanks to better cameras, faster networks, and more on-device storage, our video usage is rapidly increasing, and every social platform — Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat — is barreling to highlight it. Instagram is no different. But where the company&039;s photo content is instantly recognizable and iconic, its video looks pretty much the same as everyone else’s. Systrom maintains that the videos posted to Instagram differ from those found elsewhere, but he acknowledged that Instagram&039;s video-viewing experience isn&039;t quite there yet.

“I agree, the video format in our viewer does feel similar to what a lot of other people are doing,” Systrom said. “I think that&039;s fine for now, but it&039;s not where we want to end up. We want to innovate and improve the experience.”

This mission-driven approach also explains Instagram&039;s decision to abandon its original logo (which Systrom himself designed) for a new one with a flatter, more abstracted aesthetic.

“You form your own identity over time,” Systrom explained. “We wanted to make sure that people knew we were not just a camera app on your phone. We are much more than that. We are about media. We are about diversity. We are about expression. The new logo aligns with our principles — simplicity, universality, understandability. It also aligns with our mission, which is not just to be a camera company, but to be a moments company. The logo is abstracted from the physical camera. It acknowledges that we are, in fact, about moments.”

That moments line sounded a bit odd given Instagram&039;s recent move away from a purely chronological feed. If the the company&039;s mission is capturing and sharing moments, doesn’t it make more sense to display them as they happened? One of Instagram’s early big cultural breakthroughs, for example, was in 2011, when New York City was hit by a blizzard, and its residents relentlessly shared photos of their slogs through the snow. We as a society experience these unexpectedly serendipitous moments where we fire up Instagram and see our friends all experiencing the same things at the same time. How will people showcase and experience those moments — such as a particularly vivid sunset in Manhattan or a gorgeous rainbow stretching across San Francisco — in an algorithm-driven world?

“Nowhere in our mission is it about being real-time,” Systrom said. “I don&039;t think we are focused on making sure you have a news feed of an unfolding event in real-time view. And I think that&039;s okay. You should still see rainbows, generally, together — especially if they&039;re good rainbows, in which case the best ones will rise to the top.”

According to Systrom, when Instagram rolled out its algorithmic timeline, people were missing about 70% of the images and videos in their feeds. So the company introduced tweaked things so that the 30% they do see is likely to be the stuff they care about most.

Systrom said Instagram experimented with several different versions of a ranked feed before landing on the one it rolled out and has since refined. The feed is now calibrated to prioritize the content with which people are most likely to engage. And, according to Systrom, that has driven people to spend more time on Instagram and upload more even more content to it.

“In general, feed is still a very, very real time,” Systrom observed. “We just take the last [updates] since you checked Instagram — which for most people is maybe a couple of hours — and we make sure that the best stuff&039;s at the beginning.”

Mat Honan

But nothing else has been as controversial for Instagram as its decision to clone Snapchat Stories. Systrom consistently talks about taking problem-solving and mission-driven approaches to the company&039;s product. In this particular case, the problem that needed solving was a simple one: getting people to post more content to Instagram more often.

“It’s pretty well-known that on Instagram you post the highlights of your day,” Systrom said. “I wish it weren&039;t that way. I wish people felt more free to share as much as they wanted during the day.”

For Instagram, that was a troubling conundrum.

“As we dug into our user studies, I realized very quickly that we had to find a solution that made it so you didn&039;t have to post your profile,” Systrom explained. “After some tests, we added a check box that said ‘expire from my profile’ or ‘don&039;t post to my profile.’ But no one understood why they would do that.”

So in August, in an attempt to get people to post more casual kinds of content in a way they already understood, Instagram rolled out Stories. For anyone who had used Snapchat — which offers a near-identical feature of the same name — the update felt…pretty familiar&033; The Verge called it a “near perfect copy” of Snapchat Stories. TechCrunch described it as “a Snapchatty feature.” The New York Times said it “takes a page” from Snapchat. BuzzFeed News wrote, “It’s hard to view Instagram Stories as anything other than a direct shot at (or, less charitably, blatant rip-off of) Snapchat Stories.”

Systrom, at the time, leaned into the criticism. And he still vigorously defends Instagram&039;s move to adopt a feature that has been for Snapchat a huge driver of engagement.

“We have a lot employees that believe passionately in ephemerality,” Systrom said. “And I wanted to be sure that we were doing the right thing for the community — not just reacting to what was out there because it was cool or hip. Ephemerality had to be adopted in a way that worked. And a signal that it is working is that after just a few months, over 100 million people, daily, use Instagram Stories. So, forget about pride of authorship, internally or externally — it&039;s working.”

Quelle: <a href="Instagram At 6: Kevin Systrom On Moments, Mission, Ads, And Stories“>BuzzFeed

We Tried Fitbit’s New Charge 2 And It Really Wanted Us To Work Out

BuzzFeed News; Fitbit

On the Charge 2, exercise and relaxation aren’t tracked as special, one-off events, but rather, they are as much a part of your routine as steps and sleep. If you’re ready to graduate from a 10,000-steps-per-day program, the Charge 2 might be a good tracker for you.

In addition to continuous heart-rate tracking, Fitbit’s new wearable, which recently became available worldwide, offers a multi-sport mode (including yoga, spinning, and circuit training), guided breathing sessions, and a personalized “cardio fitness score” that reveals how fit you are (and could be). It also has interchangeable bands and a display that’s four times larger than last year’s Charge HR.

Is the Charge 2 right for you? Read on&#033;

Let’s talk about the biggest improvement first: the bands.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

The Charge 2 has the same sleep, heart rate, and altitude sensors as previous Fitbits and, like the Charge HR, runs on a battery life of up to a week or so. The technology is largely unchanged – but the big game changer are the interchangeable bands.

Take a quick look at Fitbit’s Facebook page and you’ll find dozens of commenters complaining about torn straps and warped bands. If the band was faulty, the entire Charge HR needed to be thrown out, even if the tracker itself was fine. The Charge 2’s bands, on the other hand, are replaceable. Fitbit’s offering a leather version for $70, along with a classic elastomer band in five different colors for $30.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

The Charge 2 looks sleeker, but is still pretty chunky.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

The device is essentially a Charge HR with a larger screen. The Charge 2 is a little bit wider and a little bit thicker than the previous model, but comfortable enough to wear all day (although too cumbersome enough to wear to sleep for Nicole).

The classic Charge 2 style comes with a silver-accented tracker and the same rubber-y elastomer band as other Fitbits. For $30 more, you can also choose from two new “special edition” Charge 2 options: one with an all-black tracker and a “gunmetal band,” and another that has a rose gold tracker paired with a lavender band. It’s fancy. But it still looks like a fitness tracker.

Working out with a big display makes a big difference.

BuzzFeed News; Fitbit

The Charge HR’s screen, which was about .75cm long, was truly the tiniest screen we had ever used. The Charge 2’s large display makes it easier to, you know, actually see information. When the “raise arm to wake display” feature worked (which was about 70% of the time), being able to look at our current pace, steps, and heart rate while running was particularly useful, so we could actually tell when we were slacking off.

There are several clock faces you can choose from – and there’s finally room to show calendar notifications and text message previews, in addition to caller ID. But, like the Alta, text messages still get cut off, meaning you have to open your phone anyway.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

Sports! So many sports!

The Charge HR only had one generic “exercise mode.” The Charge 2 has a “multi-sport mode” with NINETEEN options. You can choose from treadmill, yoga, pilates, kickboxing, spinning, circuit training, and much more, right from the tracker. In the app on your phone, you can choose which seven exercise shortcuts appear on the Charge 2, and customize the order in which they appear.

One cool new mode is “Interval Workout” for workouts with alternating periods of intensity and rest (like this).

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

You can set the move and rest times on the app, plus how many times you want to repeat the interval. When the interval is up, the tracker will buzz and it’ll show “move” or “rest” on the screen. After years of fidgeting with different apps and the built-in timer on the iPhone, the interval workout mode, so far, has been our favorite use of the Fitbit.

In the Fitbit app’s Exercise section, you strangely can’t filter workouts by type.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

You can see a chronological list of your workout history, but if, say, you wanted to look at only bike rides from the past month, you wouldn’t be able to do so. Also, you don’t get special sport-specific stats that, for example, auto-track how long you held chair pose when you select yoga mode (it will, however, track the duration and heart rate during your practice). But it does validate activities like yoga or hiking as legitimate exercise. Simply by acknowledging that those activities exist, Fitbit is providing a strong motivational tool for users who prefer alternatives to just running or biking.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

Other fitness trackers (like Garmin wearables and the Apple Watch) focus on runs, walks, and bike rides, and categorize everything else as “other.” Fitbit is more aware of the different ways people actually exercise (elliptical&033; tennis&033; boxing&033;) and give you the option to categorize your workout as such. This, IMO, is where Fitbit shines.

The Charge 2 has a tap screen, not a touchscreen, which takes some getting used to.

Tapping on the larger display is much easier than it was on Fitbit’s Alta, which we reviewed earlier this year. Still, the Charge’s interface isn’t very intuitive – initially, at least. The hardware design is very basic (just one button&033;), which means that there are some trade-offs with ease of use.

On the one hand, there’s only one button to figure out, but on the other hand, Fitbit needed to program in a lot of different button/tap combos to accommodate all of the Charge 2’s features. If you want to get serious about tracking your workout on the Charge 2, you’re going to need to learn all of them. To select a sport mode, you need to press the side button and then tap to view the different types of exercise. To start the workout, you press and hold the side button. To scroll through real-time stats, you need to tap or press the side button multiple times. When you’re done, press and hold the button again to finish.

You get the idea. A lot of taps and button pressing.

Putting the tracker into a specific exercise mode really only affects one thing: what shows up on the display while you’re working out.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

The screen will always show the duration, plus the information most relevant to that sport. For example, when run, bike, or hike is selected, and your phone is nearby, it’ll show the mileage in big, bold numbers at the top. If your phone isn’t on you, the Charge 2 will estimate that mileage, based on how long your stride is (you need to go on a run with your phone and calibrate your stride first, for this to work). For weight training, it’ll show heart rate.

Tapping the screen over and over again to see different stats during a workout is pretty frustrating. To avoid fiddling around with the display, we’d recommend just focusing on one metric: current pace for running and heart rate for pretty much everything else.

This score is Fitbit’s estimate of your VO2 max — the maximum amount of oxygen your body can use during exercise — and based on your profile (the weight, height, age and gender you input) and resting heart rate. Fitbit told Stephanie she needed to step up the intensity of her exercise (one way would be making sure she’s working hard enough that her heart rate is elevated). She has not done so, but that’s probably just her fault.

Keep in mind that this is just an estimate, and a more accurate reading, as measured in a sports performance lab, would include the amount of oxygen you breathe in and out. Stephanie’s score, for example, is between 45 and 49 (“good to very good” for women age 28; a professional runner’s is 63, according to the app).

For most people, letting Fitbit’s automatic workout tracking (available for walk, run, bike, elliptical, “sports,” and aerobic workout) figure out what you’re doing is much easier than manually starting an exercise mode. You literally don’t need to do anything – the tracker knows when you’re working out and will log it in the app for you. In our experience, the tracker did a great job of recognizing runs, walks, and especially bike rides.

The downside to auto-tracking? It doesn’t record GPS location data, so the mileage is less accurate, and if you want a map of your workout, you’ll need to initiate the exercise on the tracker.

Here’s what Fitbit needs to improve.

One of the most frustrating things about the Charge 2’s exercise mode is that you can’t pause a workout. The Strava app and Garmin trackers both have an auto-pause feature, and the Apple Watch can be paused by hitting its two buttons at the same time.

There are plenty of reasons why you’d want to pause a run&033; Maybe there’s a cute dog you *really* need to pet, or an ex-coworker you need to gloat about your new job to. With the Charge 2, you have to either finish the workout and start a new one later, or let it run.

It provides more precise pace and distance information on the Charge 2’s display and records a map of your run, walk, hike, or bike in the app. But, again, you’re tethered to your phone. The Fitbit app can record and map runs with GPS independently, so the trackers don’t actually add much value when it comes to this metric.

Once you’ve used Connected GPS with your phone once to calculate your stride length, Fitbit claims you’ll get better estimates of your pace and mileage when you don’t bring your phone. So if you just go for a run with your tracker, you will get stats. But you won’t get a map or any other location data.

And beyond that, because the Charge 2 relies on your phone, it may not capture location data with perfect accuracy. On Stephanie’s walk in downtown San Francisco with her phone, the tall, densely-packed buildings made the GPS tracker go haywire – and Fitbit’s app doesn’t work to fix obviously inaccurate data. There are also multiple threads on Fitbit’s website citing issues with connected GPS.

Fitbit integrates with Strava, RunKeeper, MapMyRun, Fitstar, and a dozen other activity apps – but it doesn’t sync activity with Google Fit or Apple’s Health app, where many users consolidate activity, sleep and nutrition data. Fitbit, which launched a sort-of smartwatch of its own, the Blaze, probably doesn’t want to share its data with companies it sees as competitors in the space. Nicole found a small workaround for this, at least to record workouts: connect Fitbit to Strava and Strava to Apple’s Health app or Google Fit. However, you won’t be able to sync your sleep or overall activity data. And it’s a really roundabout way to do something that should be straightforward.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

As we mentioned before, the device can detect when you raise your arm and turns on the screen when you do so. It’s called “Quick View,” and it works really well while running or walking – but for some reason the feature doesn’t agree with biking. It may be because your arm is already at a 90-degree angle while you’re holding the handlebars, and it’s not enough movement for the Charge 2 to tell when you’re raising your arm.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

The new “Relax” feature consists of 2- and 5-minute guided sessions that use an animated visualization to prompt you to breathe and slow down your heart rate. (App-guided meditation is very in these days.) To be honest, it was a little weird to try to be mindful with our eyes wide open and glued to our wrists; we would have preferred some kind of buzz or other physical feedback that let us closes our eyes.

Okay, so who should buy the Charge 2?

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

If you’re just starting a workout routine or ready to ditch a pedometer for something a little more advanced, the Charge 2 has most of the fitness-friendly features you’re looking for. Its heart rate and multi-sport modes will give you tools to improve your overall fitness. The Charge 2 is definitely geared more towards runners and cyclists – but if you’re into yoga, circuit training, or interval training, there’s something for you, too.

The automatic workout tracking feature means that you don’t have to worry about logging a run with the tracker or app every time. And when you want more precise distance statistics, you can bring your phone and see mileage and pace on your wrist. On the mobile app, you can look at your cardio fitness score to see how you stack up against your peers, and read about what you can do to be fitter, whether it’s lose weight or increase the intensity of your workouts.

The app is easy to use, and because Fitbit is the top-selling wearable company, according to an IDC survey, it has a big community. In the first quarter of 2016 alone, the company sold 4.8 million units. It’s likely that you have at least a few friends with Fitbits who can cheer you on.

Fitbit also made a crucial update to the bands, making them removable and replaceable. There are more styles to choose from, and it’ll likely last longer than a Charge HR.

If you’re looking for a heart rate-tracking wearable that’s not *too* expensive, tracks activity, and has basic smartphone notifications, then you should consider the Charge 2, which starts at $150.

Who shouldn’t buy the Charge 2?

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

Because of its thick, chunky style, we wouldn’t recommend the Charge 2 for those interested in sleep tracking. The Flex 2 or Alta are much better picks for that. Those two bands are also much more stylish and geared toward the fashion-forward set.

If you want something that isn’t dependent on your smartphone, this Fitbit is not the right device for you. The Fitbit app is great, but the problem is, you need it to change a lot of different settings on the Charge 2.

The connected GPS feature also relies on your phone for location data.The Charge 2 is sweat, rain, and splash-proof, but it’s not safe for the pool or beach. Fitbit’s Flex 2, on the other hand, is suitable for swimming.

More serious athletes should consider swim-friendly, heart rate-tracking, and GPS-enabled wearables, such as the Vivosmart HR+ by Garmin ($200), Apple Watch Series 2 ($369), and Polar M400 ($180).

And a final thing to consider: If you’re trying to lose weight or get fit, you may not even need a fitness tracker&033; A device like the Charge 2 can provide little bits of encouragement throughout your day, which may be effective for some people. But it’s more important to do research on how to exercise workouts or eat in ways that support your goals to actually improve your overall, long-term fitness.

Here’s a guide on what fitness trackers are good for – and where they fall short.

Quelle: <a href="We Tried Fitbit’s New Charge 2 And It Really Wanted Us To Work Out“>BuzzFeed

Cracking The Tinder Code: Love In The Age Of Algorithms

Alraun2014 / Getty Images

I used to be terrible at Tinder — but for a few weeks this summer, I was pretty good. Women responded to my messages. Our chats went deeper than usual. Previously stalled discussions were suddenly revived and I was right-swiped with increasing frequency. I began to understand my matches in a way I hadn’t previously, but not because of anything I&#039;d done. My Tinder messages were being composed by a woman who also set up my profile. And I was using Tinder’s on staff sociologist’s input to refine my approach.

I handed over my account to my colleague, Jessica Misener, on a hunch (correct) that I wasn’t doing things right on Tinder. And while Jessica didn’t really need the help, I took over her account as well. We embarked on our great switcheroo in an attempt to get to the bottom of what makes Tinder tick; customizing each other’s profiles to what we thought people of our gender wanted, releasing those accounts into the wild, and then comparing the results to our past luck.

We swapped accounts on the condition that no message could be sent without the explicit approval of its real owner — this was a quest to understand the inner workings of the platform, not dupe people. And, when we were done, we brought our findings to Tinder, which reviewed them and — based on its own research including some previously unreleased data — told us what we&039;d done right and wrong. Spoiler: I had a lot to learn. And judging from the Tinder profiles we saw, you probably do too.

Downloaded by more than 100 million people, Tinder is responsible for some 1.5 million in-person dates each week, according to its creators. It’s helped to normalize “meeting online.” Tinder did this with an ingeniously simple swipe “right for like”/”swipe left for dislike” vetting process, connecting people only when there is mutual interest. Its soaring popularity has helped revolutionize modern dating, shifting us from finding love via chance to finding it via algorithm.

Wearing a hat in your Tinder profile pic? That’ll hurt your chances by 12%.

The secrets of Tinder&039;s code lie in the hands of people like Dr. Jess Carbino, a Tinder employee with a sociology PhD. from UCLA. She has a lot of visibility into what works on Tinder and what doesn&039;t. For instance: Wearing glasses in your profile picture, whether for vision or sun, decreases your chances of being right-swiped by 15%. And a hat? That’ll hurt your chances by 12%.

“It&039;s really important for people to able to glean a great deal about your face, which indicates things beyond attractiveness,” Dr. Carbino explained in a phone interview from Tinder’s Los Angeles headquarters last week. Tinder is willing to share a good deal of this data because, at the end of the day, it wants people to find satisfying matches. And, if you use Tinder, you probably want more matches too. So take your damn hat off. And, while you’re at it, those shades need to go too.

In Trusted Hands

Stock_colors / Getty Images

Looking through the men showing up on Jessica’s Tinder account, I saw many dudes presenting themselves with blurry pictures, mirror selfies, hats, nowhere-looking gazes, and other off-the-charts terrible selfies. When I saw a guy with a clear picture, smiling and looking toward the camera, I instantly swiped right.

When Jessica set up my profile, she chose a picture of me looking sideways to start, and then followed with a few looking straight at the camera. A week in, thinking about that man with the straightforward smile, I suggested we switch up my own profile. We chose a photo I didn’t love, but where I looked straight at the camera and smiled. It worked significantly better than my previous profile pic.

“Individuals who are front facing are 20% more likely to be swiped right on.”

The forward-facing smile was the right move, according to Tinder’s Dr. Carbino. “Individuals who are front facing are 20% more likely to be swiped right on, relative to their counterparts who are facing sideways or not showing themselves,” Dr .Carbino said. Even though I felt the smiling picture was worse than any other, it made a big difference: you are 14% more likely to be swiped right on if you smile on Tinder, Dr. Carbino said.

After Jessica landed a few matches on my behalf, I watched in amazement as she crafted thoughtful, personalized messages to each. My opening message is perhaps best described as, “How’s it going?” Jessica describes hers as: “Not just, ‘Oh cool you&039;re from North Carolina? I like Asheville a lot,’ but: “Oh you&039;re from North Carolina? I&039;ve always wondered if the Carolinas have a rivalry about which is better. like South Carolina is OBVIOUSLY cooler but North Carolina is literally on top of it, which seems significant to me.”

Jessica’s method proved effective. Conversations kicked off with thoughtful messages were far richer than my usual “Hey,” “Sup,” “Nm, U?” variety. And Tinder’s data seems to bear this out. Dr. Carbino said Tinder is conducting a messaging analysis study, and its initial results indicate more thoughtful messages are more likely to generate responses. You can also always send a GIF, which is 30% more likely to get a response, according to Dr. Carbino.

Viewing Tinder from my colleague Jessica’s vantage point, I didn’t need any special conversational tactics. If anything, the biggest challenge was weeding people out.

Stampede

Xavier Arnau / Getty Images

Running Jessica’s account felt like watching dozens of men attempting to run through the same tiny door at once. It was overwhelming. As I swiped right, a pattern emerged: Match. Match. Match. Match. Message. Message. Message. Message. These guys meant business. They were relentless.

Watching them in action, I began to rethink one of my core Tinder principals: never double text. Sending a message, waiting, and sending another message despite no response had long been no go territory for me. It felt needy, and a bit delusional. If someone was interested, they’d respond. If not, they wouldn’t. But as I witnessed the volume and pace of messages hitting Jessica’s Tinder, I very quickly saw the folly of my ways.

Double texting works, according to Dr. Carbino, who calls it re-engagement. “The idea of re-engagement, if done in a way that&039;s appropriate, can be quite effective,” she told me. “You can say something along the lines of, “Hey, it&039;s time to step up your Tinder text game&039; and make a joke out of it to re-engage them and to try to further the conversation along in a way that&039;s more meaningful.”

On Tinder, you can also use a ‘Super Like’ button once every 24 hours to signal more interest than the ordinary ‘like,’ but the people using this feature felt a bit off to me, so I started swiping left and rejecting them all out of habit. That wasn’t a normal behavior. Super Likers, according to Tinder, are three times more likely to match, and their conversations typically last 70% longer than those of non-Super Likers.

Super Like or not, you may want to go for the real-world encounter early as possible. People who meet in person via Tinder typically do so within 2-7 days of matching, according to Dr. Carbino.

Tinder God Emerges

Siphotography / Getty Images

“I always said great advertising should be like dating.”

When you first sign up for Tinder, a text overlay appears on the app urging you to “Swipe more to help us learn your preferences. The more you swipe, the better our recommendations&#033;” The prompt is subtle, and it’s also the most prominent indicator that Tinder sorts the profiles it shows you via an algorithm — a mathematical formula that pulls in a number of data points and makes decisions about who comes next.

The keys to Tinder’s algorithm are held by Dan Gould, a former advertising technology executive who spent the early part of his career attempting to match the right ad to the right person at the right time — now he’s doing it with people. That a former ad-tech exec now holds a power position at a dating company says a lot about the role of algorithms in romance today. “I always said great advertising should be like dating,” Gould told me. “If advertising works perfectly, it would be like finding that great partner for you. It would find the right thing, at the right time, at the right price, and maybe something you didn’t even know.”

According to Gould, Tinder&039;s algorithm gives a lot of weight to the choices you make while setting preferences. Distance ranges, gender and age preferences — all these things need to match up before Tinder will show you a potential match. Two other critical factors are distance and recency. Distance is straightforward: being closer gives you an edge. But “active time,” i.e. recency, is more intriguing. “People who have been active recently are more likely to come back soon and interact with other people.” Gould said. “While I probably shouldn’t say how you can game the system, the one thing that a person can really do to appear to a lot more people and get more matches is to be active recently. If I were trying to get more matches I would open the app every hour and just swipe a little bit.”

Swipe Life

Demaerre / Getty Images

In their book Modern Romance: An Investigation, the comedian Aziz Ansari and NYU sociology professor Eric Klinenberg describe asking a woman to project her OkCupid in-box on a screen in an LA comedy club. “The moment we put her in-box up on the screen, you could see every man in the room just deflate,” Klinenberg said in a recent phone interview. “They suddenly realized what they were up against.”

The draw of that choice is so powerful that Seattle-based Ricky Burnett, founder of a company called Project Attraction, a dating coaching service that promises to help men “become the confident, bad ass guy that women obsess over,” said he sees a lot less competition when trying to meet someone in real life. “I consider it to be a lost art these days,” he explained. “You kind of put people in awe when you just walk up to them and say ‘hi.’”

Proliferation of choice can have negative consequences as well. With so many potential matches to swipe on, they all become a bit more … disposable. “Go back to [the pre-Tinder] era,” said relationship Psychologist Dr. Karen Sherman. “If you didn’t meet somebody in college then what the hell were you going to do? Because then you were pretty much out of possibilities. Now, so what?

For Dr. Carbino, algorithmically-assisted courtship is a clear net positive. “There&039;s so much data out there that suggests that individuals who meet their partners online have more satisfactory relationships and are more likely to get married faster, relative to individuals who meet offline,” she said.

Klinenberg is of a similar opinion. He likes to tell a story of how he and Ansari once asked a “pretty average looking” guy for a look at his dating in-box. The guy, Klinenberg said, had messages from women who “30 years ago, if he had gone to a bar and they had given him their phone number, he would’ve gone crazy, it would’ve been the greatest night of his life.” There&039;s a lesson in that in-box: “There’s a lot of volume. Even if that guy was striking out 95% of the time, it’s a whole lot easier to start flirting with someone and ask them out online, than it is in person.”

After swapping Tinder accounts with Jessica and getting Tinder&039;s input, I made more progress on long-unanswerable question: “What did I do wrong?” than ever before. You can&039;t quantify everything in the age of algorithms, but more and more is becoming knowable. Now if you&039;ll excuse me, I have some swiping to do.

Quelle: <a href="Cracking The Tinder Code: Love In The Age Of Algorithms“>BuzzFeed

90% Of The People Who Took BuzzFeed News’ Survey Say Twitter Didn't Do Anything When They Reported Abuse

That Twitter is plagued by harassment is a truism. Innumerable blog posts and stories have been written about the company&#039;s endless struggle against hate speech and the trolls who propagate it. Yet Twitter’s reporting process for such behavior remains opaque, and countless people who’ve been targeted by it say reports they filed with Twitter were ignored or dismissed because they didn&039;t meet the company’s standards for harassment.

To better understand how Twitter handles reports of harassment, BuzzFeed News invited readers to complete an online survey about abuse. More than 2,700 users responded. The results suggest that an overwhelming majority of reported instances of abuse ended with Twitter taking no visible action toward the offending account.

But first, a few things to keep in mind:

Our survey was distributed primarily through BuzzFeed’s social channels, largely on Twitter and via a link in a BuzzFeed News post. As such, the 2,702 respondents are likely not reflective of Twitter’s users overall. Respondents who participated in this survey were largely English-language speakers. By virtue of the subject matter, participants were probably more likely to have experienced abuse on Twitter than the average user of the service. (That said, respondents were given an option to state that they had not experienced abuse on Twitter.) BuzzFeed News also conducted follow-up interviews with a number of respondents.

Also worth noting: We&039;ve seen evidence that Twitter occasionally takes action against tweets reported as abusive without revealing that it has done so. But this leaves targets of abuse who reached out to the company in the dark about whether their appeals for help were heard. In some instances, Twitter has publicly revealed that it deleted tweets after a high-profile outcry. Just yesterday, Binyamin Appelbaum, a New York Times correspondent with more than 40,000 followers, retweeted some particularly horrific anti-Semitic remarks that had been directed at him and copied Twitter&039;s CEO, Jack Dorsey. Afterward, the company deleted the tweets and Dorsey notified Appelbaum of the deletions publicly on Twitter.

All this said, the responses to our survey do offer a human window into Twitter’s underbelly of abuse, providing not only harrowing examples of harassment, but data on how it is handled — or not — by the social network.

About our respondents:

Of the the 2,669 people who provided demographic information in our survey:

• 772 people (26.3%) identified as a racial or ethnic minority.
• 707 people (28.8%) identified as a member of the LGBTQ community.

Here’s the gender breakdown of the the 2,669 people who chose to answer:

• 1,817 female
• 720 male
• 58 gender fluid
• 26 transgender
• 21 agender
• 27 not listed

THE RESULTS:

Of our 2,702 respondents, 1,478 (55%) said they had been the target of an abusive tweet or Twitter direct message. Of those who reported suffering abuse on Twitter, 18% said they had been harassed in just the past week, while 26% reported being harassed at some point within the past month, but not the past week.

According to survey respondents, Twitter’s most common response to an abuse report is inaction.

46% of respondents told BuzzFeed News that the last time they reported an abusive tweet to Twitter, the company took no action on their request that they were aware of; their only recourse was to personally block the offending account. Another 29% who reported abusive tweets said they never heard anything back at all. And 18% of those who reported an abusive tweet said they were told that the tweet did not violate Twitter’s rules, which explicitly forbid violent threats, harassment, and hateful conduct. In only 56 instances (2.6% of the time) did respondents say Twitter deleted the offending account, and in 22 instances (1% of the time) respondents said Twitter issued a warning to the user who’d sent the tweet. Of the 2,115 people who responded to this particular survey question, just five individuals said they were contacted by a Twitter representative to discuss the abuse they reported.

On Sept. 15, Twitter declined BuzzFeed News&039; request for an executive interview on the subject of harassment. In response to a Sept. 19 letter detailing the findings of our survey, Twitter&039;s head of communications, Kristin Binns, provided the following comment:

“Safety is our top priority — we&039;re building better tools and processes every day. We can&039;t comment on a third-party survey, and its anonymous nature makes it impossible to verify data or corroborate response. While we know there’s still much to be done, we’re making progress toward giving people more control over their Twitter experience and to better combat abuse.”

Among survey respondents, harassment was common and varied.

Over 67% of respondents described the tweets they received as misogynistic in nature. Nearly 30% reported being targeted with homophobic slurs. One-quarter said they’d been subjected to racist epithets, one-quarter reported death threats, and one-quarter reported tweets encouraging them to kill themselves. Nearly 20% of respondents reported being threatened with rape; another 20% said they’d received tweets threatening to publish their private information, photos, or videos.

Roughly one-third of survey respondents who reported receiving an abusive tweet said they reported it to the company using Twitter&039;s abuse forms. And nearly 80% of respondents said they reported an abusive tweet directed at somebody else.

We asked survey respondents to describe the harassment they experienced on Twitter. This is what they told us:

• “Someone spread a video around of an unnamed girl taking part in perverse activities with an animal, and captioned it with my underage friend&039;s name. It was taken down the next day, but the damage was done.”
• “Someone took a google cached but long deleted photo of me from my fb, photoshopped it on to a naked body, and posted it alongside my real name, openly calling me a dyke (I&039;m not out to anyone except a few very close friends). That&039;s one instance in a series of nearly 500 abusive tweets from 50 different troll accounts (likely created by same person or few people, based on how they were posting).”
• “I get a lot of messages threatening rape, men trying to find my physical location and disseminating it so I can be raped, threats of murder, people wishing miscarriages on me, to be sent into war zones to be raped and murdered.”
• “Pictures of my family, my address, my employer, threats to &039;rape this bitch with a cactus,&039; threats to &039;take a crowbar to that pretty throat,&039; insinuations that I am only academically successful in a male-dominated subject because I am attractive.”
• “Lots and lots, mostly from Gamergaters. One of the worst problems is that even if I block someone, Twitter still allows them to tweet my handle, so the big Gamergate figures can still regularly send their legions of cretins to make my notifications miserable.”
• “I blocked the abuser, but after a witty retort (that was polite) and me wishing him a good day he said &039;what would make his day better would be to do this&039; and inserted a graphic video of a jihadist chainsawing a kneeling man&039;s head off.”
• “A serial racist, doxxer and harasser (who has been suspended once before), somehow connected my professional and private accounts, which have nothing to do with each other, posted my full name and encouraged her 30,000+ followers to go after me (some of who have offered to show up with guns). She has also started harassing my former employers as well as inviting harassment to my best friend, who isn&039;t even on twitter. My professional field is social media and marketing, so her harassing tweets have basically held my professional account hostage as they are forever linked and visible to potential employers.”
• “I had a user on Twitter stalk me, my family and friends on Twitter and offline. This user has had over 85 accounts suspended. I have all documentation to support my claims including usernames, IP addresses, reports sent to Twitter and the FBI. This person would create fake accounts with my name and others in attempts to harass. He tweeted a picture of my mothers license plate to thousands of his followers…This person is racist, homophobic and despite doxing 15 year old girls and having over 85 accounts suspended he is still allowed to have an account on Twitter where he spews hatred, racism and misogyny.”
• “My meant to be private pictures (nudes) posted for months non stop, my drivers license posted, my address posted, my work place address posted, my parents info posted, threats to kill me and my kids, photo shopped pics of me with gunshot wounds through my head and chest, inciting people to swat me, my naked pics tweeted at two workplace Twitter accounts, it goes on and on. Pedophile tweets about my kids.”
• “A picture of a person pointing a gun at me; telling me they&039;d bury me out back; calling me a cunt and telling me to stop talking out of my clit; posting my full name (I am anonymous on Twitter… or was)… all different people at different times. There&039;s been more, but that&039;s it off the top of my head.”
• “Unsolicited photos of genitals.”
• “There&039;s so much&#033; Telling me I deserve my rape. Telling me to kill myself. Threats of hunting me down and killing me and my mom. And tonight I was targeted by a group of trolls. I was told I asked to be raped and then that I was a total victim who faked her disabilities and should be euthanized.”
• “The site is inundated with neo-nazis. I thought of deactivating my account many times, but I didn&039;t want them to think they could silence me. My neighbors reported trucks in front of my house in the middle of the night. I do not answer my house phone anymore due to abusive calls. A map to my home was circulated. There&039;s nothing left of my life for them to dox.”

Though the hundreds of written responses collected by BuzzFeed News vary, a majority of them express concerns about Twitter’s internal commitment to curbing abuse — particularly abuse directed at the platform’s non-celebrity users. For many respondents, Twitter&039;s failure to address harassment on its platform has created an expectation that the problem, now systemic, will never be resolved. Below are some excerpts from respondents:

• “It&039;s completely out of control and Twitter is doing nothing about it. I have a friend who is basically stalked by a couple of people, from multiple sock accounts. One gets suspended, five more take its place. They use report bots to get her suspended. It happens over and over and Twitter does NOTHING.”
• “They can be presented with multiple examples of a user violating TOS and STILL say the account broke no rules. It&039;s disheartening. You feel utterly vulnerable. I&039;ve never been so afraid to upset the wrong person.”
• “This ONE situation of harassment I am dealing with has affected my career, ability to find work (which I haven&039;t been able to) and I am just one of many. As a platform/business, I can&039;t see twitter lasting very much longer as people leave rather than accept that the company doesn&039;t care about their users.”
• “Having been on twitter since it started, I have seen a DRASTIC change in the past year, especially in terms of harassment. It has become &039;normal,&039; almost the purpose of the platform itself.”
• “I always tell my co-workers, ‘If you want to know how racist America is, check my Twitter account.’”
• “They can delete accounts sharing broadcast content in minutes, but abusers are rarely if ever sanctioned, and almost never banned.”
• “How much money do I need to have to protect myself and my friends? Olympics money? NBC money? Taylor Swift money?”
• “It sucks. It took down a video I posted about the Olympics about 12+ hours after I published it. But it has never taken down a tweet or an account reported by me. Not a single one. And I report harmful stuff every other day. (Harmful as in blatant racism/sexism, violent content, harassment or abusive content. As in, according to their guidelines.)”
• “I get the impression that Twitter has no interest in curbing or preventing harassment and only seems willing to take action if the public backlash may impact their bottom line. Twitter claims to be balancing concerns for free speech with comfort of users, but the fear of harassment (or a harassment dogpile or even worse – doxxing) routinely causes me to self-censor. In essence, Twitter&039;s protection of hate speech in the guise of free speech infringes on my own free speech.”
• “There seems to be absolutely no way to take action against it. Reporting used to have some impact, lately I don&039;t even get responses to reports.”

BuzzFeed News asked some survey respondents to share their Twitter harassment experiences.

w.soundcloud.com

Click here for our full-length post with full results and more interviews, here.

Quelle: <a href="90% Of The People Who Took BuzzFeed News’ Survey Say Twitter Didn&039;t Do Anything When They Reported Abuse“>BuzzFeed

Meet Google Allo: The New Messaging App That Talks For You

There’s an episode of Black Mirror, a British television show that imagines life in the near future, that tells the story of a woman who reunites with her deceased lover, reincarnated thanks to the wonders of artificial intelligence. While alive, Ash, the boyfriend, spends his time religiously jotting down observations and recording images of things he sees in an app. And when he dies, a tech company uses this information to create a chatbot that mimics the way he talks and what he’s interested in (it gets darker from there). It&#039;s a future that seems a bit far off in the show, but then again, the episode came out a few years before Google’s new messaging platform, Allo.

Channel 4

Allo is a new AI-powered messaging app that debuts today on iOS and Android. It’s a fun, conversational interface, to be sure. But not only does it host your conversations, it also learns how you talk, and composes messages for you, in your style.

Using Allo, which I first got my hands on last week, you can feel the mind-blowing aspects of AI in a way you simply can’t in other daily-use consumer products. And while Allo will likely struggle to break through in a saturated messaging app market, it would be foolish to write off its capacity to bring AI deeper into our lives. Remember, it&039;s powered by the heft of Google’s 18 year history of learning what we want via our searches, and its seven distinct billion-plus user products. Allo doesn’t quite take you into Black Mirror territory, but, for likely the first time in your life, it travels close enough for you to see it.

Consider the following conversation between Nick Fox, Google’s VP of communications products, and myself:

Me: “Hey&#033; How are you?”

Nick: “Pretty good. How are you?”

Me: “I’m doing well”

Nick: “That’s good to hear&033;”

It may appear banal, but there’s something amazing about this conversation: None of it was written by either of us.

For each of those messages, Nick and I picked text suggested by Allo via a feature called Smart Replies. Smart Reply suggestions are shown underneath the compose field in Allo and updated based on the context of the conversation. Tapping a Smart Reply sends it along as a message. When Fox sent me a picture of his kid, Allo looked at the picture and suggested I write back “beautiful smile” along a smile emoji.

What’s even more remarkable is how Allo adjusts after some use. If you usually say “Yo&033; Sup?” as a greeting, Allo will learn that and suggest the phrase instead of something more generic like “Hey&033; How are you?” It will also learn how you converse with different people, so it will suggest different messages to send to your boss and your wife and your pal. (Unless they’re the same person.) Smart Replies are available in Google’s Inbox product already (where people opt to use the AI-generated replies about 10% of the time, according to Google), but the live, fluid world of messaging is very different than the stilted world of email. In Allo’s case, the machines can talk to us — or each other, or some hybrid — in near real time.

When Fox and I spoke without the assistance of AI, he told me that Allo’s Smart Replies work better for pleasantries and basic responses, and it probably won’t suggest things with deep detail, such as intentions to fly to another city later that day. “We&039;re not trying to replace human expression with smart replies,” he said. “We think of Smart Reply like a spell check, it&039;s assisting you with your expression, it&039;s helping you with your expression rather than a replacement.”

Smart Replies, of course, are not simple spell check. They are far more advanced. But Fox’s implication was clear: temper your expectations, and don’t fear this thing taking over human expression. Fair enough, but I still found myself tapping Smart Replies at almost every opportunity.

The Google Assistant

While I was messaging with a Google team member on Allo, I wanted to share a bit more information about “Be Right Back,” the Black Mirror episode starring the chatbot boyfriend. My usual process for doing this would be to go to Google, search for “black mirror be right back” click a link, copy it, and paste it into the messaging app. But inside Allo I simply wrote “@google black mirror be right back” and Google replied with a card filled more information about the episode. This was the work of the Google Assistant, the other big AI-powered feature in Allo.

Assistant is akin to a souped up Chatbot included in Allo, and you can bring it into any conversation you’re having within the app. In my discussion with Fox, he suggested I ask it to find nearby sushi places, and after I asked, it instantly replied with ten options. Fox responded with the name of one place, and Assistant sent a card showing its rating, cost, hours, and a short description. Within the card, I could hit shortcuts to call the restaurant, get directions or look at the menu.

You can also talk directly to Google Assistant in a private chat. It can tell you the weather, find places to eat, search the internet, call up messages from your Gmail, play games and more. It’s the most useful chatbot I’ve used other than Facebook’s M. (Of course, that’s a weak field; most chatbots make me want to throw my phone out the window.)

But it is perhaps most useful when it just pops into chats to help out. When I sent a colleague a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge, it suggested he respond with the a Google query for Golden Gate Bridge, which fired a “quick intro” culled from Wikipedia. Tapping a follow-up prompt gave us toll information, and then another tap sent us to Google Maps for directions. This all happened within a few seconds, and none of it felt like “searching.”

With Assistant, Google is creating a version of search adjusted for the fact that we spend most of our time in apps when we use our phones, and not in web browsers, which Google Search is built for. To remain competitive in this new world, Google knows search must live in various other forms, and releasing Assistant in Allo is just the start. Google will also embed Assistant in its Amazon Echo-like, voice operated product Google Home, and elsewhere. Fox described the product as “a cohesive glue across a number of Google services.”

So yes, Allo is another messaging app entering a market where there are already more than enough. But to think of it as simply a messaging service misses the point. Allo’s introduction gives humans a place to interact with AI more intimately than ever before. A few days into using Allo, I’m on board with that. And frankly, if a company wants to take my conversations turn me into chatbot after I die, I’m down with that too. Google, you have my permission.

Quelle: <a href="Meet Google Allo: The New Messaging App That Talks For You“>BuzzFeed

The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 Has Been Formally Recalled In The US For Explosion Risks

Roughly one million Samsung Galaxy Note 7 phones have been formally recalled by the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) due to the danger of the phone’s lithium ion batteries overheating and exploding.

According to the statement, users are entitled to a replacement or a refund of their phones, which retail for between $850 and $890.

Any phone sold before September 15, 2016 is subject to recall. If you own a Samsung Note 7 and want to find out if your phone has been recalled, examine the IMEI number on the phone and either call Samsung— preferably on a separate phone&#033; — or visit samsung.com.

The recall statement reads, “Samsung has received 92 reports of the batteries overheating in the U.S., including 26 reports of burns and 55 reports of property damage, including fires in cars and a garage.” Mexico and Canada have also recalled Note 7, which went on sale August 19.

As early as September 2, the CPSC issued a warning about the potential for the battery cell in the phone to explode. Samsung by that point had already said it would “voluntarily replace” users’ devices because of the dangerous battery.

Following the cautionary statement, American airlines have been asking passengers to turn their Note 7 phones off for the duration of flights. In a September 9th statement, the CPSC recommended that users stop charging the device altogether and power it down. The current recall reiterates those sentiments.

However, while sales of the Note 7 dropped after reports of exploding batteries started surfacing, data from Apteligent shows that most people who already owned the phone hadn’t stopped using it.

Samsung’s president of Samsung’s mobile business, Koh Dong-jin said in a September 2 press conference, “It has been confirmed that it was a battery cell problem. There was a tiny problem in the manufacturing process, so it was very difficult to find out.”

The debacle has already cost Samsung $25 billion in market value, and the recall costs are estimated to be over $1 billion.

The recall could inspire other big markets, namely China, to recall the phone. Chinese media have noted that while Samsung has recalled 2.5 million phones in 13 countries, it has only recalled just under 2,000 phones in China.

youtube.com

Quelle: <a href="The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 Has Been Formally Recalled In The US For Explosion Risks“>BuzzFeed

The Underground Neo-Nazi Promo Campaign Behind Adult Swim’s Alt-Right Comedy Show

Last month, printers at the University of California, Santa Cruz and elsewhere spontaneously disgorged a single sheet of paper bearing swastikas and rows of black and white text. Titled Samiz.dat, the printouts told the story of a man named Tyler, who in a near-future New York commits a mass murder in a synagogue. Fueled by a “pure hatred of niggers,” Tyler begins by killing “a single black in the temple” — whose presence is the result of a “kike slut” who believes in “race mixing propaganda” — then begins to shoot the rest of the “filthy Jew[s].”

At the end of the story, Tyler turns to…

“…a teenaged Jewess that was quivering in fear. Tyler grabbed a nearby tefillin and began furiously beating her with the straps. After rejoicing in her cries of pain, he used the hot flash hider of his Saiga to penetrate her virgin cunt and sear her insides before he began to rape her. Tyler&#039;s last moments were spent raping all three orifices of the virgin Jewess before killing her and himself. “I love Jews&#033; Jews rock&033;” were Tyler&039;s last words. This atrocity happened as a result of MILLION DOLLAR EXTREME PRESENTS WORLD PEACE, Friday nights on Cartoon Network&039;s Adult Swim.”

Evidence strongly suggests the disturbing text is the work of Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, the notorious white nationalist hacker and troll who throughout the past year has made a sport of sending unwanted hate speech to thousands of unprotected public printers around the country. In March, he took immediate credit for printing, mostly using open printers at universities and colleges, some 30,000 flyers for the Daily Stormer, which describes itself as “The World&039;s #1 Alt-Right and Pro-Genocide Website.” Between two large swastikas, the flyer exhorts white men to “join us in the struggle for global white supremacy.” Then, earlier in August, Weev sent to thousands more printers the first issue of a “webzine” called Samiz.dat — for the underground protest literature in the Soviet Union — that advocated raping, torturing, and murdering the children of black people, Jews, and “federal agents.” On Twitter, Weev described Samiz.dat as “an underground … magazine for racially aware authoritarians published only to every open printer on the Internet.” The hack has inspired imitators.

Indeed, these printouts have become so commonplace that they no longer spur coverage. What is surprising about the newest issue of Samiz.dat, however, is that it explicitly promotes a weekly television show on a major cable network owned by Time Warner. Corporate media tends not to be an object of affection amongst white supremacists. (“I know you fucking Jews control the fucking media,” reads a line from the document.)

But then, World Peace is far from a typical television show. As BuzzFeed News reported last month, the members of Million Dollar Extreme (MDE), the sketch comedy troupe who created the show, are the preferred court jesters of the alt-right, the pro-Trump online movement that prizes offensive speech, believes white people in America are imperiled, and churns out memes at a metastatic pace. The alt-right is a leaderless movement that resists easy characterization; in fact, that is one of its defense mechanisms. Weev described even a sympathetic report by Breitbart on the alt-right as “The tireless attempts of you Jews to smear us decent Nazis.” But his preoccupation with white identity and white nationhood, his adoption of hate speech as a principle, and his commitment to trolling make him an important figure within the movement regardless of his public statements.

Indeed, while Samiz.dat may have read simply as terrifying speculative fiction to the passersby who discovered it, the document is full of in-jokes that would only make sense to committed members of the alt-right.

Tyler, the mass murderer, is a reference to a character created by MDE frontman Sam Hyde. In the story printouts, Tyler commands his victims to post to social media blaming Hyde for the shooting; that’s a reference to a series of hoaxes in which members of 4chan publicly named Hyde as the perpetrator of a series of real mass shootings. And Tyler&039;s last words, “Jews rock&033;”, are the name of a skit in a recent episode of World Peace.

So what apparently caused Weev to devote an entire issue of his “webzine” to promoting World Peace?

Though Adult Swim has a history of controversial guerrilla marketing, the network said in a statement that it had no part in the creation or dissemination of the promotion.

Instead, Weev seems to have been prompted by a request from Sam Hyde. On Aug. 16, Hyde&039;s Twitter account (which he previously told BuzzFeed News was managed by his “assistant”) asked his followers to help promote World Peace:

Within four hours, Weev wrote to another alt-right account that he had “already finished the postscript” — a printer language — “and i&039;m waiting for the scan to finish.” Then he posted a copy of the text of Samiz.dat to Pastebin.com. The UC Santa Cruz Police Department reported flyers had been sent to networked campus printers the following day.

Hyde is personally acquainted with Weev. The two accounts periodically interact on Twitter; Hyde (or his assistant) told Weev that he was “planning on sending” him a review copy of the MDE book How to Bomb the US Gov&039;t. On the Million Dollar Extreme subreddit — which Hyde, or his “assistant,” moderates — Weev bragged about the first issue of Samiz.dat, which mentioned Hyde by name. And in a Reddit AMA, Weev said that he had met Hyde only once, but that Hyde was “an awesome dude” who had offered to help him make videos. Weev added that when they met he asked for “a fanboy jpeg,” which may be the following image of the two heiling that periodically gets shared on the MDE internet:

Via reddit.com

Hyde responded to a BuzzFeed inquiry asking if he knew about the promotion ahead of time with a one word email: “nope.” Hyde later followed up with an expression of affectionate condescension for the reporter.

Despite repeatedly taking credit for Samiz.dat online and initially agreeing over Twitter DM to answer questions about the fliers, Weev attributed the publications to his “assistant.” He told BuzzFeed News that Hyde did not know about the publication ahead of time. When asked how he knew that, since his assistant was responsible for the publication, he responded, “Why would my assistant consult those disgusting race mixers from MDE about our plan to get the liberal media to attack them?”

But perhaps a more important question than the provenance of the letter is one about what it represents: Does a show that inspires neo-Nazi pamphleteering jibe with Time Warner&039;s avowed corporate values of “freedom of expression, diversity of viewpoints and responsible content?”

Time Warner did not respond to a request for comment.

Quelle: <a href="The Underground Neo-Nazi Promo Campaign Behind Adult Swim’s Alt-Right Comedy Show“>BuzzFeed

Today Is The Day You Can Finally Delete The Stocks App

Download iOS 10 right now.

Have you ever used the Stocks app? Or Keynote? Or the Apple Watch app?

Probably not, right? But for years you haven&#039;t been able to delete built-in Apple apps from iOS.

Michelle Rial / BuzzFeed

Well, starting today, you can finally DELETE ‘EM.

giphy.com / Via logotv.com

Connect your iPhone to a computer to back it up via iTunes. You can also back up your phone using iCloud by going to Settings > iCloud > Backup > turn it to on. If you don&039;t have enough iCloud space, try this trick.

Don&039;t skip this step&#033; You could lose all of your data&033;

Next, update to iOS 10 in Settings.

The fastest way to download iOS 10 is to connect the device to your computer. If you have the latest version of iTunes, open the app and then go to Summary. Next, click Check for Update.

You can also update the device wirelessly. Open the Settings app > General > Software Update and tap Download and Install.

These devices can upgrade to iOS 10: iPhone 5 or newer, a 6th generation iPod Touch, iPad Pro, iPad 4 or newer, and iPad mini 2 or newer.

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Quelle: <a href="Today Is The Day You Can Finally Delete The Stocks App“>BuzzFeed

I Used The New iPhone 7 And, TBH, No Headphone Jack Was Not That Bad

Okay, everyone, calm down.

BuzzFeed News / Apple

Last week, the Internet exploded in enraged disbelief when Apple unveiled the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus — minus headphone jacks. But, as I discovered while testing the device in the days that followed the keynote, a phone is much more than the sum of its ports.

For the purposes of this review, I’m not interested in “bead blah-sted anodized al-yoo-mi-nee-um.” Because high-definition closeups and carefully choreographed onstage demos are not real-world conditions, I&#039;m more concerned about the iPhone in the context of life’s less, er, dignified moments.

I’m human, and wrote this as such.

Listen, I was more upset than anyone. “DON’T YOU DARE, TIM&#033;&033;&033;,” I mouthed to my computer on one particularly bleak August day, when the jack murder was all but confirmed.

(Just kidding, I live in San Francisco. Every Fogust day is particularly bleak.)

At first, the prospect of a Bluetooth-only product seemed a little …mean — and also strange. Most high-fidelity headphones use the same 3.5 mm port that’s been around for fifty years. It’s *just about* the only technology that our grandparents can still relate to&033; Seriously, Tim, how dare you&033;

But when Apple announced its proposed solution — EarPods that connect via Lightning (the name of the iPhone’s one and only remaining port) and a Lightning-to-audio-jack adapter for wired headphones, both included in the box — I put down my pitchfork.

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Quelle: <a href="I Used The New iPhone 7 And, TBH, No Headphone Jack Was Not That Bad“>BuzzFeed