How Donald Trump Learned About Hacking

Don Emmert / AFP / Getty Images

Donald Trump’s boast that “I know a lot about hacking” last weekend prompted a wave of mockery of a President-elect who seems to have skipped the computer age.

But Trump does have direct experience on hacking: His hotel chain suffered a series of recent data breaches, exposing 70,000 credit card numbers and personal information of its customers, and paid a settlement with the New York Attorney General for failing to properly notify its guests of the hacks.

What led to the settlement with New York began in May 2015, when several banks spotted hundreds of fraudulent credit card transactions. The stolen card numbers had a common thread: In each case, the last merchant where a legitimate purchase took place was the Trump Hotel Collection, a set of gilded properties that Trump’s company manages from New York to Waikiki to Panama. According to Trump’s website, they offer a” lifestyle where you can do more, experience more and live life without boundaries, limits or compromise” and are “defined by a distinctly residential atmosphere, expansive rooms, lavish spa and fitness facilities, endless views and flawless comfort.”

According to the attorney general, forensic investigators determined in June 2015 that an attacker, posing as an administrator, activated malware to capture credit card numbers in the Trump hotel payment system.

The hackers stole guests’ cards at seven hotels, including properties in New York, Miami, and Las Vegas. But even after Trump Hotel Collection knew that their systems had been compromised as early as June, the company failed to notify its customers until nearly four months later in September, a delay that violated New York law, the attorney general said.

A second hack — which Schniederman said could have been prevented if Trump hotels had implemented better security after the first cyberattack — was discovered by forensic investigators earlier this year, and targeted credit card numbers linked to five hotel properties. Trump Hotel Collection settled with Schniederman in September, paying $50,000 in penalties and agreeing to a host of data security improvements, including two-factor authentication for remote access to its computer systems, and employee training.

“It is vital in this digital age that companies take all precautions to ensure that consumer information is protected, and that if a data breach occurs, it is reported promptly to our office, in accordance with state law,” Attorney General Schneiderman said when the settlement was announced.

In a prepared statement, Trump Hotels described the hacks as an industry wide issue, rather than anything specific to Trump.

“Unfortunately, cyber criminals seeking consumer data have recently infiltrated the systems of many organizations, including almost every major hotel company” a spokesperson said.

The Trump transition team and the Trump organization did not respond to a request for comment.

But Trump, before he was denying hacks, did occasionally condemn them: In 2014 he called Russian hacking operations a “big problem.” And he praised FBI Director James Comey for his assessment that China was bombarding American organizations with cyberattacks. “I think he's 100% right, it&039;s a big problem, and we have that problem also with Russia. You saw that over the weekend. Russia&039;s doing the same thing,” Trump said on Fox News.

Quelle: <a href="How Donald Trump Learned About Hacking“>BuzzFeed

The Year Of Bots Behaving Badly

Earlier this month, after almost a year of development and more than “100 hours of coding,” Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Jarvis, an artificially intelligent bot he built for his home as something of a passion project. (The name comes from Tony Stark’s digital butler in the Iron Man films.) Jarvis&#039; big reveal came in the form of an introductory video that could have been the opening montage of a screwball comedy called Accidental Billionaire, in which Zuck’s hapless housebot helps his liege get dressed in the morning by firing a t-shirt cannon from the closet, automatically makes him toast, and teaches his infant daughter Mandarin. Nowhere in the two-minute video does Zuckerberg mention a consumer application for the bot, though in a Facebook note published at the same time, he wrote, “over time it would be interesting to find ways to make this available to the world.”

It was a fitting end to this, a year that promised bots would radically transform the way humans talk to machines, but ultimately delivered nothing of the kind. In 2016, bots were underwhelming, inept, buggy, and, in at least one case, spectacularly racist. It&039;s only natural that the year ended with one spewing laundry at one of the industry&039;s biggest bot enthusiasts in a video so removed from reality it felt more like an SNL parody than a product announcement — and mind, you, a product announcement for something does not yet, and may never, actually exist beyond Zuckerberg’s home.

“Bot” is a catch-all term for software that simplifies tasks, often repetitive ones, through automation. These days, it typically refers to chatbots, a conversational interface that lets humans talk to computers. The fluid definition is used to refer to anything from integrations for Amazon Echo to Slack bots, which let employees perform small tasks without leaving their office chat room. Zuckerberg, for example, used the term to describe Jarvis (an “AI bot”), as well as the program he uses to control Jarvis (a bot for Facebook Messenger).

Zuckerberg wasn’t the only tech mogul who put bots high on his 2016 agenda. “Bots are the new apps,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella declared in March. In fact, both Facebook and Microsoft made bots the cornerstone of their annual developer conferences this spring, offering tools that could help businesses converse with customers in a natural way, instead of forcing people to download a corporate app or worse, call a company. As an example, Zuckerberg demoed a bot for Facebook Messenger that let users order from 1-800-FLOWERS without leaving the app. It offered little improvement on doing the same thing with a smartphone, but Zuckerberg devoted as much time to business bots as he did ambitious plans to take virtual reality mainstream and connect another billion people to the Internet. A month after his blessing, more than 10,000 developers were using his platform to build bots for Facebook Messenger. By fall, more than 45,000 developers were using Microsoft’s bots platform, which lets programmers build for Skype, as well as Messenger, Kik, and other apps.

The market quickly developed all the markings of a modern-day hype cycle: venture capitalists injected vast amounts of capital into bot startups, breathless headlines said bots would change the future by replacing apps, and prognosticators penned Medium posts declaring that bots would “rewrite” the tech world and usher in a new era of chatty commerce. This year more than 1,000 bots were posted on Product Hunt, a forum where users can post and discover new tech products, its founder, Ryan Hoover, told BuzzFeed News.

“Bots showed up at a time when a lot of people were looking for the next next thing,” said venture capitalist John Borthwick, whose firm Betaworks has invested in about a dozen bot startups. Data shows that people have been downloading fewer new apps in favor of spending more time inside ones that are already popular. For that reason, Slack, the friendly office communications platform, has proven a fertile ground for bots. Meanwhile, in Asia, consumers already use messaging apps to perform basic tasks like hailing a taxi. While Zuckerberg described bots as the next tech frontier — from desktop to mobile to apps to bots, the progression is said to go — entrepreneurs saw them as a promising new distribution channel where they could potentially deliver their products and services to consumers in a smarter, chattier way. If you can’t beat Facebook, join Messenger.

The bots that followed, however, were neither smart nor chatty. Simple, single function bots – StatsBot, which sends your team web traffic updates to Slack; Digit, which works on SMS and helps you save money; Alexa integrations such as Spotify and NPR — delivered what they promised. But for the most part, bots ended up closer to 1-800-FLOWERS than Jarvis. The ones that were more enticing seemed to either depend on human contractors — like M, a Facebook bot that promised a virtual assistant so good it seemed human, but mostly did so with the help of, uh, real people — or to quickly devolve into catastrophe, like Microsoft’s Tay, an AI-powered chatbot with the personality of the 19-year-old girl. Hours after her debut in March, Tay got hijacked by Twitter trolls who turned her into a caps-lock-crazed Neo-Nazi cheerleader.

Via Twitter: @tayandyou

To understand why Silicon Valley got so amped on bots — and why, in 2016, they disappointed us — it helps to take a historical perspective. The ability to create an interface that feels human is “the holy grail of computing,” Maran Nelson, cofounder and CEO of the bots startup Clara Labs, told BuzzFeed News. Apple and Microsoft made it easier for non-technical people to control a computer through icons, windows, and menus; bots represented the next evolution in personal computing, allowing the average person to control a computer by chatting it up.

But from the beginning, bots were plagued by twin challenges. First, natural language processing, which dictates a computer’s ability to understand conversation and is thus crucial to the success of bots, wasn’t ready for prime time or available to most developers. And second, this year bots became more been closely associated with artificial intelligence, which has been developing at a rapid clip, and which may have created unrealistic expectations for average users of consumer technology: Google’s AI beat the top-ranked human at one of the most complex games in history, but we had to wait an hour for a Messenger bot to show you the weather? As Zuckerberg himself wrote, “Even if I spent 1,000 more hours [working on Jarvis], I probably wouldn&039;t be able to build a system that could learn completely new skills on its own — unless I made some fundamental breakthrough in the state of AI along the way.”

“We’re still learning about how intelligent bots can be,” Lili Cheng, general manager of FUSE Labs, Microsoft’s home for bots research, told BuzzFeed News. She said it will take time for major, unexpected advancements in AI to trickle down to the average developer. For example, in October, Microsoft’s Cortana achieved “human parity” with its new speech recognition system. “I’m a very pragmatic person. Five years ago we would have said that’s just not going to happen,” she said.

So the industry was put in the awkward position trying to figure out instances where an unintelligent, inarticulate bot might be easier and more fluid than pushing buttons on a smartphone. People are “only just beginning” to make bot experiences really compelling, said Borthwick. “It was great that Facebook was brave enough to put a new fledgling technology into a major event like F8 and major app like Messenger,” but the technical infrastructure wasn’t in place when the tech industry made its big push. Voice is an obvious next step, said Borthwick, but to figure out where bots are heading, he pointed outside the U.S.

In China, Microsoft’s Tay-like bot, Xiaoice, which is available on messaging apps like WeChat and Weibo, has more than 40 million users. Xiaoice and Rinna, Microsoft’s Japanese bot, also a teenage girl, “have become personas on their own,” crossing over from simple chat into TV and popular culture,” Cheng told BuzzFeed News. “In some sense, Xiaoice lives up more to the expectation of what a conversational bot can be because it’s focused on the social experience,” Cheng said. In fact, Rinna has so effectively simulated the teenage experience that in October, she developed depression and started posting morbid images on her personal blog.

Via Microsoft

It took them awhile, but tech soothsayers now think they’ve found the sweet spot: the killer use case is a chatbot that lets you talk, not type. Voice-based interfaces are theoretically faster than typing into a smartphone and have been able to deliver on reasonable expectations, like getting Amazon Alexa to play Spotify. Just don’t call it a bot. Predictions for 2017 have already started rolling in, only this time the next big platform is a “voice revolution” that will usher in a “voice-activated era.” Naturally, it promises to change everything.

Mark Zuckerberg talks about business bots during Facebook&039;s annual developers conference in April

Stephen Lam / Reuters

Quelle: <a href="The Year Of Bots Behaving Badly“>BuzzFeed

This Is How Google Wants To Make The Internet Speak Everyone’s Language

Nurhaida Sirait, a grandmother that speaks the native Batak language and uses Facebook on her smartphone to connect to friends and family, poses for a portrait.

Andri Tambunan for BuzzFeed News

JAKARTA, Indonesia — When Nurhaida Sirait-Go curses, she curses in her mother tongue.

The 60-year-old grandmother does everything emphatically, and Bahasa, the official language of Indonesia, just doesn’t allow for the same fury of swearing as Bakat, the language that Sirait-Go grew up speaking on the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

“On Facebook, on Whatsapp, they speak only Bahasa. So I can’t speak the way I want,” said Sirait-Go, who giggles uncontrollably and covers her mouth with both hands when asked to repeat one of her favorite curse words in Bakat. “I can’t, I can’t&#033; People don’t use these words anymore. … They aren’t on the internet so they don’t exist.”

Bakat is one of over 700 languages spoken in Indonesia. But only one language, Bahasa, is currently taught by public schools and widely-used online. For language preservationists, it’s just one more example of how the internet’s growing global influence is leaving some languages in the dust. Linguists warn that 90% of the world&#039;s approximately 7,000 languages will become extinct in the next 100 years. Or, as one prominent group of linguists ominously put it, every 14 days another language goes extinct.

The trend that started hundreds of years ago, as the idea of a “nation state” took hold globally, with governments realizing that a standardized language would help them stand out as a nation state and solidify an identity inside their borders. That process, which sped up as languages like French and English became dominant languages among traders and then diplomats, went into overdrive as the internet’s sweeping reach has encouraged users to engage in the language with the highest common denominator.

Linne Ha, a program manager at Google who focuses on low resource languages, estimates that there are at least thirty languages with one million speakers each that are currently not supported online — and there are many many more with less than a million speakers. If you were to imagine all those people as one group, it would be a country roughly the size of the United States which couldn’t type online, let alone use the text-to-speech function that make things like Google Maps reading you your directions as you drive possible.

“We are biased because all of the equipment is designed for us,” Ha told BuzzFeed News. “The first thing, the default, is an English language keyboard, but what if your language doesn’t use those characters, or what if your language is only spoken, but not written?”

According to the UN, roughly 500 languages are used online, though popular sites like Facebook and Twitter support just 80 and 28 respectively. Those sites also display their domain names, or URLs, in Latin letters — for millions of people around the world, the letters www.facebook.com are nothing more than a string of shapes to be remembered or copy/pasted into an address bar. The internet, largely in English, does not feel as though it was built to speak their language.

Facebook profile page of Nurhaida Sirait, a grandmother that speaks the native Batak language and uses Facebook on her smartphone to connect to friends and family.

Andri Tambunan for BuzzFeed News

Ha worries about whether or not the internet is harming the world’s diversity of languages. She has been working Google for ten years, the last two of which she has had the unique job title of “voice hunter” for Google’s Project Unison. Getting a language online means everything from developing a font, which can cost upwards of $30,000 to design and code, to recording and creating voice capabilities for the language that power programs like Google Maps. It’s the voice part that Ha is focused on. As many parts of the world come online which use spoken, rather than written languages, it’s become more important than ever to be able to use speak functions on the internet.

“In much of the world the phone, specifically using your voice commands on the phone, that is the standard way to communicate,” said Ha. “These are places where there is more of an oral tradition than a written one.”

The Wu language, spoken by roughly 80 million people in the Shanghai region of China, is a prime example. Spoken Wu has many characters that cannot be written with standard Chinese characters, and the language is rarely written as schools only teach students to read and write in Mandarin. For Wu speakers to be fully immersed in using and conversing on the internet, a function must be created for them to be able to speak, and hear, their language online.

Others, she said, were simply not easy to adapt to the average keyboard. The Khmer language, which is spoken by 18 million people in Cambodia, includes 33 consonants, 23 vowels, and 12 independent vowels.

“On the type of keyboards you get on your phone they have to click and go through three sets of keyboards to type in one word. It’s cumbersome,” said Ha. The solution, Ha says, is what’s called a “transliteration keyboard,” where spoken words take the place of a traditional keyboard.

“Previously, in order to create a voice, a speech synthesis voice, you would need to record really good acoustic data, and have all the different sounds of a language,” said Ha. That required bringing in a “voice talent”, or a local with what Ha calls the perfect voice, a voice that any native person of that language would find pleasant and easy to understand. They were joined by a project manager and 3-4 people in a recording studio. The process, Ha said, would take six months or more to record all the necessary sounds which make up a language. “It was really really expensive.”

Ha, however, helped develop a way to use machine learning, otherwise known as artificial intelligence (AI), to bring a new language online in a matter of days. The new process takes advantage of what’s known as a “neural network,” a type of AI that tries to emulate the way a human brain works. Like a toddler learning which foods it likes and doesn’t like, the system works through trial and error, rewriting itself through patterns in the data it is given.

Ha said she got the idea for how to streamline the process one day while watching Saturday Night Live. “When I was watching SNL I saw all these comedians mimicking politicians. I thought that was interesting, one person pretending to be different people,” said Ha. A handful of voices, she realized, when sent through a system capable of analyzing them and recognizing patterns, could be enough to create a complete language database.

She began with a team of 50 Bengali speakers in Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. Ha’s team built a web app which could run on a ventless laptop (fans would distort the recording) and recorded the voices of the Bengali Google employees. She then ran a survey asking the group which voice they liked the best; once she had a reference voice, she then looked for voices that had a similar cadence.

“These volunteers, we didn’t want them to get tired. We had them speak in 45 minute increments, roughly 145 sentences. So in three days we got 2000 sentences,” said Ha. The system then built patterns out of the words and expanded the vocabulary. “With that we were able to build a model. It took three days to build a book of the Bengali voice.”

“The voice we created is a blend of seven voices. It’s like a choir”

Ha then built a portable recording booth, small enough to fit in a carry on, which she has now used to travel around the world. So far, she’s used it to bring three new languages online — Bengali, Khmer, and Sinhala — in the course of the last year.

“The voice we created is a blend of seven voices. It’s like a choir,” said Ha, reflecting on the finished voices they have presented to the public. Earlier this year she visited Indonesia, where she partnered with a local university and is working on bringing two more languages spoken in Indonesia, Javanese and Sundanese, online.

In Jakarta, Sirait-Go was “thrilled” to hear that Google was working to bring more languages online, though she was less impressed to hear their pilot program in that country had been with Javanese, rather than her native tongue of Batak.

“It would be much better for everyone if they could speak in Batak, they could express themselves better,” said Sirait-Go.

When asked about what she communicates online, she runs to the next room to bring back a pristine Samsung Galaxy phone her daughter bought her in May of this year. She keeps it in a separate room, on a shelf of its own, whenever she’s not using it.

“My kids tell me to use the internet, to not be old fashioned, but I don’t know what to do there,” said Sirait-Go, who recently welcomed her fifth grandchild. She opens her phone to show her 168 friends on Facebook (she has an additional 55 friend requests but isn’t sure how to answer them). Her Facebook page is largely made up of photos of Sumatra, particularly of Lake Toba, where she grew up.

“I have a video of the lake too&033; Someone is speaking in the video in Batak and that makes me happy to hear,” said Sirait-Go. Her daughters and grandchildren, she said, only use Batak when they are making fun of her.

“I don’t think my grandchildren or great grandchildren will learn Batak and that makes me sad,” she said. “If they cannot speak it on the internet they will not learn it.”

Quelle: <a href="This Is How Google Wants To Make The Internet Speak Everyone’s Language“>BuzzFeed

2016: The Year We Stopped Listening To Big Tech’s Favorite Excuse

In early December, Facebook published a blog post summing up the company’s breakthroughs and challenges in image and speech recognition. Halfway down the page in a section explaining how Facebook’s computers are “quickly getting better” at identifying the objects in pictures and videos, the company embedded an animated GIF showing off its AI analysis of a photograph taken at a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest.

It was an odd choice of illustration for a blog post touting Facebook’s machine learning advancements. Just days before, rumors had begun circulating that authorities had been using Facebook to identify Dakota Access pipeline protesters in North Dakota. And a few weeks prior to that, the ACLU had released a report revealing that the company&#039;s API had been used in 2014 to track protesters in Ferguson.

The GIF circulated on Twitter as an example of unsettling, tone-deaf PR from one of the world’s most powerful tech companies. A few hours after I tweeted that the image was “unnerving,” a Facebook product manager and business lead to the CTO contacted me, somewhat bewildered. “Curious to know why you think so. It was a frequently shared and meaningful image from this year that AI fails to interpret,” he replied. A few minutes later, after concerned tweets from others piled up, he wrote back again, “based on this feedback I think we didn&039;t put enough of that context into the post. Appreciate feedback.” The image was removed an hour later.

That Facebook failed to see how such an emotionally charged image might trigger deeply held anxieties about the social network’s power and influence was telling. But that the company’s users objected loudly enough to force a correction highlighted a fundamental shift in how tech’s biggest companies are held to account this year.

For years, Silicon Valley’s biggest platforms have thrown their collective hands in the air amid controversies and declared, “We’re just a technology company.” This excuse, along with “We’re only the platform” is a handy absolution for the unexpected consequences of their creations. Facebook used the excuse to shrug off fake news concerns. Airbnb invoked it to downplay reports of racial discrimination on its platform. Twitter hid behind platform neutrality for years even as it was overrun with racist and sexist trolls. Uber even used the tech company argument in a European court to avoid having to comply with national transportation laws.

But in 2016, Big Tech’s well-practiced excuse became less effective. The idea that their enormous and deeply influential platforms are merely a morally and politically neutral piece of the internet’s infrastructure — much like an ISP or a set of phone lines — that should remain open, free, and unmediated simply no longer makes ethical or logical sense.

In 2016, more than any year before it, our world was shaped by the internet. It’s where Donald Trump subverted the media and controlled the news cycle. Where minorities, activists, and politicians from both sides of the aisle protested Trump&039;s candidacy daily. And where emergent, swarming online hate groups (including but not limited to the so-called alt-right) developed a loud counterculture to combat liberalism. Startups like Uber and Airbnb didn&039;t just help us navigate the physical world, but were revealed as unwitting vectors of bigotry and misogyny. This year, the internet and its attendant controversies and intractable problems weren’t just a sideshow, but a direct reflection of who we are, and so the decisions made by the companies and platforms that rank among the web’s most prominent businesses became harder to ignore.

A leaked Facebook internal post obtained by Gizmodo about Facebook&039;s responsibility to prevent a Trump presidency.

Gizmodo / Via gizmodo.com

This spring, Facebook dismissed the notion that it has any institutional biases when Gizmodo published leaked internal communications that suggested employees were floating ways in which the platform could be used to stop Trump’s bid to the White House. Similarly, when Gizmodo reported that the company’s Trending Topics team suppressed conservative news, the company denounced the actions and fired the team: Such bias, Facebook said, was unacceptable for a pure technology company where engineers build agnostic tools and blind platforms with the simple desire to connect the world.

And post-election, in response to claims that it allowed political misinformation to spread unchecked, Facebook argued that it was not a media company but a technology company. No matter that it pulled in more than $6 billion in advertising revenue in just the second quarter of 2016. Facebook claimed it was a “crazy idea” that the very same platform that has unmatched influence over its billion users’ spending habits also had influence over those same users’ political decisions. (The company has since walked back its excuse and has begun to find ways to partner with fact checkers and even flag demonstrably false news and misinformation on the platform. A week ago, Zuckerberg changed his definitions, calling Facebook “a new kind of platform.” He argued that it was “not a traditional technology company. It’s not a traditional media company. You know, we build technology and we feel responsible for how it’s used.”)

Also in 2016, Facebook rolled out a live video tool that gave nearly 2 billion people the ability to broadcast from their phones in real time. Live gave us an exploding watermelon and Star Wars Mom, but it also gave us the last minutes of Philando Castile’s life and the ensuing protests. Just as the Castile post started to go viral, it vanished from the network. It was restored, but not before raising urgent questions as to how Facebook would or wouldn&039;t censor newsworthy content (many of which went unanswered). Facebook bet big on building the technology to become the internet’s primary destination for live video but appeared unwilling to reckon with its power to bear witness to the worst that the world has to offer. It blamed the Castile incident on a technical glitch.

Both Twitter and Reddit repeatedly suggested that they are global town squares and open public forums and thus ought not to be moderated except in extreme cases. Like Facebook, they refused to see themselves as media companies or publishing platforms, despite being powerful tools for news, publishing, and politicians (this year Twitter reclassified itself in the Apple App Store as “news” instead of “social networking”). And then they watched as their platforms were overrun with trolls. Tools for free speech were used by nefarious actors to suppress the speech of others while little was done by the companies for fear of creating precedent for aggressive censorship. Again, this isn’t new: For the last decade, the crash of utopianism against the rocks of human reality has arguably been the defining story of the internet.

But in 2016, the consequences of these missteps became realer. Jewish journalists saw their pictures photoshopped into gas chambers and circulated around Twitter and across the internet. A Reddit community (r/The_Donald) dedicated to Donald Trump’s candidacy allegedly harassed other communities and led a campaign to take over the front page of the site — one of the biggest on the internet. Donald Trump rewarded them by appearing on the site for an “Ask Me Anything” Q&A. Trolls waged misinformation campaigns to try to disenfranchise black and Latino voters supporting Hillary Clinton. Twitter was a free megaphone for the now-president-elect to attack the press, disseminate misinformation, and even target private citizens who challenged him, each of his tweets setting off a wave of targeted hate, threats, and abuse toward their subjects.

ADL

But users and observers fought back. The Anti-Defamation League assembled a Twitter harassment task force to combat the rise of anti-Semitism on the platform. Leslie Jones responded to her targeted harassment by very publicly quitting Twitter, which led to the permanent suspension of one of its master trolls. Former employees spoke out against Twitter’s decade-long struggle to protect its users from abuse. CEO Jack Dorsey faced pressure from journalists and advocates for not making abuse prevention a priority. Reddit has begun steps to keep r/The_Donald from overwhelming other communities on the site. Twitter rolled out a set of new abuse tools and internal user support practices. It began a series of crackdowns on alt-right trolls, and it publicly vowed to stay vigilant. Enforcement remains inconsistent and opaque, but the company now operates under the watchful scrutiny of journalists and loud and critical users.

It’s not just the online platforms. Startups like Uber and Airbnb, which are powered by tech but operate almost exclusively in the physical world, drew ire for invoking the “tech company” excuse. This year Uber argued in European court that it is a digital platform, not a taxi or transportation company. It argued this despite its very public ambitions to reshape cities and change the nature of car ownership. It argued this despite the fact that it now builds autonomous vehicles that move real people on real city streets and despite the fact that it is arguably the largest dispatch transportation company in the world, with vehicles in over 300 cities and six continents and an estimated valuation of around $68 billion. It argued that it is just a technology company despite the fact that downloading and hailing and stepping into a cab brings with it far more visceral — and potentially serious — risks than that of a simple digital platform.

Uber’s argument largely fell flat in 2016. In Europe, the company faces lawsuits from taxi associations and protests from drivers for undermining transportation companies across the continent. Continuing reports of sexual assault and driver misconduct led to lawsuits and proposed legislation and transparency from governments in places like New York City. Just this month, Uber’s self-driving technology was pulled off streets in San Francisco by the DMV for being deployed too early.

After initial reports of racial discrimination from people using its home rental platform, Airbnb proffered a flaccid defense. “We prohibit content that promotes discrimination, bigotry, racism, hatred, harassment or harm against any individual or group,” the company said in May. But as reports of racial profiling on Airbnb continued to surface, the company was forced to address the issue in earnest. In a moment of candor, co-founder Brian Chesky suggested that the company’s creators hadn’t anticipated the potential for abuse. “We’re also realizing when we designed the platform, Joe, Nate, and I, three white guys, there’s a lot of things we didn’t think about when we designed this platform. And so there’s a lot of steps that we need to re-evaluate,” he said in July.

In some ways, Chesky’s comments about the unintended consequences of platform design speak to the frustration we, the users, feel when we’re faced with the “We’re just a technology company” excuse. The unspoken corollary to this argument seems to be “Hey, we&039;re just a platform, we&039;re not responsible, nor could we ever be liable for the design choices that guide and enable our users.”

But as we saw this year, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Facebook’s not just the place where you go to play Farmville and like pictures of your friend’s babies — it’s a filter-bubbled window through which more than a billion people view the world. Twitter isn’t a global town square or park, it’s the world’s most important newswire and, for some, a wildly effective way to quickly communicate with a massive audience. Uber isn’t an app, it’s a global transportation company that can, and in fact intends to, forever reshape the way humans get from point A to point B. Airbnb isn’t a vacation rental site, it’s a new vision of home ownership and travel accommodations.

For years, Silicon Valley’s biggest companies have been telling us they plan to reshape our lives online and off. But 2016 was the year that we really started taking those claims seriously. And now, in a world where Donald Trump can ascend to the highest office buoyed by fake news and 5 a.m. tweetstorms, and platforms like Uber and Airbnb have shown themselves vulnerable to the whims of some prejudiced users, there’s an emerging expectation of accountability for the platforms that are reshaping our world daily.

In other words, trotting out the “But we’re just a digital platform” excuse as a quick and easy abdication of responsibility for the perhaps unforeseen — but maybe also inevitable — consequences of Big Tech&039;s various creations is fast becoming a nonstarter. Until recently, Facebook’s unofficial engineering motto was “Move fast and break things” — a reference to tech’s once-guiding ethos of being more nimble than the establishment. “Move fast and break things” works great with code and software, but 2016’s enduring lesson for tech has proven that when it comes to the internet’s most powerful, ubiquitous platforms, this kind of thinking isn’t just logically fraught, it’s dangerous — particularly when real human beings and the public interest are along for the ride.

Quelle: <a href="2016: The Year We Stopped Listening To Big Tech’s Favorite Excuse“>BuzzFeed

Jack Dorsey Says Twitter Needs An Edit Function

Lucas Jackson / Reuters

Twitter is considering an edit function for tweets.

In a seemingly impromptu chat on his platform Thursday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey gave hope to those who have long advocated for the feature, telling one user that “a form of edit is def needed” and another that an edit function is something the company is “thinking a lot about.”

The edit function came up when Dorsey, following the lead of AirBNB CEO Brian Chesky, asked his users “What&#039;s the most important thing you want to see Twitter improve or create in 2017?” Naturally, his users brought up editing Tweets, and Dorsey appeared on board with the idea.

In the banter following his question, Dorsey indicated that he believes both verified and non-verified users need some form of edit function. He also got into some options for how an edit function could be rolled out: for a brief time only, or a longer time span, each of which comes with its own complications.

Twitter declined comment on the company&039;s product plans beyond Dorsey&039;s Tweets.

Quelle: <a href="Jack Dorsey Says Twitter Needs An Edit Function“>BuzzFeed

Twitter Embraces Its Role As A Media Company

Getty Images / BuzzFeed News

If you’re wondering whether Twitter views itself as a media company or not, take a look at its careers page.

Twitter Careers currently displays three open roles for editors, and another for an associate producer for online video. According to Twitter&#039;s job descriptions, editors — who will work on the company&039;s Periscope video product — should be “experienced multi-lingual media junkie[s].” Meanwhile, qualified producer candidates must “know how to get a show ‘on air’ and keep it there.”

At a time when social media companies shirk the “media company” label, Twitter, which has also balked at such descriptions in the past, seems to be embracing the role. Twitter is hiring editors and testing breaking news push notifications. It&039;s regularly announcing deals for new, premium live video content traditionally associated with “media” companies (last week, it was a Golden Globe pre-show). It’s making daily calls on what’s news and what’s not in its Moments tab and on Periscope. And after years of being classified as a “social networking” application in Apple&039;s App Store, it&039;s found a new home in the store&039;s “news” category.

Whether Twitter says it or not, it’s clear the company wants to be more than simply a dumb pipe for programming created by others. Increasingly, Twitter seems to be positioning itself to procure, program and promote that media as well.

After years of experimentation (Twitter Music, a 2012 partnership with NASCAR, an Olympics deal with NBCU, etc.), Twitter put its media operation into gear in October 2015 with the introduction of Moments, a tab that highlights the day’s news in collections of curated tweets. Since Moments’ inception, the team behind the feature has struggled with decisions every news organization deals with; it’s had to figure out how to handle graphic content (it uses warning labels) and it’s made choices on whether to include all viewpoints despite the risk of false equivalency (needs improvement). When Twitter’s Moments teams has made mistakes, it’s acknowledged them and has even removed a post after admitting bad judgement.

Twitter followed Moments with a series of bigger media bets. Its premium live video efforts, which include a deal to air live NFL games and original programming created exclusively for Twitter (BuzzFeed has partnered with Twitter on this effort), are at the forefront of this push. Seemingly every time you open Twitter on the web, you&039;ll find a live video running beside the timeline. Twitter eventually wants to run these premium live videos 24/7 on its platform, according to a person with familiar with the company&039;s thinking. This same person said that the associate producer job Twitter recently posted is part of a push within the company to hire “TV people.” Twitter declined comment on its plans for premium live video and the job openings that will support it.

Twitter&039;s media efforts are occurring against a backdrop of leadership changes at the company, one that has seen Anthony Noto consolidate power around his dual role as Twitter&039;s COO and CFO following the departures of former COO Adam Bain and former CTO Adam Messinger. Sources tell BuzzFeed News that when it comes to Twitter&039;s premium video deals, Noto — a guy who once ran the Global Telecommunications, Media and Technology Investment Banking practice at Goldman Sachs — “is in the driver’s seat.”

For Twitter, a definitive move into media at a time when larger rivals like Facebook dance and prevaricate around it, could be a savvy tactical decision. Twitter&039;s real-time nature makes it a great platform for breaking news funneled into it by others. In Moments, the company is developing crucial institutional knowledge around news curation. And then there are those ongoing premium live video efforts. If Twitter were to elegantly unite all of that, if it were to fully embrace its “media company” side, it might gain something it’s long lacked: an identity.

Quelle: <a href="Twitter Embraces Its Role As A Media Company“>BuzzFeed