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You Can Now Book Guided Tours And Local Meetups On Airbnb, Too

Caroline O’Donovan / BuzzFeed News

With Airbnb's new service, Trips, even people who don&039;t have a bed or room or home to rent can offer services like local tours or home-cooked meals to travelers — for a fee.

CEO Brian Chesky announced the news Thursday morning at Airbnb Open, its annual hosting conference, which attracted more than 7,000 people and had a tech conference-meets-Coachella vibe.

“You can spend as much time planning your trip as on your trip,” Chesky said on stage at the LA&039;s Orpheum Theater. “We want to fix this, We don&039;t think there should be a trade-off. We think travel can be magical and easy.”

Starting today in twelve cities — Detroit, London, Paris, Nairobi, Havana, San Francisco, Cape Town, Florence, Miami, Seoul, Tokyo and LA — Airbnb&039;s offerings will be divided into three categories: homes, experiences and places.

“Homes” what Airbnb has offered all along: short-term rentals. What&039;s new is “experiences” — “handcrafted activities designed and led by local experts” — and “places” —a resource clearinghouse with in-depth guidebooks, self-guided audio tours, and information on local meetups. For example, a trip to Nairobi could now include a reservation at a local cafe made or a meetup with other travelers at a local bar made through the “Places” tab, and a lesson in cleaning a cookstove (an “experience”), in addition to a place to stay — all booked without leaving Airbnb.

Experiences are advertised like films, with movie posters and video trailers. Half of these “immersive” experiences, often three-day itineraries, cost less than $200, Chesky said. For example, a three-day photography experience that involves a studio tour and snack on one day, a photoshoot and dinner the next day, and post-production lesson with tea costs $199, and can be booked instantly. A single-day “experience” might be a show, an afternoon shopping at a marketplace with a food anthropologist or, for $31 dollars in L.A., a living room concert by local artists. The company has set a target that10 percent of the experiences be aimed at social partnerships, with proceeds going to local nonprofits, not Airbnb.

Hosts can apply today to lead experiences in 51 cities globally, and even guests who aren&039;t staying in an Airbnb can book them.

Chesky was clear to differentiate the Airbnb experiences from more typical tours. “You immerse,” he said. “You join the local communities.”

“Places,” meanwhile, offers online guidebooks, with tips for local dining, music, and more that are “curated” by locals, but are activities travelers can undertake on their own.

Airbnb also announced an audio tour partnership with Detour, maps that highlight local favorites based on where you&039;ve booked, and a partnership with Resy that will allow guests to book tables at local restaurants without leaving the Airbnb app. Those partnerships are live now in the launch cities; Chesky said Airbnb is working on partnerships with other services, including airlines, in the near future.

“If you have a passion, if you have an interest, or if you have a hobby, you can share your community with others in the world, because travel has never really been about where you go, it&039;s about who you can become,” Chesky said. “And this is something that we would love to be able to build together.”

Chesky didn’t address on stage the question of who’s responsible if your guided river tour kayak springs a leak, or if the home-cooked meal you booked makes you queasy. Whether these entrepreneurial locals will be regulated as small business owners or allowed to operate as free agents remains to be seen. Like so much of Airbnb&039;s regulatory situation, it&039;s likely the answer will be decided by local authorities on a city-by-city basis.

Quelle: <a href="You Can Now Book Guided Tours And Local Meetups On Airbnb, Too“>BuzzFeed

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The Anti-Defamation League Has New Demands For Twitter And Facebook

ADL

This week, Twitter began taking steps to address the harassment problem that has plagued its platform for years. On Tuesday, it rolled out new anti-abuse tools, including an expanded mute feature and a more streamlined system of abuse reporting; later in the day, it controversially banned a number of notable alt-right accounts from the service.

But as Twitter navigates the precarious territory of trying to police its platform while holding true to its free speech roots, one of the country&#039;s best-known civil rights groups is pushing for it to do more. Today, roughly one month after its initial report on the rise anti-semitism on Twitter, the Anti-Defamation League published its recommendations for addressing internet harassment. Its conclusion: social platforms need better harassment reporting options; they need to improve their response times to those reports; they need to invest in new tools to curb harassment; and they need to be more transparent about their abuse and harassment review processes.

Last month&039;s ADL report found that between August 2015 and July 2016 roughly 2.6 million anti-Semitic tweets were broadcast on Twitter, creating more than 10 billion impressions across the web. Of those tweets, 19,253 were directed at journalists. Among its concerns, the Anti-Defamation League report suggested hate speech targeting journalists was creating a chilling effect that could hurt their freedom to report and investigate.

“We’re already seeing this spread into the real world and mainstreaming in a way we’ve never seen in our over–100-year history as an organization,” Anti-Defamation League CEO Johnathan Greenblatt told BuzzFeed News.

For social media platforms — the ADL singles out Twitter in particular — the report suggests the mechanisms for reporting must be more efficient and clear for users. This includes cultural context training to allow reviewers to keep up with the ever-changing tactics of trolls and better reporting systems that allows users to flag offensive content once, rather than every time it pops up. To Twitter&039;s credit, it has tackled both these issues in its most recent anti-abuse update, though critics still feel the mute filter is primitive and mostly cosmetic.

The report also recommends an appeals process, which would allow users to protest a denied hate speech or harassment report. Such a feature that would be welcomed: In September BuzzFeed News surveyed over 2700 users, with 90% of respondents saying Twitter didn’t do anything when they reported abuse.

The ADL report says platforms like Twitter invest in research and innovation and stress the need for “natural language processing and machine learning” that allow accounts to stay anonymous but also. Failing that, the ADL suggests that the platforms, most notably Twitter, “privilege” verified identities. This approach, which has been suggested before, would allow Twitter to expand verification and create a two-tiered system of verified accounts with accountability alongside a more lawless, mostly likely anonymous group of accounts.

Listed throughout the Anti-Defamation League report is a call for more transparency from platforms, including better explanation of internal abuse review processes as well as the guidelines for moderation “so they can better participate in the system.” Twitter, for example, has come under sharp criticism for its opaque reporting processes and policies, and while the company has clear and specific rules, users complain they are haphazardly enforced.

Pepe the Frog, a meme co-opted by white supremacists and the Alt-rRght

The company has been criticized for being slow to respond to cases unless they go viral or are flagged by celebrities, public figures, or journalists. And in an alarming number of cases, reports of clear rules violations are met with responses from Twitter suggesting the reported tweet or account was not in violation. This week, when Twitter user Ariana Lenarsky found what appeared to be promoted tweet in her timeline from a prominent Neo Nazi account with the hashtag, #WhiteAmerica, Twitter banned the account but refused clarify whether the tweet was paid for by the account, suggesting instead that it may have been “photoshopped.” The confusion surrounding the promoted tweet, as well as Twitter’s reluctance to clarify the event, only complicate reporting processes for users. And as Twitter potentially begins the fraught process of banning accounts associated with a particular political movement (in this case, the alt-right as well as white nationalists), a lack of transparency may only serve to stoke the fires of hate speech and abuse on the platform.

For lawmakers, the ADL report suggests more research as well as new laws covering emergent forms of cyber abuse like “doxxing” (the unwanted publishing of personal information in public) and “swatting” (calling police to a residence on behalf of someone else when there is no problem). The report calls on policymakers to establish funding for better training of state and local law enforcement to handle online harassment, and urges funding of a “single national reporting center (along the lines of the Internet Crime Complaint Center)” that could collect and siphon serious reports to the proper authorities.

This second half of the ADL&039;s report comes at a pivotal moment in the tech industry&039;s handling of online harassment. Just days into Trump’s victory, alt-right trolls across the internet are gearing up for an ideological war, fought with false information and aggressive harassment on Twitter. ““We must do everything we can to ensure that the Internet remains a medium of free and open communication for all people,” Greenblatt said of its new report. “We look forward to working with the social media platforms, policymakers, and others to implement these recommendations as quickly as possible.”

You can read the full report here.

Quelle: <a href="The Anti-Defamation League Has New Demands For Twitter And Facebook“>BuzzFeed

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Total Cost of (Non) Ownership of a NoSQL database service in 2016

Earlier today we published a paper Total Cost of (Non) Ownership (TCO) of a NoSQL Database Cloud Servce. TCO is an important consideration when choosing your NoSQL database, and customers often overlook many factors impacting the TCO. In the paper we compare TCO of running NoSQL databases in the following scenarios:

OSS NoSQL database like Cassandra or MongoDB hosted on-premises
OSS NoSQL database hosted on #Azure Virtual Machines
Using a managed NoSQL database as a service such as Azure DocumentDB.

To minimize our bias, we leveraged scenarios from other publications whenever possible.

In part 1 of our TCO paper, we explore an end-to-end gaming scenario from a similar paper NoSQL TCO analysis published by Amazon. We kept scenario parameters and assumptions unchanged and used the same methodology for computing the TCO for OSS NoSQL databases on-premise and on virtual machines. Of course in our paper we used Azure Virtual Machines. The scenario explores an online game that is based on a movie, and involves three different levels of game popularity: the time before the movie is released (low usage), the first month after the movie releases (high usage), and subsequent usage (medium usage), with different volume of transactions and data stored during each stage, as listed in the chart below.

The results of our analysis are fairly consistent with AWS paper. Once all the relevant TCO considerations taken into account, the managed cloud services like DocumentDB and DynamoDB can be five to ten times more cost effective than their OSS counter-parts running on-premises or virtual machines.

 The following factors make managed NoSQL cloud services like DocumentDB more cost effective than their OSS counter-parts running on-premises or virtual machines:

No NoSQL administration dev/ops required. Because DocumentDB is a managed cloud service, you do not need to employ a dev/ops team to handle deployments, maintenance, scale, patching and other day-to-day tasks required with an OSS NoSQL cluster hosted on-premises or on cloud infrastructure.
Superior elasticity. DocumentDB throughput can be scaled up and down within seconds, allowing you to reduce the cost of ownership during non-peak times. OSS NoSQL clusters deployed on cloud infrastructure offer limited elasticity, and on-premises deployments are not elastic.
Economy of scale. Managed services like DocumentDB are operating really large number of nodes, and are able to pass on savings to the customer.
Cloud optimized. Managed services like DocumentDB take full advantage of the cloud. OSS NoSQL databases at the moment are not optimized for specific cloud providers. For example, OSS NoSQL software is unaware of the differences between a node going down vs a routine image upgrade, or the fact that premium disk is already three-way replicated.

The TCO for Azure DocumentDB and AWS DynamoDB in this moderate scenario were comparable, with Azure DocumentDB slightly (~10%) cheaper due to lower costs for write requests.

Quantitative comparison

One challenge with the approach taken in Amazon’s whitepaper is the number of assumptions (often not explicitly articulated) made about the cost of running OSS NoSQL database. To start with, the paper does not mention which OSS NoSQL database is being used for comparison. It is difficult to imagine that the TCO of running two very different NoSQL database engines such as Cassandra or MongoDB for the same scenario would be exactly the same. However, we think Amazon’s methodology maintains its important qualitative merit, this concern non-withstanding.

In the second section of our whitepaper we attempt to address this concern, and provide more precise quantitative comparison for more specific scenarios. We examine three scenarios:

Ingesting one million records/second
A balanced 50/50 read/write workload
Ingesting one million records/second in regular bursts

We compare the TCO for these micro-scenarios when using the following NoSQL databases: Azure DocumentDB, Amazon DynamoDB, and OSS Cassandra on Azure D14v2 Linux Virtual Machines, a popular NoSQL choice for high data volume scenarios. In order to run tests with Cassandra, we utilize the open source Cassandra-stress command included in the open source PerfKit Benchmarker.

Hourly TCO results depicted in the chart above are consistent with the observations in Part 1, with few additional quantitative findings:

DocumentDB TCO is comparable to that of OSS Cassandra running on Azure D14v2 VMs for scenarios involving high sustained pre-dominantly write workloads with low storage needs (i.e. local SSD on the Cassandra nodes is sufficient). For example, 1M writes with a time to live (TTL) less than three hours, or most writes are updates. Cassandra is famous for its good performance for such scenarios and in the early stages of product development is often seen very attractive for this reason. However, the non-trivial dev/ops cost component brings the total cost of ownership of Cassandra deployment higher.
If more storage is needed, or the workload involves a balanced read / write mix, or the workload is bursty, DocumentDB TCO can be up to 4 time lower than OSS Cassandra running on Azure VMs. Cassandra&#039;s TCO is higher in these scenarios due to non-trivial dev/ops cost for administration of Cassandra clusters and Cassandra&039;s lack of awareness of the underlying cloud platform. DocumentDB TCO is lower thanks to superior elasticity and lower cost for reads and queries thanks to low overhead auto-indexing.
DocumentDB is up to two to three times cheaper than DynamoDB for high volume workloads we examined. Thanks to predictable performance guaranteed by both offerings, these numbers can be verified by simply comparing the public retail price pages. DocumentDB offers write optimized low overhead indexing by default making queries more efficient without worrying about secondary indexes. DocumentDB writes are significantly less expensive for high throughput workloads.

In conclusion, we’d like to add that TCO is only one (albeit an important one) consideration when choosing NoSQL database. Each of these products compared shines in its own way. Product capabilities, ease of development, support, community and other factors need to be taken into account when making a decision. The paper includes briend overview of DocumentDB functionality.

On the community front, we applaud MongoDB and Cassandra projects for creating significant community around their offerings. In order to make Azure a better place for these communities we recently offered protocol level support for MongoDB API as part of DocumentDB offering, and are encouraged with the feedback received to date from MongoDB developers. DocumentDB customers can now take advantage of the MongoDB API community expertise, as well as not worry about locking in into proprietary APIs, a common concern with PaaS services.

As always, let us know how we are doing and what improvements you&039;d like to see going forward for DocumentDB through UserVoice, StackOverflow azure-documentdb, or Twitter @DocumentDB.
Quelle: Azure

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Promoted Tweet For Nazi Site Highlights Twitter's Opaque Enforcement Policies

Writer Ariana Lenarsky was scrolling through her Twitter feed at 6:08 P.M. last night when she says she came upon a tweet from new_order_1488, a Neo Nazi account. “&#039;New Article: The United States Was Founded as a White People&039;s Republic&039; on NEW ORDER website,” it read. The hashtag #WhiteAmerica followed.

Racist and white supremacist content is nothing new on Twitter, which has long been a home to the internet&039;s political underbelly. But this tweet was different — Lenarsky hadn&039;t followed the account. The tweet displayed in her timeline appeared to be one of Twitter’s Promoted Tweet ads — ad units that can be purchased, targeted and placed into timelines of selected users.

Lenarsky was outraged; she took a screenshot and tweeted it with the caption, “@twitter I can&039;t believe anything still surprises me, but why the fuck am I seeing nazi ads on this website.” The tweet went viral.

Twitter&039;s ad policy explicitly states that the company “prohibits the promotion of hate content, sensitive topics, and violence globally,” which would apparently exclude an ad from @new_order_1488 whose logo features a swastika, and whose account links back to a well-established Nazi web site.

When BuzzFeed News reached out to Twitter — around 10:00 P.M. last evening, Twitter spokesperson Nu Wexler emailed that the company does not comment on individual accounts and noted, “but it looks like the screenshot in that tweet is either old or photoshopped.”

Lenarsky told BuzzFeed News via email, “I don&039;t know what &039;old&039; means, but it&039;s definitely not photo-shopped (I don&039;t own or know how to use photoshop).” She said she took the screenshot just after 6:00 P.M. Two separate users also confirmed to BuzzFeed News that they had seen a similar promoted tweet from @new_order_1488 that evening.

After being contacted by BuzzFeed News, Twitter sent a link which showed the company had suspended the account. When asked if @new_order_1488 ever ran a promoted tweet, Wexler did not reply. Nor did Wexler respond to multiple requests to speak on the phone for attempts to clarify, or return voice and text messages.

This came on the same day that Twitter rolled out its new harassment tools, including updated reporting workflow and an expanded mute keyword filter. In the past 24 hours, Twitter has also banned several prominent alt-right accounts.

But even that is fraught. As Twitter tries to combat harassment, it faces criticism for purging accounts associated with a particular ideology, rather than explicit harassment, an argument that contradicts Twitter&039;s decade-long, staunch commitment to maximalist free speech. The confusion surrounding the @new_order_1488 promoted tweet, and Twitter&039;s reluctance to clarify what happened, illustrate that the company&039;s struggle to highlight the opaque procedures around reporting and policing harassment and hate speech.

Though the offending account has been suspended, Lenarksy is still frustrated with Twitter&039;s failure to police hate speech. “Twitter is normalizing, promoting, and profiting off of Nazi white supremacy propaganda. That is beyond the human scope of acceptability, especially now. Twitter must publicly condemn this behavior and make a statement reassuring users that they understand why this is unacceptable,” she wrote to BuzzFeed News. “It&039;s one thing to allow Nazis to have their own twitter accounts (which is still embarrassing from a private company) but to promote their message is unconscionable.”

Quelle: <a href="Promoted Tweet For Nazi Site Highlights Twitter&039;s Opaque Enforcement Policies“>BuzzFeed

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Viral Fake Election News Outperformed Real News On Facebook In Final Months Of The US Election

BuzzFeed / Getty Images

In the final three months of the US presidential campaign, the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, NBC News, and others, a BuzzFeed News analysis has found.

During these critical months of the campaign, 20 top-performing false election stories from hoax sites and hyperpartisan blogs generated 8,711,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook.

Within the same time period, the 20 best-performing election stories from 19 major news websites generated a total of 7,367,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook. (This analysis focused on the top performing link posts for both groups of publishers, and not on total site engagement on Facebook. For details on how we identified and analyzed the content, see the bottom of this post. View our data here.)

Up until those last three months of the campaign, the top election content from major outlets had easily outpaced that of fake election news on Facebook. Then, as the election drew closer, engagement for fake content on Facebook skyrocketed and surpassed that of the content from major news outlets.

BuzzFeed News

“I’m troubled that Facebook is doing so little to combat fake news,” said Brendan Nyhan, a professor of political science at Dartmouth College who researches political misinformation and fact-checking. “Even if they did not swing the election, the evidence is clear that bogus stories have incredible reach on the network. Facebook should be fighting misinformation, not amplifying it.”

A Facebook spokesman told BuzzFeed News that the top stories don&#039;t reflect overall engagement on the platform.

“There is a long tail of stories on Facebook,” the spokesman said. “It may seem like the top stories get a lot of traction, but they represent a tiny fraction of the total.”

He also said that native video, live content, and image posts from major news outlets saw significant engagement on Facebook.

Of the 20 top-performing false election stories identified in the analysis, all but three were overtly pro-Donald Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton. Two of the biggest false hits were a story claiming Clinton sold weapons to ISIS and a hoax claiming the pope endorsed Trump. The only viral false stories during the final three months that were arguably against Trump&039;s interests were a false quote from Mike Pence about Michelle Obama, a false report that Ireland was accepting American “refugees” fleeing Trump, and a hoax claiming RuPaul said he was groped by Trump.

BuzzFeed News

BuzzFeed News

This new data illustrates the power of fake election news on Facebook, and comes as the social network deals with criticism that it allowed false content to run rampant during the 2016 presidential campaign. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said recently it was “a pretty crazy idea” to suggest that fake news on Facebook helped sway the election. He later published a post saying, “We have already launched work enabling our community to flag hoaxes and fake news, and there is more we can do here.”

This week BuzzFeed News reported that a group of Facebook employees have formed a task force to tackle the issue, with one saying that “fake news ran wild on our platform during the entire campaign season.” The Wall Street Journal also reported that Google would begin barring fake news websites from its AdSense advertising program. Facebook soon followed suit.

These developments follow a study by BuzzFeed News that revealed hyperpartisan Facebook pages and their websites were publishing false or misleading content at an alarming rate — and generating significant Facebook engagement in the process. The same was true for the more than 100 US politics websites BuzzFeed News found being run out of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

This new analysis of election content found two false election stories from a Macedonian sites that made the top-10 list in terms of Facebook engagement int he final three months. Conservative State published a story that falsely quoted Hillary Clinton as saying, “I would like to see people like Donald Trump run for office; they’re honest and can’t be bought.” The story generated over 481,000 engagements on Facebook. A second false story from a Macedonia site falsely claimed that Clinton was about to be indicted. It received 149,000 engagements on Facebook.

All the false news stories identified in BuzzFeed News&039; analysis came from either fake news websites that only publish hoaxes or from hyperpartisan websites that present themselves as publishing real news. The research turned up only one viral false election story from a hyperpartisan left-wing site. The story from Winning Democrats claimed Ireland was accepting anti-Trump “refugees” from the US. It received over 810,000 Facebook engagements, and was debunked by an Irish publication. (There was also one post from an LGBTQ site that used a false quote from Trump in its headline.)

The other false viral election stories from hyperpartisan sites came from right-wing publishers, according to the analysis.

Ending the Fed

One example is the remarkably successful, utterly untrustworthy site Ending the Fed. It was responsible for four of the top 10 false election stories identified in the analysis: Pope Francis endorsing Donald Trump, Hilary Clinton selling weapons to ISIS, Hillary Clinton being disqualified from holding federal office, and the FBI director receiving millions from the Clinton Foundation. These four stories racked up a total of roughly 2,953,000 Facebook engagements in the three months leading up to Election Day.

Ending the Fed gained notoriety in August when Facebook promoted its story about Megyn Kelly being fired by Fox News as a top trending item. The strong engagement the site has seen on Facebook may help explain how one of its stories was featured in the Trending box.

The site, which does not publicly list an owner or editor, did not respond to a request for comment from BuzzFeed News.

Like several other hyperpartisan right-wing sites that scored big Facebook hits this election season, Ending the Fed is a relatively new website. The domain endingthefed.com was only registered in in March. Yet according to BuzzFeed News&039; analysis, its top election content received more Facebook engagement than stories from the Washington Post and New York Times. For example, the top four election stories from the Post generated roughly 2,774,000 Facebook engagements — nearly 180,000 fewer than Ending the Fed&039;s top four false posts.

A look at Ending the Fed&039;s traffic chart from Alexa also gives an indication of the massive growth it experienced as the election drew close:

Alexa / Via alexa.com

A similar spike occurred for Conservative State, a site that was only registered in September. It saw a remarkable traffic spike almost instantly:

Alexa / Via alexa.com

Alexa estimates that nearly 30% of Conservative State&039;s traffic comes from Facebook, with 10% coming from Google.

Along with unreliable hyperpartisan blogs, fake news sites also received a big election traffic bump in line with their Facebook success. The Burrard Street Journal scored nearly 380,000 Facebook engagements for a fake story about Obama saying he will not leave office if Trump is elected. It was published in September, right around the time Alexa notched a noticeable uptick in its traffic:

Alexa / Via alexa.com

That site was only registered in April of this year. Its publisher disputes the idea that its content is aimed at misleading readers. “The BS Journal is a satire news publication and makes absolutely no secret of that or any attempt to purposely mislead our readers,” he told BuzzFeed News.

Large news sites also generated strong Facebook engagement for links to their election stories. But to truly find the biggest election hits from these 19 major sites, it&039;s necessary to go back to early 2016.

The three biggest election hits for these outlets came back in February, led by a contributor post on the Huffington Post&039;s blog about Donald Trump that received 2,200,000 engagements on Facebook. The top-performing election news story on Facebook for the 19 outlets analyzed was also published that month by CBS News. It generated an impressive 1.7 million shares, engagements, and comments on Facebook. Overall, a significant number of the top-performing posts on Facebook from major outlets were opinion pieces, rather than news stories.

The biggest mainstream hit in the three months prior to the election came from the Washington Post and had 876,000 engagements. Yet somehow Ending the Fed — a site launched just months earlier with no history on Facebook and likely a very small group of people running it — managed to get more engagement for a false story during that same period.

“People know there are concerned employees who are seeing something here which they consider a big problem,” a Facebook manager told BuzzFeed News this week. “And it doesn’t feel like the people making decisions are taking the concerns seriously.”

How We Gathered the Data

BuzzFeed News used the content analysis tool BuzzSumo, which enables users to search for content by keyword, URL, time range, and social share counts. BuzzFeed News searched in BuzzSumo using keywords such as “Hillary Clinton” and “Donald Trump,” as well as combinations such as “Trump and election” or “Clinton and emails” to see the top stories about these topics according to Facebook engagement. We also searched for known viral lies such as “Soros and voting machine.”

In addition, created lists of the URLs of known fake news websites, of hyperpartisan sites on the right and on the left, and of the more than 100 pro-Trump sites run from Macedonia that were previously identified in BuzzFeed News reporting. We then looked for the top performing content on Facebook across all of these sites to find false stories about the election.

We conducted our searches in three-month segments beginning 9 months from election day. This broke down as February to April, May to July, and August to election day.

Even with the above approaches, it&039;s entirely possible that we missed other big hits from fake news websites and hyperpartisan blogs.

To examine the performance of election content from mainstream sites, we created a list that included the websites of the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC News, USA Today, Politico, CNN, Wall Street Journal, CBS News, ABC News, New York Daily News, New York Post, BuzzFeed, Los Angeles Times, NPR, The Guardian, Vox, Business Insider, Huffington Post, and Fox News. We then searched for their top-performing election content in the same three-month segments as above.

It&039;s important to note that Facebook engagement does not necessarily translate into traffic. This analysis was focused on how the best-performing fake news about the election compared with real news from major outlets on Facebook. It&039;s entirely possible — and likely — that the mainstream sites received more traffic to their top-performing Facebook content than the fake news sites did. As as the Facebook spokesman noted, large news sites overall see more engagement on Facebook than fake news sites.

Quelle: <a href="Viral Fake Election News Outperformed Real News On Facebook In Final Months Of The US Election“>BuzzFeed

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Adult Swim Talent Want The Network To Cancel Its Alt-Right Comedy Show

Until this week, when president-elect Donald Trump named one of the alt-right&039;s new nabobs his chief strategist, perhaps the highest purchase gained by the ascendant movement was a six-episode, 15-minute sketch comedy show on Adult Swim called Million Dollar Extreme Presents World Peace.

Now, as America processes the news that Trump, the alt-right&#039;s hero and avatar, will become the most powerful person in the world, a group of Adult Swim talent — actors, directors, writers, and producers — is desperately trying to convince the network&039;s powerful boss, Mike Lazzo, not to renew the show for a second season.

“They&039;re gathering a long list of complaints from people,” said a source connected to the network. “All of these complaints will hopefully be able to keep a second season from happening.”

BuzzFeed News spoke with three sources who have regularly worked with Adult Swim, the late-night cable network owned by Time Warner that&039;s famous for its zany, cult-favorite comedies. All three sources spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of harassment by the online community surrounding Million Dollar Extreme, the sketch comedy group behind World Peace, and by members of the group itself.

Indeed, the relationship between the MDE and its community is a major reason for the cancellation campaign. Sam Hyde, MDE&039;s most prominent member, is something of an icon on the alt-right websites where the show&039;s fans congregate. (He moderates a subreddit devoted to the group.) In these forums, thousands of fans gather to decode World Peace&039;s complex, if winking, symbology, which many devotees are convinced expresses an anti-progressive, pro-white ideology. It is because of this alleged dog-whistling — as well as what they claim are harassment campaigns from Hyde and his followers online — that the three sources say they and others want Lazzo to cancel the show.

According to one source with knowledge of the network&039;s operations, it&039;s likely that Lazzo is already aware of the show&039;s solicitations of the alt-right. The same source said that the Adult Swim standards department repeatedly found coded racist messages in the show, including swastikas, which were removed ahead of broadcast. None of this was enough, according to one of the sources, to convince Lazzo not to air the show.

“Lazzo makes every decision there. A lot of people at Adult Swim have been on him trying to get it not renewed,” said the source. “I know at least one person who is very high up there who was furious about it before it came out.”

Indeed, anger about the show, boiling over now, dates back at least to May, when Adult Swim announced during its annual presentation to advertisers that the show would be part of the network&039;s fall schedule. At a company party afterwards, unhappy conversations predominated.

“People with shows were aware of it and angry about it,” one of the sources told BuzzFeed News.

Now a few of them are going public.

On Monday, the actor and comedian Brett Gelman — who has appeared on several Adult Swim programs including “Brett Gelman&039;s Dinner in America” — announced over Twitter that he was severing ties with Adult Swim over World Peace and Lazzo&039;s defense on Reddit of the network&039;s lack of shows with female creators.

“The show is an instrument of hate,” Gelman told BuzzFeed News.

And in a since deleted tweet, actress Zandy Hartig of the network&039;s long-running Children&039;s Hospital implored Adult Swim to “please get rid of MDE and Sam Hyde. He&039;s an embarrassment for you and for me as someone who was very grateful to you.”

Hartig and Gelman have now joined Tim Heidecker, who rose to fame on the Adult Swim show Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job&#033; as objects of scorn on the MDE internet. Heidecker, who has publicly ridiculed the alt-right, posted on Facebook yesterday that “I love and respect my friend Brett Gelman and I support his decision fully.”

Reached for comment, Adult Swim referred BuzzFeed News to a statement the network gave about World Peace in August:

Adult Swim’s reputation and success with its audience has always been based on strong and unique comedic voices. Million Dollar Extreme’s comedy is known for being provocative with commentary on societal tropes, and though not a show for everyone, the company serves a multitude of audiences and supports the mission that is specific to Adult Swim and its fans.

On Reddit, a poster who identified herself as Adult Swim senior director of programming Kim Manning described the show as “a source of HOT, HOT debate around the office…it has been for a long time…If you watch the show we produced, it&039;s not an alt-right speak piece…We argue about it a lot around the office. That&039;s all I can really say.”

Sam Hyde did not respond to a request for comment, but earlier today, in a series of tweets, he asked his fans not to harass Adult Swim employees:

Ultimately, whether the show comes back for another season is up to Lazzo, who sources say enjoys causing a stir. “I don’t think he&039;s down with the alt right,” said one source. “I think he&039;s a left-leaning guy. But when he sees someone pushing buttons — he’s very anti establishment — his instinct is that he’s doing something right.”

Quelle: <a href="Adult Swim Talent Want The Network To Cancel Its Alt-Right Comedy Show“>BuzzFeed

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Twitter Finally Cracks Down, Banning Prominent Alt-Right Accounts

Ariel Davis / BuzzFeed News

Last night, Twitter suspended a number of prominent alt-right accounts, including alt-right leader, Richard Spencer (@RichardBSpencer), his think tank, called the National Policy Institute, and his magazine (@radixjournal). The suspensions come only hours after Twitter announced an new set of abuse tools, including an expanded mute future and a retraining of how its safety staff handles hateful abuse.

Other suspended accounts include Ricky Vaughn (who was previously banned after a BuzzFeed News story detailing his campaign to disenfranchise voters with false information), former Business Insider CTO Pax Dickenson, and John Rivers.

Though the abuse tools were received tepidly as a small first step that was in many ways cosmetic, the decision to begin to ban some of Twitter&#039;s more prominent alt-right and white nationalist voices is a signal that the company may be getting serious about reclaiming its platform from trolls.

It&039;s unclear whether Twitter will continue the wave or issue any mass bans quietly throughout the coming months but there is precedent for such a decision — in order to crack down on ISIS, Twitter banned 125,000 Isis-linked accounts between mid-2015 and February 2016.

Twitter bans of small, anonymous accounts are frequent when the company decides that the account is in violation of the company&039;s rules, which forbid hateful conduct (though Twitter&039;s reporting processes are notoriously opaque and often result in reports of violence and hate speech going unanswered and unenforced).

But Twitter rarely bans prominent and especially verified accounts — this Summer Twitter banned Breitbart writer and noted troll Milo Yiannopoulos after his role in inciting a targeted harassment campaign against actress Leslie Jones. The move was seen then as a sign that Twitter was poised to crack down on it&039;s racist, misogynistic, anti-semitic underbelly.

Until last night, the company had done little to stem the tide of harassment, especially during a heated election season in which alt-right accounts — many supporting the President-Elect — spread hate and misinformation.

Just Last month, the Anti-Defamation League released a report citing a “significant uptick” in anti-Semitic harassment toward journalists. The study showed roughly 2.6 million anti-Semitic tweets, creating more than 10 billion impressions across the web between August 2015 and July 2016. The words that were most frequently found in the bios of the users sending those tweets were, according to the report, “‘Trump,’ ‘nationalist,’ ‘conservative,’ ‘American,’ and ‘white.’”

The bans have riled some alt-right communities. “The Great Shuttening” he predicted has occurred,” one commenter in Reddit&039;s alt-right subreddit lamented. Another suggested that Twitter is a valuable lifeline for the movement arguing that, “the benefits of Twitter are interacting with normies, influencing discussion and getting alt-right memes trending.” In a YouTube video, Richard Spencer said he&039;s “alive physically, but digitally speaking, there has been execution squads across the alt-right.”

Twitter has not yet responded to a request for comment as to whether more bans are forthcoming — the company does not, as a policy, comment on individual accounts.

Quelle: <a href="Twitter Finally Cracks Down, Banning Prominent Alt-Right Accounts“>BuzzFeed

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Free local development using the DocumentDB Emulator plus .NET Core support

Azure DocumentDB is a fully managed, globally distributed NoSQL database service backed by an enterprise grade SLA that guarantees 99.99% availability. DocumentDB is a cloud born database perfect for the massive scale and low latency needs of modern applications, with guarantees of <10ms read latency and <15ms write latency at the 99th percentile. A single DocumentDB collection can elastically scale throughput to 10s-100s of millions of request/sec and storage can be replicated across multiple regions for limitless scale, with the click of a button. Along with the flexible data model and rich query capabilities, DocumentDB provides both tenant-controlled and automatic regional failover, transparent multi-homing APIs and four well-defined consistency models for developers to choose from.

Due to its flexible schema, rich query capabilities, and availability multiple SDK platforms, DocumentDB makes it easy to develop, evolve and scale modern applications. At the Connect() conference this week, we announced the availability of new developer tools to make it even easier to build applications on DocumentDB.

We&#039;re excited to introduce a public preview of the DocumentDB Emulator, which provides a local development experience for the Azure DocumentDB service. Using the DocumentDB Emulator, you can develop and test your application locally without an internet connection, without creating an Azure subscription, and without incurring any costs. This has long been the most requested feature on the user voice site, so we are thrilled to roll this out everyone that&039;s voted for it.
We are also pleased to announce the availability of the DocumentDB .NET Core SDK, which lets you build fast, cross-platform .NET web applications and services.

About the DocumentDB Emulator

The DocumentDB Emulator provides a high-fidelity emulation of the DocumentDB service. It supports identical functionality as Azure DocumentDB, including support for creating and querying JSON documents, provisioning and scaling collections, and executing stored procedures and triggers. You can develop and test applications using the DocumentDB Emulator, and deploy them to Azure at global scale by just making a single configuration change.

You can use any supported DocumentDB SDK or the DocumentDB REST API to interact with the emulator, as well as existing tools such as the DocumentDB data migration tool and DocumentDB studio.  You can even migrate data between the DocumentDB emulator and the Azure DocumentDB service.

While we created a high-fidelity local emulation of the actual DocumentDB service, the implementation of the DocumentDB emulator is different than that of the service. For example, the DocumentDB Emulator uses standard OS components such as the local file system for persistence, and HTTPS protocol stack for connectivity. This means that some functionality that relies on Azure infrastructure like global replication, single-digit millisecond latency for reads/writes, and tunable consistency levels are not available via the DocumentDB Emulator.

Get started now by downloading the DocumentDB Emulator to your Windows desktop.

About the DocumentDB .NET Core SDK

You can build fast, cross-platform web-apps and services that run on Windows, Mac, and Linux using the new DocumentDB .NET Core SDK. You can download the latest version of the .NET Core SDK via Nuget. You can find release notes and additional information in our DocumentDB .NET Core SDK documentation page.

Next Steps

In this blog post, we looked at some of the new developer tooling introduced in DocumentDB, including the DocumentDB Emulator and DocumentDB .NET Core SDK.

Get started coding now by downloading the DocumentDB Emulator to your desktop!
Get started building fast, cross-platform web apps with the new DocumentDB .NET Core SDK
Create a new DocumentDB account from the Azure Portal
Stay up-to-date on the latest DocumentDB news and features by following us on Twitter @DocumentDB or reach out to us on the developer forums on Stack Overflow

Quelle: Azure