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Monday, 20 January 2020

Facebook sticking with policies on politicians' lies and voter targeting

The social media company is announcing steps to give users more control over the ads they see. But it did not back down on allowing candidates to spout falsehoods, despite months of criticism from Democrats.

Facebook is announcing steps to give users more control over the ads they see. But it did not back down on allowing candidates to spout falsehoods. | Alexander Koerner/Getty Images

Facebook is standing by its policies that allow politicians to lie to voters, while targeting their ads at narrow subsets of the public — decisions with vast implications for the more than $1 billion in online campaign messaging expected in this year’s elections.

The online giant announced Thursday morning that it is not changing the most controversial elements of its approach to campaign ads, after months of a debate that has divided Silicon Valley and brought Facebook a barrage of criticism from Democrats. The critics have been most incensed by Facebook’s refusal to fact-check politicians’ claims, accusing the company of knowingly profiting from deception.

Facebook has defended the policy on free-speech grounds, saying voters should be the ones scrutinizing politicians' messages.

The company’s separate decision not to limit “microtargeting” is probably welcome news to candidates of both parties, who value the ability to tailor messages based on data such as a voter’s age, gender, neighborhood, job or sports fandom. President Donald Trump’s campaign has pushed Facebook not to limit ad-targeting, a step Google took in November, and accused Twitter of trying to “silence conservatives” when it banned political ads altogether in October.

Facebook also said it is taking steps to give users more control over and insight into the ads they see, as well as improving its publicly available database of its political advertisements — allowing for more precise searches and filtering of ads and offering size estimates for their target audience. And the company announced it will soon allow users to control the volume of political and social issue ads they see.

“There’s no change to the policy regarding fact-checking politicians in advertising,” Facebook spokesperson Tom Reynolds said in an interview before the announcement. “We made a decision, and this is a different set of issues that we’re tackling here regarding transparency and users’ controls when it comes to seeing political ads.”

Asked whether the company’s position on that might change, he added: “As of right now, this is what the policy is going to be.”

Spending on political ads could reach as much as $6 billion in the 2020 election cycle, including $1.6 billion that will be spent on digital video, according to companies that analyze the advertising market. Facebook and Google are by far the biggest platforms for online political advertising.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg made two visits to D.C. last fall to defend Facebook’s refusal to fact-check candidates’ claims, including a speech at Georgetown University where he argued that voters “should be able to see for themselves what politicians are saying.”

Facebook’s director of product management, Rob Leathern, offered a similar defense in a blog post published Thursday morning, saying the company is following “the principle that people should be able to hear from those who wish to lead them, warts and all, and that what they say should be scrutinized and debated in public.”

Push for global digital tax agreement stalls amid tensions

Several senior officials told POLITICO the stand-off between France and the US may have scuppered chances of reaching a deal on how to tax the digital world.

Hopes for a global deal to tax firms like Facebook and Google have been significantly scaled back | Denis Charlet/AFP via Getty Images

Hopes for a global deal to tax firms like Facebook and Google have been significantly scaled back ahead of a meeting later this month involving more than 130 countries, several senior officials told POLITICO.

The growing pessimism about overhauling how the digital economy is taxed comes as tensions mount between France and the United States over Paris' digital tax rules, which overwhelmingly target American tech firms.

Both countries are helping to lead digital tax negotiations at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Paris-based group of mostly rich Western countries.

Speaking on Tuesday, Bruno Le Maire, France's finance minister, said that he still hoped to reach a digital tax agreement within the OECD over the next two weeks, and that he would meet Steven Mnuchin, the U.S. Treasury secretary, in Davos, Switzerland, later this month to hammer out an agreement.

"We want to try all options to reach an agreement at the OECD in the next 15 days," said Le Maire, who spoke to Mnuchin on Monday about the ongoing dispute.

Two officials said the chances of any agreement being reached before June now looked remote, if not impossible, if Paris and Washington went further down the path of a trade war.

But the political stand-off between the U.S. and France over how to move forward with global digital taxation rules has soured hopes of reaching an initial agreement when more than 130 countries gather for a two-day meeting at the end of January.

Participants now hope to merely agree to continue discussions beyond January on how to proceed with the negotiations, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Two officials said the chances of any agreement being reached before June — when the OECD's digital tax rules were expected to be finalized — now looked remote, if not impossible, if Paris and Washington went further down the path of a trade war.

Under the current OECD proposals, new rules would allow all countries to tax the digital operations of companies worldwide, beyond a certain threshold, and create a minimum level of tax that all firms must pay on their online activities.

Digital tax rhetoric

Doubts about reaching a global agreement on digital tax have been steadily growing.

U.S. officials have become increasingly vocal about the slew of domestic proposals from European countries to impose levies on the digital economy — efforts that have primarily focused on American tech giants like Apple and Amazon.

Big Tech’s 'bully' tactics stifle competition, smaller rivals tell Congress

Executives detailed allegations of intellectual property theft, attempts to block them from platforms and efforts to seemingly drive them out of business.

The House antitrust subcommittee’s sweeping investigation of possible anti-competitive conduct in the digital marketplace has zeroed in on the practices of tech companies like Amazon. | Mark Lennihan/AP Photo

Apple, Amazon and Google wield their market dominance to bully smaller tech players with relative impunity, executives from smaller competitors testified on Friday at a congressional hearing to explore allegations of anti-competitive practices in the industry.

In a rare public rebuke of tech's most powerful companies, the executives detailed allegations of intellectual property theft, attempts to block them from platforms and efforts to seemingly drive them out of business.

“They have come to use the scope of their platforms and their overwhelming dominance in certain markets to unfairly disadvantage competitors and squelch potential competition," said Patrick Spence, CEO of smart speaker firm Sonos, at a House antitrust subcommittee field hearing in Colorado to examine abusive practices in the tech industry.

And speaking out against Google, Apple and Amazon so publicly and forcefully could risk reprisals from the firms that control much of the global digital marketplace.

"I feel that this is a big enough issue that people need to speak out. It’s important these issues come to the forefront," Spence said. "We have a responsibility to speak for those that can’t.”

In addition to Sonos, the lawmakers heard from executives at electronics firms PopSockets and Tile and the software company Basecamp, all of whom made some of the most explicit public competition complaints against the tech giants to date.

“They make rules about how the platform should operate, who should have access to permissions and exempt themselves from all those rules,” Kirsten Daru, vice president and general counsel at Tile, said about the Apple app ecosystem. “We need equal access and permissions. ... We need rules applied consistently across the board to everyone in the ecosystem, including Apple."

Friday’s hearing is the latest in the House antitrust subcommittee’s sweeping investigation of possible anti-competitive conduct in the digital marketplace, a probe that has zeroed in on the practices of Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google.

At the session, subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline (D-R.I.) said major platforms have grown so powerful that the companies “effectively serve as private regulators” and are “increasingly using their gatekeeper power in abusive and coercive ways.”

Since taking over the gavel for the House antitrust panel last year, Cicilline has emerged as a leading congressional critic of Silicon Valley's practices, and of the federal regulators tasked with overseeing them. Three Colorado lawmakers — Democratic Reps. Joe Neguse and Ed Perlmutter, and Republican Rep. Ken Buck — attended Friday.

As part of the committee's investigation, Cicilline and other lawmakers for months have met privately with companies who believe their products have been unfairly stifled by larger competitors — charges that Google, Apple and Amazon largely deny.

Even so, big tech companies are facing U.S. probes into their competitive practices at the state, federal and congressional level.

Google is under investigation by the Justice Department and a coalition of state attorneys general for dominating the ad tech market, its dominance in search and allegations related to Android. The FTC is scrutinizing Amazon over allegations related to its Marketplace. Apple has so far escaped any known antitrust probe in the U.S., though European authorities are investigating Apple Pay as well as a complaint about the iPhone-maker by Spotify, which has complained about Apple's 30 percent commission on sales through its App Store.

UNUSUAL NEW UPDATE

The small image you see when you search is slightly less small

Google's search results might look a little different today.

The alteration is minor, and searchers might not even notice. But it is the kind of change that looks strange once you spot it.

The company has altered the way that pages show up on search results. Though it is only minor, it is an alteration that will be seen by many millions of people.

It has already outraged those who have noticed it, and claim that the new design has ruined the search results page.

The most prominent change is that the logo of the website the search result comes from – technically known as the favicon – is now much larger. It is now perhaps the most obvious thing, beyond the name of the page you have searched for, and is much more prominent than the URL.

But there are other, smaller changes too, such as the domain name appearing more clearly and in black type.

Gun-toting humanoid robot sent into space

Google has also changed the results so that the "ad" label – which appears if a company has paid to be shown in the search results, rather than appearing in them organically – is more clear and obvious.

The change follows a similar alteration on mobile.

On Reddit, the change has prompted a slew of outrage from users who claim it has ruined their experience of using the site. Users voiced frustration with everything from the look of the design to the fact that the pages look more like ads and so they scrolled past them.

"The new layout and search results are so bad, I briefly thought I was somehow hacked or running some counterfeit version of Chrome," wrote one on the Google subreddit. Others suggested they had moved to other search engines, such as DuckDuckGo.

Google receives tens of thousands of searches per second from all around the world, meaning that vast numbers of people will see the changes.

While they are not thought to have rolled out to everyone, they are steadily being pushed out to anyone who searches.

online google News

Monday, 20 January 2020

Facebook sticking with policies on politicians' lies and voter targeting

Facebook sticking with policies on politicians' lies and voter targeting

Push for global digital tax agreement stalls amid tensions

Push for global digital tax agreement stalls amid tensions

Digital tax rhetoric

Big Tech’s 'bully' tactics stifle competition, smaller rivals tell Congress

Big Tech’s 'bully' tactics stifle competition, smaller rivals tell Congress

UNUSUAL NEW UPDATE

WHY DOES GOOGLE LOOK DIFFERENT? SEARCH RESULTS GET UNUSUAL NEW UPDATE

The small image you see when you search is slightly less small

Gadget and tech news: In pictures