The New York Times - USA (2020-08-06)

B4 Y THE NEW YORK TIMES BUSINESSTHURSDAY, AUGUST 6, 2020

TECHNOLOGY

Twenty state attorneys general on Wednesday called on Facebook to better prevent messages of hate, bias and disinformation from spreading, and said the company needed to provide more help to users facing online abuse. In a letter to the social media giant, the officials said they regu- larly encountered people facing online intimidation and harassment on Facebook. They out- lined seven steps the company should take, including allowing third-party audits of hate content and offering real-time assistance to users. “We hope to work with you to ensure that fewer individuals suf- fer online harassment and discrimination, and that it is quickly and effectively addressed when they do,” said the letter, which was addressed to Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, and its chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg. The officials who signed the letter, all of them Dem- ocrats, represent states including New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California, as well as the Dis- trict of Columbia. The letter adds to the rising pressure facing Mr. Zuckerberg and his company to stop disinformation and harassment on Face- book. Civil rights leaders, advertisers and some of the company’s own employees have criticized Facebook for failing to curtail the spread of noxious content. Extre- mists and conspiracists have

turned to social media — most of- ten Facebook, Twitter and YouTube — to circulate falsehoods about the coronavirus pandemic, the coming presidential election and Black Lives Matter protests. Facebook and other social media companies have made some changes to dismantle misinformation and hate on their services. Last month, Twitter announced that it would remove thousands of accounts associated with the fringe conspiracy movement QAnon, saying their messages could lead to harm and violated Twitter policy. In June, Facebook took down a network of accounts tied to boogaloo, an antigovern- ment movement in the United

States that encourages violence. That same month, YouTube banned six channels for violating its policies, including those of two prominent white supremacists, David Duke and Richard Spencer. But according to the attorneys general, Facebook in particular has not done enough. The officials pointed to Facebook’s recent Civil Rights Audit — which found that advertisers could still run ads that painted a religious group as a threat to the “American way of life” — as evidence that the social network had fallen short. “Facebook has a hate speech, discrimination, disinformation problem,” Attorney General Gur- bir S. Grewal, of New Jersey, who

led the letter, said in an interview. “The way I view it, as an attorney general, is that it directly affects public safety in my state, that the groups that are allowed to find community online, on Facebook, allow hate to be normalized.” Danielle Keats Citron, a law professor at Boston University and the author of “Hate Crimes in Cyberspace,” said she was “grate- ful to see these A.G.s step forward and demand that Facebook do better.” Facebook needs “far more sun- shine and oversight,” Professor Citron said. “They need to enforce their hate speech policies fairly including against white supremacists, and they need to audit their algorithms to curtail their opti- mization for extremism.” Daniel Roberts, a spokesman for Facebook, said in a statement that the company was investing billions of dollars to combat hate speech and misinformation. “We share the Attorneys General’s goal of ensuring people feel safe on the internet and look forward to continuing our work with them,” he said. The attorneys general asked that Facebook more aggressively enforce its existing policies against hate; allow public, third- party audits of hate content and enforcement; commit to an inde- pendent analysis of the social network’s content and algorithms; and expand policies limiting in- flammatory ads that could vilify minority groups. They also called on Facebook to

provide supportive services for people harassed on its platforms. According to a 2017 survey from the Pew Research Center, more than 40 percent of Americans have experienced some form of online harassment, and of those, more than three-quarters reported being harassed on Face- book. The attorneys general said that the company’s response has been too slow or weak when people

flagged harassment. The officials said that the social network should provide immediate assistance. Mr. Grewal said the letter was inspired in part by Facebook’s delay in removing a local page, Rise Up Ocean County, that appeared to stoke anti-Semitic rhetoric on the social network. Mr. Grewal said it took 10 months for Face- book to completely take it down — after violent attacks against Jews in Jersey City, N.J., in December. Mr. Grewal said the state attorneys general expected Facebook to react much faster to the letter. “We won’t be stopped,” he said. And if there were to be another delay, he said, “we always have a variety of legal tools at our dispos- al.”

Officials Urge Zuckerberg and Co. to Better Police Hate

By DAVEY ALBA

Rights leaders,

advertisers and staff

criticized Facebook. The letter from attorneys general gave steps Facebook should take, including allowing audits of hate content and offering real-time assistance to users.

JIM WILSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES

SAN FRANCISCO — As the Chinese-
owned video app TikTok works to
head off the threat of a ban in the
United States, Facebook has
sensed opportunity.
On Wednesday, Instagram, the
photo-sharing app owned by
Facebook, released Reels. Just
like TikTok, people can use Reels
to create 15-second videos that are
designed to be easily shareable.
And just like TikTok, Reels allows
users to sync up their video re-
cordings with clips of music or au-
dio files that they record them-
selves, while adding other effects,
like augmented reality filters.
The timing of the release could-
n’t be more on the nose. TikTok
has been struggling through a
geopolitical morass with Presi-
dent Trump. The White House,
which has said TikTok is a na-
tional security threat because of
its ownership by the Chinese in-
ternet company ByteDance, has
said the app must sell its U.S. busi-
ness within 45 days or face a ban.
Reels became available on
Wednesday in more than 50 coun-
tries, including the United States,
Britain and Japan. It will also be
featured in India, one of Face-
book’s key growth areas. In June,
TikTok was banned in India as
part of a crackdown on many Chi-
nese apps.
“TikTok is doing big things in
this format, as have apps and fea-
tures like Snap, YouTube and oth-
ers,” Instagram said in a state-
ment. It added that it had also
seen the rise of short-videos on its
service. “No two services are the
same and this responsiveness to
consumer demand is competition
at work and one of the longtime
hallmarks of the tech sector,” it
said. “It increases choice, which is
good for people.”
TikTok declined to comment.
Facebook has a history of
cloning features or apps from its
competitors. Mark Zuckerberg,
chief executive of Facebook,
rolled out a product called Stories
for Instagram and Facebook in
2016 and 2017, respectively, as a
response to the rise of the app
Snapchat. Stories was a near-ex-
act copy of Snapchat’s Stories,
which let people chronicle their
days and can be set to disappear.
Facebook’s move dented
Snapchat’s growth, according to
documents that Snap, Snapchat’s
parent company, filed for its initial
public offering in 2017. Evan
Spiegel, Snapchat’s founder, has
expressed frustration at Face-
book’s willingness to copy its com-
petitors.
In a memo to employees this
week, executives at TikTok’s par-
ent company criticized Facebook.
Zhang Yiming, chief executive of
ByteDance, said that he wished to
expand as a global company but
that TikTok faced an “intense in-
ternational political environment,
the collision and conflict of differ-
ent cultures, and the plagiarism
and smear of competitor Face-
book.” Mr. Zhang noted the “com-
plex and unimaginable difficul-
ties” his company has faced over
the past year, and that it has only
grown worse under the “unfair”
treatment from the Trump admin-
istration.
In a congressional hearing last
month with other tech chief exec-
utives, Mr. Zuckerberg pointed to
China and products like TikTok as
innovation that the United States
should be worried about, and that
TikTok’s ascendancy was grounds
to avoid unduly harsh regulation
against American companies.
TikTok has long been in Face-
book’s sights. As TikTok grew rap-
idly over the past few years in the
United States and elsewhere,
Facebook also rolled out Lasso,
another clone of TikTok, in 2018.
But Lasso did not catch on with
audiences and Facebook shut it
down in July.

Facebook Starts

A TikTok Rival:

Instagram Reels

By MIKE ISAAC

future cash flows. Then they hash out terms, negotiate a price and sign a deal. A TikTok acquisition is far, far more complicated. For starters, even though TikTok has gone to great lengths to distance itself from its Chinese parent company, the app is still very tightly integrated with ByteDance’s Chinese operations. As The Information recently reported, most of TikTok’s core features were developed by ByteDance’s Chinese engineers using a suite of shared software tools — known as “zhongtai,” or “central platform” — that is available to all of ByteDance’s more than two dozen apps. And most of the important decisions about TikTok’s operations and strategy have been made by executives in China. Separating TikTok from ByteDance would, by definition, require untangling many of these Chinese connections. That could present problems. Many of Tik- Tok’s top American executives — including Kevin Mayer, its chief executive — are new to the company, and presumably still get- ting up to speed. And while Tik- Tok does have engineers based

in the United States who could theoretically help with the tech- nical untangling, many of the engineers with the deepest knowledge of TikTok’s systems are presumably Chinese nation- als in Beijing. And what about the algorithm? By all accounts, TikTok’s core algorithm — which selects videos for the central feed users see when they open the app, called the “for you page” or FYP — could be the most valuable asset the company owns. Eugene Wei, a longtime tech executive and blogger, likens TikTok’s FYP algorithm to the Sorting Hat

from the Harry Potter series — a “rapid, hyper-efficient match- maker” that analyzes users’ behavior and places them into personalized niches, based on their interests. The FYP algorithm is TikTok’s secret sauce, and a big part of what makes it so accurate is ByteDance’s global reach. Every swipe, tap and video viewed by TikTok users around the world — billions and billions of data points a day — is fed into giant databases, which are then used to train artificial intelligence to predict which videos will keep users’ attention. Sometimes, that might mean showing American users videos made in India or China. (I once fell into a delightful rabbit hole of TikTok dances by multigenera- tional Chinese families.) Other times, it could mean using data from one country’s users to inform another country’s recom- mendations. It could even mean using data gleaned from an en-

tirely different ByteDance app — such as Douyin, the Chinese equivalent of TikTok — to inform what TikTok users are shown. ByteDance considers itself, first and foremost, an A.I. company. And the nature of building A.I. is that the more data you have, the better your algorithms generally are. Would an Ameri- can TikTok algorithm, trained only on American users’ data, be less addictive? It’s certainly possible. But even if ByteDance was willing to part with TikTok’s algorithms and the machine learning models they rely on — a big if — it’s not clear that an American acquirer would be able to recreate TikTok’s magic right away. Karl Higley, a recommender systems engineer who previ- ously worked at Spotify, said that without access to historical data — data about what TikTok’s users swiped, tapped and lin-

gered on weeks or months earli- er — a new, Americanized TikTok might essentially need to start from scratch. “In order to personalize the app for existing users, they’re going to need historical data for U.S. folks unless they want to wipe the slate clean, which would be a terrible user experience,” Mr. Higley said. American tech giants, of course, are no slouches when it comes to building addictive algorithms. And it’s possible that an American-owned TikTok could rebuild the app’s core technology without users even noticing a difference. But it’s not trivial work, and it could take months or years to do — months or years in which Facebook, Snapchat and other competitors would be nipping at TikTok’s heels. And if users sensed that their algorithm was degrading in the meantime, or showing them fewer interesting videos than it once did, they could be tempted to jump ship. In addition to recreating Tik- Tok’s algorithms, an American acquirer would also need to work quickly to preserve TikTok’s other valuable asset: its creator culture. As my colleague Taylor Lorenz has written, TikTok is home to a large, vibrant community of creative talent, some of whom make a full-time living from the app. Those people are attracted to TikTok partly because the platform gives them a

way to reach a mass audience. But they’re also attracted to it because TikTok has cultivated an aura of cool through advertising, striking partnerships with music festivals and other popular events, and hosting exclusive parties for TikTok creators at industry events like VidCon. Already, Facebook is report- edly trying to poach popular TikTok creators for Instagram Reels, its new TikTok clone, by dangling six-figure deals in front of them. And if TikTok is ac- quired by Microsoft — a company not historically known for its youth appeal — creators could sense that it’s time to move on. TikTok could try to lower the risk for an acquirer by striking multiyear exclusive deals with its most popular American creators, the way that platforms like YouTube and Twitch have done. It could also accelerate its plans to let popular users earn money from the platform. But without a firm grip on its A-list talent, TikTok’s acquirer won’t be as- sured that the platform isn’t losing its edge. Hank Green, a YouTube star and chief executive of the educa- tion company Complexly, who has more than 600,000 followers on TikTok, said that a TikTok acquisition could make creators more skeptical of the company’s motives. “One of the things about Tik- Tok is they’ve been able to make lots of changes really fast, and people are open and receptive to that,” Mr. Green said. “If you see that change as coming from outside the ecosystem, that can feel like a foreign change.” Many of the people I spoke to agreed that even with the potential pitfalls and unresolved ques- tions, the opportunity to buy TikTok is a once-in-a-decade deal for the right acquirer. Popular, growing social networks are exceedingly rare, and TikTok has already made itself a fixture of American culture in a way that few other apps ever have. “TikTok is compelling, not just because of its large and growing user base, but also because of its platform potential to expand into e-commerce and livestreaming,” said Connie Chan, a partner at the venture capital firm An- dreessen Horowitz. “Video is a fantastic way to sell things and short videos are perfect for product discovery.” Mr. Green, the YouTube star, agreed. “If I had the opportunity to buy TikTok, I’d buy TikTok,” he said. “There’s so much value on that platform right now that is completely untapped.”

Sale of TikTok Could Pivot on Control of Talent and Algorithm

FROM FIRST BUSINESS PAGE

ByteDance, TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, has more than two dozen apps, all of which share a suite of software tools, known as “zhongtai,” or “central platform.”

MANJUNATH KIRAN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

WU HONG/EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCK

Every swipe, tap and

video is fed into giant

databases.

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The New York Times - USA (2020-08-06)

B4 Y THE NEW YORK TIMES BUSINESSTHURSDAY, AUGUST 6, 2020

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