Search Results for: Facebook

Could Facebook Be Tried for Human-Rights Abuses?

Longreads Pick

In Myanmar, Facebook is the de facto internet. Does that mean they can be legally responsible for their actions — or lack thereof — when content there influences politics or incites violence?

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Dec 20, 2017
Length: 15 minutes (3,762 words)

Does Even Mark Zuckerberg Know What Facebook Is?

Longreads Pick

In a little more than a decade, Facebook has become one of the most important technology companies in the world. But as it’s grown, the company has had to try to figure out how to govern its 2 billion users, something it hasn’t quite managed. In light of that, Max Read grapples with an increasingly important problem: What exactly is Mark Zuckerberg’s world-spanning empire?

Author: Max Read
Published: Oct 1, 2017
Length: 19 minutes (4,980 words)

A Whale Hunt on Facebook

Whale bones and boat frames, Barrow, Alaska
Whale bones and boat frames, Barrow, Alaska via Wikimedia

What happens when a Greenpeace activist finds a Native Alaskan whale hunter on Facebook? Trolling, that’s what.

At High Country News, Julia O’Malley visits Gambell, Alaska, a community that relies on subsistence hunting for survival. And she meets a skilled hunter, Chris Apassingok, who has been targeted on social media since news of his successful whale hunt went public online.

It used to be that rural Alaska communicated mainly by VHF and by listening to messages passed over daily FM radio broadcasts, but now Facebook has become a central platform for communication, plugging many remote communities into the world of comment flame wars, cat memes and reality television celebrity pages.

That is how Paul Watson, an activist and founder of Sea Shepherd, an environmental organization based in Washington, encountered Chris’ story. Watson, an early member of Greenpeace, is famous for taking a hard line against whaling. On the reality television show, Whale Wars on Animal Planet, he confronted Japanese whalers at sea. His social media connections span the globe.

Watson posted the story about Chris on his personal Facebook page, accompanied by a long rant. Chris’ mother may have been the first in the family to see it, she said.

“WTF, You 16-Year Old Murdering Little Bastard!,” Watson’s post read. “… some 16-year old kid is a frigging ‘hero’ for snuffing out the life of this unique self aware, intelligent, social, sentient being, but hey, it’s okay because murdering whales is a part of his culture, part of his tradition. … I don’t give a damn for the bullshit politically correct attitude that certain groups of people have a ‘right’ to murder a whale.”

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The “Facebook of Money” That Wasn’t

Photo via Tilt/Glassdoor

To paraphrase Tolstoy, every struggling startup struggles in its own way. Except they all seem to feature extravagant soirées, hazy business plans, and round after round of beer pong on a SoMa roof deck. At Fast Company, Ainsley Harris charts the decline and fall of Tilt, a social-payments platform billed as the “Facebook of Money.” Joining other examples in the emerging genre of schadenfreude-laced startup postmortems, it offers an almost-wistful glimpse at Silicon Valley culture at the precise moment when easy funding became a thing of the past.

Over time, Beshara’s leadership alienated some of Tilt’s more experienced hires, who chose to move on rather than challenge their rookie boss. Meanwhile, Tilt continued to attract young talent barely old enough to join the company’s happy hours.

“There was too much focus on culture and creating this nirvana of a company. This is not a fraternity, this is a business,” says a former manager. Beshara seemed determined to keep the party going until the bitter end. Last September, for example, with a cash crunch imminent, he pressed forward with Tilt’s final Lake Tahoe retreat. Only a small group of employees had any idea that a sale was already in the works.

Looking back now, Beshara acknowledges the imbalance. “I feel very strongly that you want to end up on the side of human connection, human relationships,” he says. “But I think you can index too far on that and really miss the importance of really high standards.”

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Inside Facebook’s (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine

Longreads Pick

John Herrman meets the social media marketers whose political memes are taking over Facebook.

Published: Aug 25, 2016
Length: 17 minutes (4,436 words)

The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed

Longreads Pick

Adrian Chen travels to the Philippines, where he meets the employees who work for content moderation companies that scrub objectionable content from social media sites.

Source: Wired
Published: Oct 23, 2014
Length: 12 minutes (3,169 words)

Can Time Inc. Save Itself By Becoming the Next Facebook?

When [Joe] Ripp first discussed taking the CEO job with Bewkes, he said that Time Inc. needed to stop thinking of itself as a magazine company. But what exactly Time Inc. will become depends on who is talking. Ripp tells me it will be a significant player in video. (The company has backed the online channel 120 Sports and has rolled out channels for sports, celebrity news, and business.) Ripp also wants to branch into e-commerce, conferences, and events. Pearlstine praises Forbes’s user-generated content model. He supports “native advertising,” the practice of running sponsored content that looks similar to editorial content, and also said his dream acquisition is LinkedIn. M. Scott Havens, a digital executive Ripp hired from Atlantic Media, recently told The Guardian that Time Inc. needs to build “the next Gilt, the next Facebook.”

None of this talk has eased skeptics’ doubts. “What is this company?” one recently departed editor asked me. “They’ve declared print dead and hastened the end of the magazine business. But they don’t have an idea of what the company is instead.” Given the crushing debt load, roughly two and a half times earnings, that has to be serviced somehow, many inside the company anticipate extreme budget cuts. And Ripp’s finance background has triggered speculation that Time Inc. is being gussied up for a sale. “Private equity could drain the cow until there’s nothing left,” speculated another longtime Time Inc. executive.

Ripp shoots down that idea. “I would not come back to a company that would be bled and drained,” he tells me. “I didn’t want any part of that. This company defined my life.”

— Time Inc., the storied company behind publications like People, Sports Illustrated, and its flagship TIME magazine, is searching for new revenue models after the decline of print-ad revenues in recent years. In New York magazine, Gabriel Sherman talked to Time Inc CEO Joe Ripp to assess what the future of the company might look like.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

From Facebook Reject to Purchased by Facebook for $19 Billion

Over the next nine years the pair also watched Yahoo go through multiple ups and downs. Acton invested in the dotcom boom, and lost millions in the 2000 bust. For all of his distaste for advertising now he was also deep in it back then, getting pulled in to help launch Yahoo’s important and much-delayed advertising platform Project Panama in 2006. “Dealing with ads is depressing,” he says now. “You don’t make anyone’s life better by making advertisements work better.” He was emotionally drained. “I could see it on him in the hallways,” says Koum, who wasn’t enjoying things either. In his LinkedIn profile, Koum unenthusiastically describes his last three years at Yahoo with the words, “Did some work.”

In September 2007 Koum and Acton finally left Yahoo and took a year to decompress, traveling around South America and playing ultimate frisbee. Both applied, and failed, to work at Facebook. “We’re part of the Facebook reject club,” Acton says. Koum was eating into his $400,000 in savings from Yahoo, and drifting. Then in January 2009, he bought an iPhone and realized that the seven-month old App Store was about to spawn a whole new industry of apps. He visited the home of Alex Fishman, a Russian friend who would invite the local Russian community to his place in West San Jose for weekly pizza and movie nights. Up to 40 people sometimes showed up. The two of them stood for hours talking about Koum’s idea for an app over tea at Fishman’s kitchen counter.

Parmy Olson, in Forbes, on the early failures of WhatsApp founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton, who just sold their messaging service to Facebook for $19 billion. Read more on Facebook.

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Photo: abulhussain, Flickr

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Facebook's Real Names Problem

One thing about some of the new apps that will come as a shock to anyone familiar with Facebook: Users will be able to log in anonymously. That’s a big change for Zuckerberg, who once told David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect, that “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

At the time of Facebook’s founding, there was no such thing as real identity online. Facebook became the first place where people met one another as themselves, and the company was stubborn about asking users to sign in and share material with their own names. A Facebook account became a sort of passport to the rest of the Web, and with its success came new problems. No teenager wants to share insane party pics with a group of friends that may include his or her parents and teachers. And dissidents in parts of the world where speaking freely can be incriminating avoided the service in favor of alternatives such as Twitter, where real names are optional.

Former Facebook employees say identity and anonymity have always been topics of heated debate in the company. Now Zuckerberg seems eager to relax his old orthodoxies. “I don’t know if the balance has swung too far, but I definitely think we’re at the point where we don’t need to keep on only doing real identity things,” he says. “If you’re always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden.” Paper will still require a Facebook login, but Zuckerberg says the new apps might be like Instagram, which doesn’t require users to log in with Facebook credentials or share pictures with friends on the social network. “It’s definitely, I think, a little bit more balanced now 10 years later,” he says. “I think that’s good.”

Brad Stone and Sarah Frier, in Bloomberg Businessweek, on the challenges for Facebook on its 10th anniversary. Read more about Facebook in the Longreads Archive.

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Facebook Feminism, Like It or Not

Longreads Pick

Susan Faludi’s takedown of “Lean In,” and a brief history of feminism and its relationship with capitalism: “In the postindustrial economy, feminism has been retooled as a vehicle for expression of the self, a ‘self’ as marketable consumer object”:

“In 1834, America’s first industrial wage earners, the ‘mill girls’ of Lowell, Massachusetts, embarked on their own campaign for women’s advancement in the workplace. They didn’t ‘lean in,’ though. When their male overseers in the nation’s first large-scale planned industrial city cut their already paltry wages by 15 to 20 percent, the textile workers declared a ‘turn-out,’ one of the nation’s earliest industrial strikes. That first effort failed, but its participants did not concede defeat. The Lowell women would stage another turn-out two years later, create the first union of working women in American history, lead a fight for the ten-hour work day, and conceive of an increasingly radical vision that took aim both at corporate power and the patriarchal oppression of women. Their bruising early encounter with American industry fueled a nascent feminist outlook that would ultimately find full expression in the first wave of the American women’s movement.”

Source: The Baffler
Published: Oct 17, 2013
Length: 36 minutes (9,021 words)