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Mark Zuckerberg on NYT story: "To suggest we weren't interested in knowing the truth or wanted to hide what we knew or wanted to prevent investigations is simply untrue."

 Facebook says it will take a couple of questions on the article but wants to focus on (looks at notes) its transparency report.
Good luck with that folks.
Now Mark Zuckerberg is running through all the tactics it's deploying to clean up the platform (you know like they should have years ago).
What every Facebook user should be reading in the meantime
https://t.co/ohyhUSyxTL
Mark Zuckerberg is vaguely denying allegations in the story and moves quickly to stressing solutions so people will stop talking about the problems. This is the Facebook playbook. Is the company misreading the room this time?
Facebook board statement on Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg: "To suggest that they knew about Russian interference and either tried to ignore it or prevent investigations into what had happened is grossly unfair."
This announcement that Facebook executives are discussing was planned for a long time. But the timing, coming a day after the NYT bombshell, is not coincidental.
https://t.co/dGsHGR99oB
https://t.co/aTsrWblscg
This is the note from Mark Zuckerberg: A Blueprint for Content Governance and Enforcement https://t.co/EtZu9sAHTT
ABC News: Mark, is anyone going to lose their job over this? If not, please explain.
Zuckerberg: Blah blah. I generally don't talk about specific cases of that in public. Blah blah.
Mark Zuckerberg: I have tremendous respect for George Soros even though we disagree. As soon as I learned about this in the NYT, I talked to our team and we are no longer working with this firm.
Wired: Why did you think opposition research was a winning strategy?
Zuckerberg: I learned about this yesterday. In general, I think you're right. This might be normal in Washington but it's not the kind of thing we want Facebook associated with.
Cheap seats: How does the CEO not know this? And why isn't the executive who clearly did know on this call?
Recode: Did you consider taking Facebook offline in Myanmar to prevent violence?
Facebook: ... We are bringing the world closer together.
Mark Zuckerberg: We have considered taking the service down when we were worried about a privacy or security issue. But he does not address Myanmar.
WSJ: Have you fired anyone?
Zuckerberg: We have made personnel changes. Hey, we just hired a new global policy and comms chief. Let's focus on that.
Lots of long pauses as executives confer on how to respond to media questions.
Asked whether he would step down as board chairman, Mark Zuckerberg says no.
"I am quite focused on finding ways to get more independence into our systems in other ways."
Bloomberg: After revelations in NYT article, how are things going to change in Facebook's relationships with critics, lawmakers and media?
Zuckerberg: Transparency is one of the bigger areas where we have to continue to do more.
The buck stops with Mark Zuckerberg, true. But no excuse for Sheryl Sandberg not being on this call if Facebook has found this new religion called transparency.
Also, if you are CEO of a major company and you learn really bad stuff about your company by reading it in the newspaper, you have a serious problem.
So, who did know on your team about Definers?
Zuckerberg: "I think someone on our comms team must have hired them."
Comms team, meet the bus that just ran you over.
Pressed again on who's responsible and who will get fired, Zuckerberg gets his back up: I feel like I have answered this question a bunch of times. I am not going to get into personnel decisions on this call.
Mark Zuckerberg just extended the call to answer more questions from the media.
https://t.co/Vp6KKvHGJ5
We are now one hour into this press call.
Finally someone asks directly about Sheryl Sandberg.
Zuckerberg: Sheryl learned about this at the same time that I did. Overall Sheryl is doing great work for the company. She has been a very important partner to me and will continue to be.
Facebook board: Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are doing great.
Mark Zuckerberg: I have no idea what's happening inside my own company and neither does Sheryl.
Why do you believe you are the right person to lead Facebook?
Zuckerberg: We are doing the right things to fix the issues. I am fully committed to getting this right.
Asked about the review of lobbyists and whether Sheryl Sandberg will oversee it in light of the allegations in the NYT article, Mark Zuckerberg says new global policy and comms chief Nick Clegg will oversee the review and he reports to Sandberg.
Zuckerberg says the reality is he is not going to know every single thing going on. He also says he has confidence in his team who does know these things. 🤷‍♀️
Facebook has now ended the press call.
Thanks for spending the last hour and 22 minutes with me.
--30--

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Yoel Roth
Yoel Roth
@yoyoel
We’ve recently seen research about so-called “bots” and misinformation on Twitter and wanted to share our perspective on why findings that might seem remarkable at first are likely inaccurate. We’re working on a more detailed explanation, but some comments for now.

We continue to be excited by the research opportunities that Twitter data provides. Our service is the largest source of real-time social media data, and we make this data available to the public for free through our public API. No other major service does this.

Many researchers, academics, and journalists use our public API — a set of tools for programmatically accessing information on Twitter. We make all public Twitter content available via our APIs. You can learn more about them here:

The basic issue with much of the research based on our public APIs is simple: The APIs don't provide insight into our defensive actions to protect Twitter from manipulation, including bots.

Because of this, API-based research can't distinguish between accounts we've already identified as bad (and hidden or removed) and real, authentic ones.
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Zen Black
Zen Black
@z3nblack
1/ Thread: "A Silicon Valley Ponzi Scheme"

Thanks to @chamath for laying this out in Social Capital's 2018 annual letter.

I've always appreciated his outspokenness.

2/ The hardest thing for most startups today is the path to market: first finding product-market fit & a way to reach customers, then building a ruthless machine to acquire, monetize & retain them.

3/ Because of this, when the VC industry invests capital into fast growing startups today, the plurality (if not majority) of invested capital will go into user acquisition and ad spending, for better or worse— usually worse.

4/ Todays massive venture-backed advertising, sales, and user acquisition playbook has morphed into one that champions growth at any cost.

This is creating a big bill that will soon come due...

5/ Ad impressions and click-throughs are bid up to outrageous prices by startups flush with venture money, and prospective users demand more and more subsidized products to gain their initial attention.
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foone
foone
@Foone
It is 2018 and this error message is a mistake from 1974.
This limitation, which is still found in the very latest Windows 10, dates back to BEFORE STAR WARS. This bug is as old as Watergate.


When this was developed, nothing had UPC codes yet because they'd just been invented.
Back when this mistake was made, There was only one Phone Company, because they hadn't been broken up yet. Ted Bundy was still on the loose. Babe Ruth's home run record was about to fall.

When this bug was developed, Wheel of Fortune hadn't yet aired. No one had seen Rocky Horror. Steven Spielberg was still a little-known directory of TV films and one box-office disappointment. SNL hadn't aired yet. The Edmund Fitzgerald was still hauling iron ore.

WHEN THIS STUPID MISFEATURE WAS INVENTED, THE GODFATHER PART II HAD JUST OPENED IN THEATERS.

So, why does this happen? So Unix (which was only 5 years old at this point) had the good idea of "everything is a file" which mean you could do things like write to sockets, pipes, the console, etc with the same commands and instructions.
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Taylor Holiday
Taylor Holiday
@TaylorHoliday
1/ What causes long term sustained performance in an ad account?

🧵featuring real examples 👇🏻

If you explore the source of FB ad growth and subsequently revenue growth for eCom brands it is almost never a function of iterative improvements to ad creative or tactics over time.

2/ More often it is a series of moments that unlock an order of magnitude increase in awareness, engagement, traffic and performance.

These moments can be caused by:

A single ad
A big PR moment
A breakthrough campaign
A change in market dynamics
A new product release
Etc.

3/ The problem is they are very hard to predict and create.

I’ll give you an example of a few that happened for us @QALORing that changed our trajectory (and ad account performance) each time...

4/ The first was @andydalton14 wearing a ring on @HBO hard knocks. It was the peak of the series popularity and they did a :30 piece on the ring he was wearing while playing.

See screenshot

Notice the traffic before and after the peak.


5/ This increased organic traffic let us alter our AdWords strategy, extract more post intent demand from new searchers and pull clips of the show to supplement our ad credibility.
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Trung Phan \U0001f1e8\U0001f1e6
Trung Phan 🇨🇦...
@TrungTPhan
For decades, Jeff Bezos shunned ads.

But now, Amazon’s ad business is huge: it’s on a $30B+ annual run rate (more than 2x the combined sales of Twitter, Snap and Pinterest).

Here’s how it happened 🧵


1/ Amazon doesn’t break out its ad business separately in financial filings. However, most analyst believe ads make up the majority of its “Other” revenue segment.

This figure has exploded from $1B in 2015 to a current annual run rate of ~$32B.


2/ In 2009, Bezos said “ads are the price you pay for a crappy product”.

But the business is so lucrative that Amazon’s interface has been swamped with ads:

◻️ First 3-7 search results (left in red)
◻️ Most of the product page (right in blue)


3/ Prior to the rise of ads, Amazon set out to build the ultimate organic customer recommendations engine.

The approach was codified in a famed 2003 research paper: “Amazon Recommendations: Item-to-Item Collaborative Filtering.”


4/ In recent years, Amazon organic recommendations:

◻️"Customers who bought this also bought this"
◻️"Customers who viewed also viewed"

Have been replaced w/ ads:

◻️ "Sponsored products related to"
◻️ "Brands related to this category"
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In Academia, people aren’t always supported when they need it. I want to share what @WesternU did when my husband died right after the pandemic shutdown. It should be shared with other uni’s as a model for empathy and proactive care when someone is in crisis.
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IT WAS RISHI KANADA WHO GAVE THE ATOMIC THEORY & TALKED ABOUT THE GRAVITY OF EARTH, 2600 YEARS BEFORE AN APPLE FELL IN FRONT OF NEWTON'S EYES:

Scientists of the modern world credit an English scientist John Dalton (1766 CE -1844 CE) for the Atomic Theory.


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A printing shop in Michigan prints ballots for Delaware County, Pennsylvania and as Lancashire County, Pennsylvania (this is normal). But along with the ballots it prints on contract and delivers to those counties, it prints some ballots that get diverted to Bethpage, New York.

There, a boiler room of folks fill in "Biden" (often without even voting downballot). The ballots (which are forensically legitimate, given that they come from the same print shop as the good ballots, ) then get trucked into Pennsylvania and mailed. Hundreds of thousands.

We have all of that documented. Texts, statements, affidavits, everything.

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