#it's crazy given that journals can only exist because of researchers' work and writing!

[foxscarf]

This doesn't even mention that it costs the authors who submit the articles thousands of pounds to publish in some journals!! You do all the work and pay for that with your grants, and then who pays for the publication? Well certainly not the PUBLISHER

[aquadrazi]

Find Someone to Carry You

Chapter 4

*****Thirteen years after the death of the Yiling Patriarch*****

“I heard the Jin Sect Leader died” “Died inside one of his whores is what I heard” “I heard the new young sect leader has been training with the Ghost of Gusu” “I heard that those young cultivators are the best in generations” “Is it true that the Second Jade of Lan turned down Chief Cultivator?” “I’m not surprised. He’s only seen around his group of Juniors when they are on night hunts” “Jin Guangyao seems to being a good job running the Jin Sect in the boy’s absence” “It seems the Jin and Lan sects are becoming closer and closer” “Maybe, but it doesn’t seem that the Ghost of Gusu cares about sect politics”

........Mo Manor…….

Lan Wangji arrived quickly after he saw Sizhui’s signal flare light up the night sky. He liked to keep his distance these days to see how his Juniors handled hunts on their own, and then would come when summoned if there were problems. They had been asked to rid the Mo Estate of some resentful energy, so apparently things were more complicated than they were led to believe.

As the Juniors recounted the events that led up to them signaling for help, Lan Wangji surveyed the area. One particular area drew his eyes.

He walked towards a run-down shack and signaled for the Juniors to follow him. The demonic hand would be dealt with, but he had a feeling there was more to this story than first appeared.

The Juniors had swarmed past him before he had finished taking in the scene, with their weapons drawn.

“Wait” He stopped them. “Tell me, what do you see?”

“Senior Lan, there is a demonic cultivator laying in the center of an array. We must kill him”

“Oh? Why must we?” Lan Wangji realized that it was high time for this lesson.

“Because demonic cultivation is evil”

“Who told you that?”

“Master Lan”

“Why is it evil?”

There was shuffling and silence.

“Is it the cultivation itself that is evil, or is it the cultivator?”

“Master Lan says that demonic cultivation erodes the mind and turns the cultivator into a monster”

“The Yiling Patriarch used demonic cultivation and he killed thousands before he was finally defeated”

“He killed my parents” Jin Ling added quietly, loud enough to only be heard by the few standing around him.

“Do you see a monster?” Lan Wangji asked calmly, despite the reference. He did not miss that most of the Juniors tensed up at the mention of Wei Ying. They had learned at a very young age that talk of the Yiling Patriarch was not tolerated around him.

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe”

“What is the array even FOR?”

“I see a boy in need of medical attention.” Sizhui said stubbornly while putting his sword away. The other Juniors followed suit. Sizhui had assumed a leadership role amongst them, they all seemed to follow his lead regardless if it was a night hunt or what game they were going to play after lecture.

“Alright. Sizhui, you take charge of seeing that Young Master Mo here doesn’t bleed to death. The rest of you, see what clues can be found in the room as to what happened here.” Lan Wangji was proud of his son. He had hoped that being raised in Cloud Recesses wouldn’t cause him to see the world as black and white, as it had for him when he was growing up.

Lan Wangji could see little bits of Wei Ying in the boy, even though he didn’t remember his time in the Burial Mounds. A-Yuan was so young when everything had happened, and when Lan Wangji had found him, the boy was suffering from a terrible fever. He still has nightmares from time to time, but Sizhui would brush them off as crazy dreams, and not memories of his past.

“Senior Lan” Jin Ling whispered next to him. “I think the spell was designed by the Yiling Patriarch.” He had found a bunch of papers and was presenting them to Lan Wangji.

How could he possibly know that?

“I- I recognize the handwriting.” Jin Ling’s hand trembled a little as Lan Wangji took the papers from him. As the Juniors grew older, Lan Wangji had spoken out loud to them less and less. However, since they had spent so much time together as they grew up, the Juniors all had an uncanny ability to read Lan Wangji’s miniscule changes in facial expressions and body language. Lan Wangji didn’t have to say anything to prompt the boy to continue his explanation.

“When I went back for my grandfather’s funeral I went looking for…” He looked around to see if anyone was in earshot, then spoke again even quieter “…the screaming man. I went back to the room I had seen him in with grandfather and Uncle Jin when I didn’t see him in the receiving hall. He wasn’t there, but there were a bunch of items that had belonged to the Yiling Patriarch there. I’m guessing that my grandfather had them collected so he could research demonic cultivation. I… read some of the journals. His writing was…distinct.” The boy almost looked ashamed as he finished his explanation.

It only took a glance for Lan Wangji to confirm that the spell was designed by Wei Ying. “You are correct”.

“It seems that the spell was designed by Senior Wei, probably during his time in the Burial Mounds with the Wen remnants.” Lan Wangji announced to the room. “So we now know that we are dealing with something that we probably haven’t seen before.”

“The Yiling Patriarch?”

“So it IS demonic cultivation.”

“I wonder if it worked…whatever it was”

Don’t be emotional.

Let them find the clues themselves.

Let them put it together.

Let them come to their own conclusions.

They are good kids with open minds, they don’t see the world as black and white.

They’ve been taught to think and gather evidence before they judge.

“Senior Lan. I’ve compared the array to the one in Senior Wei’s drawing, it was correctly drawn. I see no reason for the spell to not have worked. Also, it appears this spell is a Sacrifice Summon, so Young Master Mo would have given up his soul and offered his body as a vessel to…something… be it a demon or another spirit, to…get revenge for him.” Lan Jingyi reported.

“Has anyone found a note?” Sizhui asked from where he was tending to the boy. “If it was a Sacrifice Summon, then there would be a note with instructions for what the spirit needed to carry out.” He channeled spiritual energy into the slashes on the boy’s wrist. The ones that would only go away once whatever it was that the boy wanted done was accomplished. His eyes widened when they closed up. “Wait! The spell didn’t work. The wounds closed.”

“So that IS young Master Mo then”

“Oh good”

“What? He’s still a demonic cultivator”

“I heard he was crazy”

“At least he isn’t an ACTUAL demon”

“He must have been in a lot of pain to want to give up his life, and all future lives for revenge”

“What do you mean?”

“The caster gives up their body to another, and their soul is destroyed in the process”

“So he was expecting to die”

“Why would anyone do that?”

Uncle would be very irritated at the Juniors chattering while looking for clues. However Lan Wangji didn’t discourage it. He liked to hear what they were thinking, and where their thought processes were going. He found it was easier to teach them if he KNEW what they were thinking, rather than guessing. The irony was not lost on him. If he had been more verbal with Wei Ying maybe things would have turned out differently. He would not make that mistake again.

No, he encouraged his Juniors to voice everything they thought and felt. He wanted them all to know that they could rely on each other no matter the situation. He never wanted to see another cultivator on their own, battling the world, misunderstood. His Juniors would have each other, even after he was long gone.

“I found a note!”

“What does it say?”

“Who was he trying to summon?”

“Who did he want revenge on?”

Their questions were broken by a sudden screaming coming from young Master Mo. “No, no please. Please stop. Please let me go, I’m scared. I don’t want to. Please, it hurts. I’ll be good, I swear. I’ll be good. Please!”

Sizhui pulled the boy into his lap and held him tightly so he couldn’t thrash about. “It’s okay, Just breathe. No one here will hurt you. Can you breathe for me?” He said soothingly to the boy while rocking him.

The boy continued to sob and beg pathetically into Sizhui’s shoulder as Sizhui whispered into the boy’s ear and rocked him gently.

“He was trying to summon the Yiling Patriarch. He wanted revenge on those who…had abused him.”

“But the spell didn’t work.”

“Does that mean that the Yiling Patriarch is alive?”

“That can’t be. The Jin clan saw him burst into a million pieces”

“Well, if he is definitely dead, then that must mean there wasn’t a soul to summon”

No soul.

Wei Ying’s soul was destroyed.

Wei Ying hasn’t just been avoiding Inquiry for the past 13 years.

He wasn’t just hiding, feeling hurt and betrayed.

His soul was destroyed, so there was nothing left to talk to.

Wei Ying would never reincarnate.

Wei Ying no longer existed.

Lan Wangji felt like someone had reached into his chest, ripped out his heart, and was squeezing it in front of his eyes.

“Se-Senior Lan? Are you okay?”

The Juniors were staring at him with looks of concern. “Mn” was all he could manage for them.

“Let’s regroup back at Cloud Recesses.” Sizhui suggested, realizing that his father was having some sort of emotional crisis. The Juniors murmured and nodded in agreement as they took samples of the talismans hanging from the walls, and all the papers that had been found, and exited the shack.

The boy in his arms whimpered as Sizhui lifted him up, even though he was careful not to press against any of the injuries he could see.

“It’s going to be okay now. No one is going to hurt you again.” Sizhui tried to soothe the boy as he carried him out of the shack. “We will help you”.

“Senior Lan, can you fly on your own?” Lan Wangji felt an arm on his shoulder, steadying him.

“I will be fine” Lan Wangji responded. It wasn’t a lie, he was sure that he would be fine to fly. The Junior stayed by his side as he left the shack, which he was glad for because his legs were fighting him to stay standing up. “I will just need a minute.”

The cool night air helped him to focus on the present. There was a young boy who needed their help, and a demonic hand to get to a secure place. There was also the information that the Jin sect had Wei Ying’s work from when he was in the Burial Mounds, and had been using it in experiments for years. Young Master Mo was one of Jin Guangshan’s bastards, and had been kicked out for being crazy. Perhaps he had been part of the experiments. That would explain the demonic cultivation.

Lan Wangji breathed deeply and steadily until his mind calmed down. They would travel back to Cloud Recesses, the boy would be tended to, and they would look through the clues and try to get a better picture of what was going on.

Once those things were taken care of, then he would allow himself to fall apart.

[spidersmiceandeverythingnice]

Gonna write my scatterbrained Spicy Hot Takes on Agartha before the news is stale and I delete this annoying and boring chapter from my mental landscape, so bear with me:

I think Agartha’s main issue was just straight up poor writing. The Japanese direct translations being as downright offensive as they were is one thing - but overall, the chapter is just one plot contrivance after another. It tries so, so hard to go for a certain tone but can’t seem to stick to any one thing or idea. Disregarding themes about sexuality probably would have been the very best way to go about this chapter, since I think the most interesting part was the theme about storytelling and in-authenticity - we all know that That Line was annoying af in a game like FGO, but it CAN work in a series like Fate as a whole. I had a helluva long day at work so allow me to explain in the least scatter-brained way I can manage right now:

Here’s what I’m thinking: Scheherazade, whose name I guarantee I will spell wrong/differently every time I write it even though I’ve been able to pronounce it properly since I was thirteen (I was in a speaking competition and told some of the Thousand and One Nights using her framework as the opening monologue, long story short ANYWAY -) is traumatized by her ordeal with the king. This is a really good and interesting thing to explore! Fitting it in with the theme of storytelling - Scheherazade is deeply afraid of dying and will do whatever it takes to live, so she makes a fantasy world and fills it with legends, and feeds their energy to a Holy Grail. With this, and the power of a Demon God at her side, she plans to reveal magic to the human world in the most destructive fashion possible, allowing the fantastic to become ordinary, and destroying the Throne of Heroes itself in the process. Fate is a series were stories have power - but Scheherazade survived basically by telling the most fantastical, interesting tales she could and never finishing them. She always would pause in the middle, and say, “That’s all for tonight.” I think this is the kind of thing we can run with in terms of setting.

Dahut is the weirdest example because it’s the one story in the chapter that I know next to nothing about. At one point it’s mentioned that Dahut is impossible to summon as a Servant, and so Drake was “forced” into the role of the Pirate Princess. Ys is probably the weakest part of the chapter for that, but I did like the idea of her being “Drake Alter,” where Drake vibrantly pursues her goals and desires but takes nothing for granted; Dahut gives into her every whim and takes absolutely everything for granted. The conflict between “Drake” and “Dahut” should have been emphasized more instead of having the player/Da Vinci dismiss her as “Oh, it’s not Drake, except when she conveniently comes back to delivery us the MacGuffins Ex Machina in the eleventh hour.” Dahut has little connection to Drake - it’s not her story, but a role she was forced into because Scheherazade was building a very specific kind of world. Therefore it is inauthentic. Perhaps that’s all it needs to be in this context. 

This can also work with the Amazons. Scheherazade never told stories of the Amazons, but she has access to basically all stories in the world through her Noble Phantasm - she learns that they are a society of warrior women who live without men, and so decides that they will be a society which oppresses men due to her fear/bitterness towards men after the ordeal she suffered through. The “oppressing men” plotline was honestly dumb all around but using the Amazons as a mechanism to explore Scheherazade's trauma would’ve been more interesting than just having them be the Big Bad before the Big Bad Columbus Reveal: Scheherazade doesn’t like fighting, but wishes that she had been strong enough to protect herself. Because she views herself as a coward and her ordeal with the king has complicated her view of sexuality - “I’m better suited to a bedchamber than a battlefield” - she uses the Amazons of Agartha as a mechanism to cope. 

This brings us to Wu, whose design I’m still not happy about even though I think the in-story justification is somewhat fair. (Let Helena and Wu be gray-haired grannies together or so help me!) Wu was absolutely an authoritarian ruler who did, in fact, invade and conquer several nations and institute a terrifying network of secret police. In her later life, she was given to decadence - but her tenure on the throne showed her to be a highly competent administrator. Notably, she ruled over an era of religious tension and balanced matters quite well, and though she was accused of undoing meritocracy to put her supporters into power, many of the men she appointed held positions in government long after she’d died because they were actually good at their jobs. Wu has been heavily mythologized over the years - later Tang emperors and Neo-Confucian scholars wrote her off (Wu founded her own dynasty under her own name, so they kind of had to legitimize it somehow), she became associated the nine-tailed fox spirit thanks to a few popular novels and poems, etc., etc., etc. The crazy thing is that Wu actually left very few records of herself behind, apart from some poems. Even the inscription on her tomb is blank! People can say whatever they want about her - it’s extremely difficult to know the full truth of the matter without any objective observers in the field (and without Wu’s own words to give context/another story), especially if you don’t read any Chinese. 

BTW - the first thing I learned history class is that when you’re dealing with primary sources, you must always remember that translators have agendas. Every word is a deliberate choice, and it changes the meaning from the original text. When dealing with historical documents, this is not always a good thing. 

Scheherazade reads some, but not all of these stories, and integrates Wu into her world as the sadist empress with an iron grip on her decadent mythical city. 

Do you see what I’m getting at here? It’s a lot, but I’m not done. Now we have to deal with Columbus - there’s “In Defense of Columbus” video is floating around in the Agartha tag, but I haven’t watched it in full and haven’t done like, any intensive research on Columbus in particular, so I’m going to apologize right now for any historical inaccuracies/misconceptions that I’m about to write. The point I want to make here mainly is that Columbus, like Wu, has been heavily, heavily mythologized for both good and evil at various points. The thing about Columbus that is also interesting is that the authenticity of his journals is or was apparently a subject of debate. The man who published most of them actually happened to be Bartolomew de las Casas - one of the founders/first vocal supporters of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. The reason de la Casas supported this is because he believed that using African labor would be an improvement over enslaving the native populations of the New World. Soon after, he had a change of heart and devoted the rest of his life to fighting against slavery in all forms. De la Casas went on to be named a saint, and was possibly the first person in history to propose the idea of universal human rights - which is how I had heard of him until literally just this afternoon; I had no idea he’d ever supported the slave trade until I was looking up basic info about Columbus’s writings so I could write this long-ass post. History is full of complicated people. 

But as I mentioned in Wu’s bit, it’s very important to note that in many ways, Columbus is literally just whatever people decide he is. Like, he never even set foot in any land that would become the United States, and yet he’s a huge symbol here! Along these lines, his amnesia would fit the theme of inauthentic storytelling, choosing what to read and what to believe in. Columbus regaining his memories was an understated moment, which is actually fucking fantastic because it could be used to really emphasize the choice that is being made here. He’s a Heroic Spirit who can choose to be whatever he wants. He can choose to be the simple hero-explorer that schoolchildren sing about, or he can choose to be the Big Bad, the first and perhaps most infamous conquistador. And he chooses to be the bad guy. That is so fuckin’ fantastic, y’all! I honest to God love that not only did FGO portray Columbus as a villain of history but that the bad reputation is something he chooses to maintain! I can write a list of Servants who were less than stellar people and got a makeover for Fate. Nero is probably one of the worst examples but like - Ozymandias absolutely owned slaves in his life as a pharaoh. Hercules and Medea murdered their own children. Asterios literally ate humans as the Minotaur. Gilles de Rais exists as a playable character. Jack the Ripper is your daughter. Hell, Nobunaga burned temples with the monks still inside - but she feels bad about it now! Enough digressing but I a hundred percent get why Japanese fans found Columbus “refreshing” at his introduction. He owns his cruelty, his desire to exploit others - he challenges the narrative that everyone is redeemable because he doesn’t even want to be redeemed, he just wants to get rich and famous, and he doesn’t give a shit who he steps over in the process! Like, Columbus said, “I’m just doing what comes naturally,” at one point when he still had amnesia, so when he got his memory back and turned on the player, I really would’ve liked for him to say is something like, “You’ve already decided that I’m the bad guy, right? You know my story, and I’m nothing if not a man of my word.”

These kinds of questions/debates could have been used to emphasize the themes of Agartha. Legends are what people decide they are. People make choices and history decides whether they were good or evil or important retroactively. Can you know what someone is like by reading a translation of their poetry? Can you judge a king’s reign by the words of their successors or their rivals? Does the context of a story matter? This all could have been super interesting to explore!

Like I said, the main theme of Agartha being “inauthentic storytelling” could have been hella, hella good considering that this is a world created by Scheherazade’s fears and trauma feeding into her escapist desires. But Minase’s incompetence as a writer made everything so hamfisted and awkward that everything just suffered under his desire to insert his fetishes at every moment. It was so obvious that he didn’t read any material for old Fate characters - like Astolfo you poor sweet thing, you deserved so much better! - and even the new characters that he clearly did research on, like Columbus, fell flat because he couldn’t figure out what he was trying to say beyond mildly-to-extra offensive sex jokes.

[artificialqueens]

Maybe We’re Helping Each Other Escape (Bengela)- Ortega

A/N: it’s crazy how fast i can work on something if the idea niggles away at me for long enough, i do much of my writing on google docs on train journeys, and i have three days off work because of the bastarding snow. welcome to whatever this is- technically it’s set within the Just The Game We’re In universe but i have tried my best to make sure it can be read standalone. i’m no good at summaries, so this was based off the idea i had the other day when i got asked about Game headcanons:

“i don’t think i’ve given Dela a role in Game so far so OF COURSE she’s the new flirty intern at the Daily Mail who gets put under Shangela’s wing and who makes Shangela very nervous because she works for the Daily Mail and she should not be having these feelings towards female colleagues”

((if you’re American and struggling with the whole idea of the Daily Mail as a newspaper, compare it to ummmmmm idk some media outlet that Trump really loves))

Shangela never thought her journalistic career would peak with her writing a 1,000 word article about the Prime Minister’s wife’s cankles, but she supposed the only way was up. Finishing the final sentence and emailing it to her senior editor to get it haphazardly checked for spelling, grammar and rogue left-wing views, Shangela took a sip of her coffee only to find it cold. Damn. She was annoyed that there were no young, terrified work experience girls to get her another. Rising from her desk chair, she grabbed her cup and made her way to the small office kitchen. Many of her friends had asked her why she took the job at the Daily Mail and she’d often reply lightheartedly, laughing something about being broke and having no morals. But as she passed by desk after desk in the small, stifled office she worked in, she found her heart sinking as it did every other day. The part about her being broke, there was truth in that- there wasn’t a whole lot that a third in Communication, Media and Culture from Oxford Brookes could get you in the world of journalism. She’d had her sights set on the BBC, but that had been for the Raja Geminis of this world, and Shangela still bristled when she saw her on the ten o'clock news remembering how the girl had befriended her for her study notes when they were in first year together. She now understood how brutal the industry could be and how easy it was to be backstabbed, but at the time eighteen-year-old Shangela just thought she’d made a friend. That was until the head of her faculty called her into a meeting to discuss plagarism allegations, and revealed that her final essay had been very similar, almost identical in fact, to Raja’s, the very same essay that Shangela had sent to her to look over to help her out. Raja’s had just been “more finessed” as they had put it. In the end, Shangela’s essay was void- 0% for an essay worth 80% of her grade for that module, dragging her down from being on course for a first class degree to having to settle for a third.   BBC out the window, Shangela had set her sights on ITV, Channel 4, fuck, even Channel 5 received an application. Hearing nothing back she’d started to lower her expectations and set her sights on print journalism- The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian. Then once she got the rejection emails from them, she begrudgingly scraped the very bottom of the barrel- The Sun, The Star, and The Daily Mail. She got a job offer from the lesser of three evils- as an editor for the section of the website dedicated to women, “Femail”- and before she knew it, she’d been trapped in the same pink offices for two years. But it was better than sitting in a freezing cold Soho flat struggling to pay the rent. Morals, though, that was still a problem. No amount of money could buy those away, and it still stung whenever she had to write an article about whose dress looked the most like a dehydrated camel’s turd at whatever awards ceremony. She’d love to be writing on the situation in Gaza and she’d love even more to be researching the emerging refugee crisis in Syria, but that was Raja’s domain. Shangela’s domain was different entirely. At least she was writing, she reminded herself, as she got to the small kitchen, washed out her mug and spooned in more coffee granules. Flicking the switch on the kettle, she was surprised when her senior editor entered the kitchen, looking as smug as he always did as if he was constantly being reminded of the gender pay gap. In his hand he held what Shangela recognised as her article- same paragraph structure and indents, but with a green highlighter across one sentence. Stiffening, she struggled to hold in her annoyance- that had to be a record for most skim-read proofreading of all time, and it hadn’t even been as much as five minutes since she had emailed the article to him. “So um, Shangie…babe. The article’s brilliant. Just a little problem with your grammar on paragraph two.” Trying to suppress her rolled eyes at the nickname she hated, Shangela examined the highlighted text on the printed sheet in front of her. Narrowing her eyes, she looked up at her editor. “Um. What’s the issue here?” Her boss took the paper from her and read from it in faux-patience. “From beneath the ankle strap, the fat gained from the baby weight four years ago tried to escape from its fleshy prison.” Cringing, Shangela screwed up her face. “And?” “You missed the apostrophe in ‘it’s’.” “No I didn’t,” Shangela explained calmly. “An apostrophe in this case means that two words have been combined to make one. ’It is’ becomes 'it’s’. Its with no apostrophe is possessive. So, “from it is fleshy prison” makes no sense.” The editor gave a sort of choked laugh. “They really taught you a lot at Oxford Brookes, huh?” Shangela found herself casting her eyes to the floor. Her skin prickled as if she’d been stung. Working up her dignity again, she met her boss’ eye. “I do pride myself on knowing basic grammar, Sir.” The senior editor slid the piece of paper slowly out of her hands. “Well I’m your superior and I’m saying that your basic grammar is wrong. So just fix that up and the article should be good to go. Okay?” Shangela simply gave a curt nod, swallowed, and returned to her desk. The Prime Minister’s wife was a lovely woman, too. It was unfair that she had to be eviscerated by the media like this, for something as shallow as her appearance. But it was in Shangela’s job description, and so it would be done.

Settling down at her desk and resentfully changing correct grammar to an error, she felt her eyes flicker above the monitor screen to see some sort of activity in the office. Gia from Fashion was showing around a girl- looking to be around Shangela’s age, or perhaps younger. Her hair was in a neat beehive which fell over her shoulders, long and straight and dark with a sort of gloss to it that Shangela thought only existed in Pantene adverts. Her makeup was simple- a sort of 60’s cat eye with some light blusher and simple pink lipgloss on her lips which were currently set in a smile as she greeted Delta who sat one row in front of her. She wore a pink dress patterned with yellow flowers, and Shangela wondered why she was bothering to notice so much about her. Narrowing her eyes, she swirled her chair around to her left to face Vivienne, the colleague at the desk beside her and possibly the only person Shangela got on with at work.

“Vivienne,” she hissed in a sort of hushed whisper, causing the other girl to turn from whatever she had been working on and flip her hair over her shoulder to listen. “Who is that that Gia’s showing around?”

The other girl rolled her eyes. “Some new intern they got. Journalism graduate apparently. I’m not convinced as to her authenticity. Look at how she’s going round the office. I’ve never seen anyone smile that much.”

“Well it’s the right attitude to have if you want to be a journalist. Be equally fake to everyone,” Shangela considered, shrugging slightly as she watched the girl. Vivienne was right- she hadn’t once broken her smile since Shangela had set eyes on her, which she found intriguing. Watching Gia turn and face her way, Shangela got a shock as if she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t. Trying to focus on her article, she blocked out her peripheral vision until the two women were right beside her desk.

“Shangela,” Gia’s voice forced Shangela to acknowledge them. “I’d like you to meet Dela, she’s our new intern and she’ll be staying with us for a couple of months.”

Shangela cast her gaze up to meet the perfectly lined pair of blue eyes smiling back at her. Up close, the girl was relatively pretty, but she couldn’t shake the annoyance of having someone just waltz into an internship right after they graduated meanwhile she had to practically beg the Daily Mail to give her a job. Swallowing her slight jealousy, Shangela forced a smile.

“Nice to meet you,” she offered a hand for the other girl to shake, only to be taken aback by her enthusiastically strong grip.

“It’s so good to meet you too! I’ve heard lots about you and read so much of your work. It’s a real honour getting to work beside you!” the girl gushed, the blush on her cheeks going a little pinker as she let go of Shangela’s hand. Shangela felt like blushing herself, taken aback that the girl seemed to have done her research so thoroughly. “Well I’m not exactly sure how much of an honour it is getting to work alongside the author of that show stopping article Floral Shirts to Work- A Yes or a No?, but I’m sure you’ll take something from it.”

Something inside Shangela lit up when Dela responded with a snort and a small giggle concealed under her hand. Gia, however, was not as easy-going and just stared Shangela down with an unimpressed glare. Great. That was a disciplinary on the cards, clearly.

“Well, by the by, since Jackie isn’t coming back from maternity leave anytime soon I said it would be fine if Dela had her desk, meaning she’ll be working beside you and Vivienne. That all okay?”

The resentment tipped over inside Shangela’s stomach again out of nowhere, Dela suddenly feeling like new competition for her. She couldn’t give anything away though, so she simply smiled and nodded.

“Good. I’ll leave you to it- I’ve given Dela a login and email address as well as some articles to proofread, but if she has any questions I trust you’ll handle them?”

Shangela bit her tongue and restrained herself from saying something about having an intern palmed off onto her, but again just nodded. Gia said a polite goodbye to Dela and then flounced off, Shangela’s face immediately setting into a scowl as she left.

“Have fun guarding the gates of Hades,” she muttered, unwittingly loud enough for Dela to hear and laugh.

“You’re a funny one, Angela. I think we’ll get along just fine,” she smiled, Shangela instantly annoyed at the misconception of her name.

“Shangela. We’ll get along even better if you get my name right,” she deadpanned, the other girl just blushing slightly and laughing apologetically.

“My bad. Sorry. Lots to take in, you know?”

Shangela raised an eyebrow and smiled briefly, although she couldn’t help but feel her defences were being worn down by Dela’s constant cheerful demeanor. Looking at her full coffee cup and then at the annoyingly smiley girl, a sly thought took place in her mind- power play. There was no way that Shangela was having this intern see herself on the same plane as herself.

“Hey, Dela? I’ve got a job for you,” she smiled, injecting cheer into her voice and feeling momentarily guilty at the way the other girl whizzed round in her wheely chair, eagerness painted over her face.

“Sure!”

“Would you mind possibly getting me a coffee?”

Dela’s smile faltered slightly as she gestured to the preexisting cup on Shangela’s desk. “Absolutely! But, um…you do already have one?”

Shangela kept her smile level as she gave a throwaway glance at the cup. “Yep, got that. Registered that. I’d just love another- long day, and I need a lot of caffeine to get me through it, you know?”

Still slightly confused, Dela nodded and dutifully made her way towards the kitchen. Turning back to her screen, Shangela smiled. She had one up on her now, and she would now know who was in charge.

Something that felt like guilt seemed to poke at her stomach, but later she’d conclude that it was probably just down to the fact she’d skipped breakfast that morning.

***

As the weeks went by, Shangela couldn’t work out if Dela was slowly growing on her or trying to annoy her to death. It started with the mornings- Shangela would walk into the office to find that yes, Dela was still there and no, unfortunately she hadn’t been taken out by a passing truck on the way into work. The intern would flash her a beaming smile, give her a cheerful good morning, and then, Shangela had noticed, would proceed to give her a different compliment every day. Sometimes it would be her makeup, sometimes her perfume, sometimes her hair or clothes. She couldn’t work out if the girl was a fake bitch or just aggressively nice, but the main thing that stumped her was why she was always so chirpy in the mornings. By about halfway through week two, Shangela snapped and decided to ask her.

“Is there a reason why you’re always so damn bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at 8am?” she borderline hissed, glaring at her. Dela sort of shrugged apologetically and then pointed to a bright pink keep cup.

“…coffee?” she guessed, then lifted up the keep cup and gave it a little shake. “In fact I’m almost out. Can I get you any?”

As Shangela shrugged off her coat and made to sit down at her computer, she found herself giving Dela a look. She’d just admittedly been pretty rude to her, and here she was offering her a coffee. Surely the girl had to be a droid or some shit? Holding her gaze and noticing again how blue her eyes were, Shangela simply nodded and held out her cup. Dela smiled back.

“Black, two sugars, right?” she asked, pausing for a second. It had been weird that she’d remembered that as well, but then Shangela supposed she did make her a coffee every day. Then it had occurred to her that the only time she’d ever had to ask Dela for one was that first day, and ever since then the girl had offered. Not really completely sure how to address the information that had just registered with her, she only nodded again. Dela gave a little nod back and made to walk away, before looking at her again and casually saying, “Your eye makeup’s lovely today, by the way. Really brings out your eyes.”

As the intern walked away, Shangela blinked a little self-consciously and began her work.

It continued the next again week. Shangela had been warming to Dela and, though she tried not to speak to her much during the day, sometimes she’d be subjected to a small anecdote about what her turtles had been up to (she, for some unknown reason, had pet turtles), sometimes she’d have to fix some sort of email or Microsoft Word-related problem for her, and sometimes she’d ask Shangela about her life. When she thought about it, Shangela supposed there wasn’t a whole lot to tell- work basically was her life, that and her Mum.

“So, um. No other half then?” Dela had asked without much expression, Shangela bristling in response.

“I hate that term. ‘Other half’. Like I’m me, I’m not incomplete in some way, you know? It’s stupid,” she rolled her eyes, thoroughly unimpressed. For the first time ever, Dela seemed anything other than bright and upbeat.

“I’ll take that as a no,” she raised her eyebrows and continued typing away. Shangela somehow regretted barking at Dela. By way of extending an olive branch, she turned and faced her.

“What about you, there a man in your life?”

Dela gave an inexplicable snort and shook her head tersely. “Nope. And there won’t be one for a very long time. Possibly ever.”

Shit. Shangela regretted asking even more- Dela had clearly been the victim of a messy breakup and her heart was obviously still broken from some dickhead ex. Clearing her throat, Shangela wanted somehow to make things better. Giving the girl a genuine smile, she gave an apologetic shrug.

“What do you say to keeping the subject off-limits for both of us and pretending this conversation never happened?”

Dela’s smile was suddenly back, and Shangela didn’t know why that made her heart light up, but it did. “I’d like that very much.”

Sure enough, the both of them kept to their word and didn’t bring the topic up again. But Shangela did find herself starting to engage in actual conversation with Dela a lot more often. She’d even venture to say she enjoyed hearing her stories and liked being asked her opinion on things, and it actually turned out they had a few things in common. It was the sort of thing that she was maybe missing out on, having never been able to commit to a boyfriend before. Really, she’d always just been too focused on work, and it was nice to just talk to someone else. She started to look forward to seeing Dela at work, just for the conversation.

Shangela turned up to work one day on a chilly day in September, about a month into Dela’s internship. By this point, she no longer really remembered what had ever annoyed her about Dela and genuinely enjoyed her company. Arriving at her desk, she was disappointed to find an empty chair where Dela usually sat. To her intrigue, however, there was a printed sheet of paper on top of her own keyboard- paragraphs of typed black with pink highlighted words and sections and scribbled notes all over it. Stuck on top of it was a pink sticky note, identical to the post-it notes that sat on Dela’s desk. Shangela picked up the paper and read the note.

About three minutes later she finally found Dela in the kitchen after frantic and furious searching. She’d seemed happy to see Shangela initially, but her face fell when she saw her expression- hot anger flushed against Shangela’s cheeks and her face was set in a scowl as she crushed the paper in her hand.

“What is this?!”

Dela blinked a couple of times, looking first at Shangela and then to the paper in her hand. “Well it’s like I said…I just proofread it and tweaked it a little. I just thought I’d be helping…I’m sorry that you don’t like it-”

Frustrated, Shangela crumpled her own article up into a ball and launched it into the bin. She turned to Dela with dark eyes, all warmth she’d ever felt towards the girl completely gone.

“Don’t ever fuck with my work again, or I’ll make it my business to get your internship cut as short as it possibly can. Got it?” she snapped, earning a sheepish nod from Dela. Fuming, she walked out of the kitchen and out of the office, being unable to bear being in the same building as Dela. She was so annoyed, so angry that a girl on an internship thought she could just waltz in and start editing the articles of someone that had worked there for almost three years. It took her all the way back to university, to her plagarism hearing. Just because Raja had changed a few words her essay was “more finessed”, just as Dela thought she was finessing her article. Shangela didn’t get to where she was today without any talent.

Fuck her, she thought, as she reached Starbucks and ordered herself the most poisonous, inky-black-looking coffee available.

As she sat and sipped at it and looked out the window, though, she felt her own words starting to chip away at her. Had she been too harsh? No- Dela had no business interfering where she didn’t have any right. She said she’d been trying to help. Maybe she genuinely wanted to. With the smallest stab to her heart, Shangela thought back to how kind and happy the girl always seemed. Fake? No- there was no way someone could keep up that charade for that length of time. As time ticked on and her cup became drained, Shangela began to feel more and more as if she’d kicked a puppy. Sighing and rising from her seat, she made her way back to the office. Dela still wasn’t at her seat and Shangela wondered if she’d ever returned. Making her way to the kitchen, she looked in the bin and plucked out the ball of paper. Opening it up, she began to read over her article, looking at the things Dela had written in.

Shit. She’d fucked up.

She hurried along the office in her heels, hoping that Dela was back so she could talk to her. She wasn’t. Mind in overdrive, Shangela went to the second most probable place and found herself at the ladies’ toilets a few moments later. To her horror, she could hear a quiet sniffing coming from the only locked cubicle.

She paused before speaking. “Dela?”

The sniffing stopped abruptly, but there was no sign of the door opening. Sighing, Shangela’s heart sank as she looked at the ceiling. “Look, I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have yelled at you like that. I was a total asshole.”

She paused. Still nothing. “I read the changes you made. They were really good. It was pretty poorly-written if I’m being honest so, thanks for making it better. And despite what I said, I do appreciate it.”

Another pause with no movement from inside the cubicle. Shangela could almost feel herself getting frustrated again, but she took a deep breath. “Look, can you please just come out of the cubicle so that we can talk, because I’m starting to get nervous that the person in here isn’t actually Dela.”

There was a beat of silence before the lock turned and Dela emerged from the cubicle, her cheeks red and puffy from crying and small specks of mascara dotted around her eyes. Shangela felt like a Grade A shit.

“I’m sorry- I don’t know why I’m crying, I’m such an idiot,” Dela started, her face flushing redder from embarrassment. Shangela shook her head.

“No, don’t be sorry. I’m sorry. For being such a dick.”

Dela smiled sadly. “I guess I just thought I’d made a friend.”

A sudden thud caught in Shangela’s heart. “I mean, I’m not that great at the whole friendship thing on the whole.”

Dela gave a small laugh. “Clearly.”

“But I mean…I guess I could try?” Shangela said hesitantly, earning another smile from Dela. Christ, she was so glad her smile was back.

“We could start with a hug?”

“It’d be a start.”

Returning her smile, Shangela walked forward into Dela’s open arms and wrapped her own arms around her, giving her a little squeeze. She was so glad she’d been forgiven, and felt relieved as she relaxed a little and rested her head on the other girl’s shoulder. She felt inexplicably safe.

The hug was eventually broken. Shangela smiled at Dela and gave her hand a quick squeeze. “Come on, bitch. Tell me more about how shit my writing is.”

As Dela howled with laughed, it occured to Shangela that Dela had been the one to break the hug, and she didn’t know why that bothered her.

***

The next fortnight was filled with what Shangela was overjoyed to find was a real friendship. They messaged outside of work hours, laughed and chatted at work and went for lunch together. Dela just made Shangela happy in ways she couldn’t remember anyone ever doing before. There was a certain element of excitement to it- the butterflies she’d get whenever Dela had sent her a new message, or the anticipation she’d feel walking into work and knowing they’d see each other. It was nice.

Today, though, was a little more nervewracking. Tomorrow she was interviewing a Cabinet Minister, Sharon Needles from the Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship, and she wanted to make sure she was completely prepared. It had been a long time since she’d interviewed anybody. As Shangela arrived in the morning, she vented all of her feelings to Dela.

“You’ll be absolutely fine. You’ve got all your questions, right?” she asked her, Shangela rolling her eyes and gesturing to the editor’s office.

“I’ve got all MY questions. I need to get them vetted from HIM. He’ll probably make me ask all sorts of embarrassing, sexist bullshit.”

Dela laughed then blinked, a little shocked. “Wait, really?”

“Dela, come on, girl. We work for the Daily Mail. Offensive shit is their currency.”

The other girl shrugged in acceptance. “Still, I never thought they’d actually ask people blatant stuff like that.”

“It’s bullshit.”

There was a small pause in which Shangela considered the venom behind her words. Dela seemed to be considering the same thing. “So how come you work here?”

Because I’m broke and I have no morals? Shangela sighed. “Because I couldn’t get a job at any other media outlet and I have no integrity.”

Dela gave a half-hearted laugh as Shangela realised how much more serious she sounded than she’d meant to. Giving a suspicious gaze around the office, Dela then moved her chair closer to Shangela.

“I sort of feel the same. Given the choice, I wouldn’t be working in a newspaper like this. It’s all that accepted me, though, so I have to just go along with the narrative of whatever they want me to write and stick it out until my internship is over.”

Shangela ran her tongue over her teeth. “You and me both, girl.”

Feeling as if the conversation had taken a sort of dark left turn, Shangela inched her chair away slightly and tried to think of a different topic. Seemingly getting the same vibe, Dela smiled and spontaneously took Shangela’s hand.

“Whatever they make you ask her at the interview, I know you’ll nail it. It’s impossible not to like you,” she beamed, giving Shangela’s hand a squeeze then returning to her work without waiting on a response.

Shangela didn’t know why, but she felt disappointed.

That was until about 10 at night when she was getting ready to go to sleep and her phone pinged from her bedside table. Turning rapidly over in bed, Shangela read the message.

D: Good luck for tomorrow! You will be amazing. Anything I can do, phone me xx

And Shangela’s heart was soaring again, and she couldn’t really explain why.

***

The day of the interview arrived, and Shangela woke up full of nervous energy. She was so excited at the thought of getting to interview an actual politician, when the pinnacle of the Daily Mail was usually the latest twat off I’m A Celebrity. The speed of her heart thrumming in her chest only increased when, just as she was about to leave her flat, her phone buzzed with a text from Dela.

D: I’m getting us pastries before work because I know you won’t eat. You can thank me with cocktails after work xx

Shangela couldn’t help the smile that spread across her face as her fingers flew across the screen texting back.

S: Alllllllllright!!! xx

As she hopped onto the tube and made her way to Notting Hill, her anticipation grew and grew wondering what her day would bring.

It turned out the first thing it brought was being practically met at the door by her senior editor, who was holding a small poly pocket with paper inside.

“Good morning, Shangie. You’re looking very lovely this morning,” he smiled nauseatingly. Shangela grimaced at him. She didn’t know why, but she felt as if she’d feel a whole lot better if Dela was with her at this moment. Really, she was the only person Shangela cared to receive compliments from nowadays.

“Thanks,” she replied briefly. “Can I help you?”

“Uh, yeah, these questions for Sharon Needles today…not quite cutting it. We want to reach out to women, not completely alienate them by boring them with politics.”

Shangela narrowed her eyes. “But…she’s a politician. So what else should I ask her about?”

“Things that women want to read about. Her love life! Her fashion! Makeup tips! You know?” the editor laughed, handing the unimpressed girl the poly pocket. “Look, I’ve got some new questions for you. They’re much more suitable for the vibe we’re going for here. No need to thank me!”

Shangela’s heart sank with disappointment as she read the first few questions. “Forgive me if I’m sounding a little naive, but you know that women can actually engage with and understand politics, right?”

The editor gave a smirk. “You write for Femail, Shangie. Not the New Statesman. Know your place.”

With that, he walked away, leaving Shangela standing at the office door and looking blankly at the questions in her hand. She was angry, but most of all she was upset. Her editor was right- although she was an editor too, it was only for the crappy, sexist supplement of a total bigoted mess of a publication. What the fuck was she doing here? Looking through the glass, she could see Dela at her desk working away, and two pastries and a coffee sitting on her own desk. In her emotional state, Shangela felt a lump rising in her throat. She swallowed, cleared her throat then blinked a couple of times before pushing open the door.

“Hey!” Dela smiled up at her, before Shangela watched her face fall as Dela saw the anger painted on her face. “Oh shit, are you alright?”

Shangela wordlessly shook her head and sat down, Dela fixing her with a look of sympathy.

“If it helps, you look really good today?” she offered. For some reason, it did help. Sighing, Shangela tossed the poly pocket onto Dela’s desk.

“Have a read of them,” she said, raising her eyebrows. “That’s the questions my senior editor wants me to ask Sharon Needles later on today.”

As she read, Dela’s eyes grew a little wide. Finishing the first page, she snorted with laughter. “I’m sorry. That’s laughably bad.”

“Right?! I can’t believe I actually have to go in there and ask them,” Shangela sighed, throwing her head back against her chair. She was jolted back to reality when she felt a warm hand rest on her arm, and her eyes flew open to find Dela looking at her.

“Hey. This doesn’t mean that you can’t put yourself across as at total sweetheart, because you are a total sweetheart. Now eat your damn croissant and drink your coffee.”

Once again, Dela seemed to know just what to say to put the smile back on Shangela’s face. “You’re the sweetheart for all of this. Thanks.”

Dela simply looked at the ground bashfully. She could have been blushing- Shangela couldn’t really see from the way her dark hair hung over her face- but if she was being honest, Shangela was blushing a little too. Smiling to herself and reaching forward, she took a sip of the coffee that Dela had bought her.

“Fuck, that’s bitter.”

“Ugh, I told them to put more sugar in it. You sit there, I’ll get you more.”

As Shangela smiled after Dela while she walked to the kitchen, she became aware of somebody’s eyes on her. Turning around in her chair, she saw Vivienne.

“Can I help you?”

Vivienne smiled apologetically, then leaned on her desk. “Shangela. Be careful.”

Shangela blinked. “What?”

“Look, I get that you and Dela have this cute gal pal thing going on, but just…if you don’t want people to talk, then tone it down.”

“Talk? What could they-” Shangela began, but trailed off. Was Vivienne trying to imply that people were thinking that she and Dela were together? Self-conscious, Shangela cast an eye over the office. “Oh, no, that’s really not- there’s nothing going on. I don’t feel…like that. Towards other women.”

Giving her a sympathetic look, Vivienne continued. “What you choose to do in your private life is none of my business, girl, but just…be careful. You work for the Daily Mail. That’s all I’m saying.”  

As Vivienne turned back to her work, Shangela stared at her blank computer screen, a small feeling of sickness taking root in her stomach. She didn’t feel that way about girls. And sure, she got excited to see Dela and always looked forward to the time they spent together and felt happy and warm whenever she texted her, but that was just what friendship was, right?

It wasn’t exactly as if Shangela had anything to compare it to.

Pushing down the slight nausea she was feeling, Shangela powered up her monitor and tried her best to eat some of the pastries that were in front of her. She had nothing to hide, and therefore she had nothing to worry about.

That was until her interview with Sharon Needles was over, and everything basically went to shit. It was like the Murphy’s Law of interviews- everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong: Sharon hated the questions and therefore hated her, dropped the f-bomb and walked out before the interview was even finished. Shangela felt as if she’d blown the whole thing, although her journalistic brain was a little excited at the thought of getting to write an article on something so scandalous. She’d told Dela all about it, the intern’s eyes lighting up with the drama of it all.

“I mean. It wasn’t quite what you wanted, but it’ll make good reading, right?” she reasoned, Shangela giving a smug smile. As she thought back to the interview, she turned to Dela again. She thought a little bit before opening her mouth, thinking about what Vivienne had said before.

“Hey, um. Did you know that Sharon Needles was gay?”

Dela looked down at her desk then brushed a bit of dust off her skirt. “No. Did she mention it in her interview?”

“Yeah. It sort of came up when I asked her that question about if she was seeing anyone.”

Dela gave a contemplative hum, then continued typing. Shangela still felt a little weird.

“And that doesn’t…bother you, no?”

Instantly, Dela looked at her with a screwed-up face. “No? It’s her life, it doesn’t affect me. Come on, Shangela, you know me well enough to know I wouldn’t judge somebody like that.”

Shangela silently nodded. So Dela was accepting and fine, and wouldn’t judge anybody for that sort of thing. Why was she thinking so much about this?

“Do you think it’s something I should put in the article?��

Dela furrowed her brow. “I wouldn’t.”

“But she mentioned it in front of me. Surely that means it’s fine to put out there?”

“People are different with that sort of thing,” Dela said quietly. “Besides, it would depend what context you use it in.”

Shangela looked at the article that was already half-finished on her screen. “I’ll maybe just mention it in passing.”

One hour went by. Shangela submitted the article to her senior editor and before long she was called into his office. He looked disgustingly gleeful, rubbing his hands together and giving the occasional little clap.

“Shangie, this is gold, baby. Amazing work. I’ve contacted the news outlets about the audio and they’re all willing to buy it too. The article is almost perfect but I just think we could add in a little bit more about the whole lesbian thing.”

The pride she’d felt at being complimented suddenly faded rapidly away. “What do you want me to add in?”

“Oh, just some sensationalist language, maybe call her leadership skills into question. You know what lesbians are like, they’re always pushing their own agenda.”

Shangela bristled. She didn’t know why she felt so defensive. “I’m not putting that in the article.”

The editor smiled smugly. “I think you’ll find that if you want to keep your job, you will.”

Heat pricked at Shangela’s cheeks as she felt herself go red. Turning to make her way out of her office, he stopped her suddenly.

“Oh! And I have a great title. I want you to use it. It’s Plug that Dyke.”

Shangela began to feel sick. “Isn’t that word pretty offensive to lesbians?”

Another smirk. “And how would you know that?”  

Looking to the ground, Shangela just opened the office door and made her way back to her desk, her hands shaking a little. She quietly sat down at her desk, opened up her word doc, and carried on editing the article. By the time she was finished it was late, and people were packing up to go home, including Dela.

“Are you still up for cocktails? You know you owe me one,” she gave Shangela a cheeky smile which normally would have made her stomach flip over. Today it flipped over for all the wrong reasons- looking up at Dela she had this horrible feeling in her stomach as if she’d betrayed her in a way. She forced a smile on her face and shook her head sadly.  

“I’m actually not feeling too good at the moment. Can we reschedule?” she asked. It wasn’t really a lie, and she only felt worse when Dela pouted and leant down to give Shangela a hug. Murmuring a goodbye against her hair, Dela grabbed her bag and left the office, leaving Shangela to rot in her own misery.

She was still feeling miserable hours later, at home curled up on her sofa and watching everything unfold on the news. She felt like a terrible person. She’d put her name to all sorts of things that she didn’t believe, but she’d done it before. Why did she feel so terrible this time? Everything from the day gnawed away at her, especially Vivienne’s words. She felt so lost and confused and not in control of anything, and thinking about Dela, which usually made her feel better, suddenly made her feel worse.

What she didn’t expect was for her buzzer to go off and a furious Dela to be standing on her doorstep. Without waiting for an invite from Shangela, she stormed in, standing in the middle of her living room where they’d both been one or twice before for movie nights or dinners.

“What the fuck did you write?” Dela almost whispered, her eyes cold as they pierced into Shangela’s. She, for her part, couldn’t say anything. She looked meekly at the floor and fiddled with a thread on the sweatpants she’d thrown on when she came in from work. Dela snapped her out of it. “Shangela! Why?”

Shangela raised her head slowly to meet Dela’s again. “My editor was telling me to or I’d have been out of a job. I’m sorry, Dela, I had to-”

“Bullshit, you didn’t have to do anything. You didn’t even have to even mention it! Why did you think it was relevant, why the hell did anyone think it was relevant?” Dela hissed, muttering the last part softly in a confused tone as she rubbed the back of her neck. Shangela felt awful.

“I completely fucked up, I know. But I didn’t mean to offend you- I know you said be careful the context you use it in, but…” she trailed off. She couldn’t think of anything else to say. Dela frowned at her.

“You were right when you said you had no integrity, you know that?”

Shangela felt like crying. She couldn’t work out why it felt as if she’d betrayed somebody, but moreover she couldn’t really work out why Dela was so upset.

“Why did you come round if you’re so angry at me?” she asked softly, part of her perhaps seeking the validation and comfort that they were still friends. Dela shook her head and gave a twisted smile.

“I wanted to know why. That was all. I wanted to know why someone I thought I knew, someone I thought was my friend, would write such disgusting things!”

Shangela couldn’t hold it in. Frowning at Dela, she narrowed her eyes. “I get that you’re upset, but I don’t get why you’re this upset? I mean, it’s not as if Sharon Needles is one of your closest friends?”

“Oh my God, Shangela, I’m a lesbian!” Dela raised her voice, tearing her hands through her hair immediately afterwards. She couldn’t look at Shangela. There was only one thing going through Shangela’s mind.

Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit

She’d just ruined their friendship, completely ruined anything she had with Dela because of her own stupid lack of backbone. Instinctively Shangela stepped forward, making to open her arms for a hug, but Dela just drew back, throwing her hands up defensively. Her face was one of heartbreak, and if Shangela had a mirror she could have seen that her face was the exact same. The churning in her stomach was only getting worse, her breathing quickening.

“Anyway. Now that I found out why you’re apparently a raging homophobe, I’ll be going,” Dela said in a sort of choked voice, making for the door. Shangela felt helpless. She couldn’t leave, not now, not while there were so many things she was feeling and thinking, not while her mind was such a mess. She suddenly reached her hand out, grabbing Dela by the wrist and only softening her grip a little once she was sure she was staying.

“Dela, please,” she said softly, her insides churning as she looked at Dela’s eyes, still cold. “Please stay. I’m really sorry, okay? There’s been a lot going on in my head today and…I don’t know how to explain it. I’m really confused and I don’t feel…I don’t feel normal.”

She didn’t know if she imagined it, but Dela’s eyes seemed to soften just a little. Her voice stayed cold. “Go on then. Say whatever it is you’ve got to say.”

“I just-” Shangela cut herself off as she looked at the ceiling. How could she articulate to Dela what she was feeling if she didn’t even know herself? “I don’t know what’s going on with me. Vivienne said something to me earlier and since then…it’s all I’ve been able to think about. Like…we’re friends, right?”

Dela looked away from where she’d previously been looking at Shangela. “Fuck, Shangela, I don’t even know any more-”

“Okay, okay, you’ve got every right to feel that way. But before, we were friends, right?”

Dela gave a non-committal shrug.

“But that’s the thing. Sometimes it didn’t feel like friendship. Sometimes it felt like something…” Shangela felt the heat hit her cheeks as she looked away from Dela, things starting to piece themselves together in her mind. “…more than that. And I’m messed up, and I don’t know what’s going on because I have no idea how the fuck I should feel, and I’m just…all the while I was editing that article to put in all the shitty bits, I felt like I was betraying somebody. Maybe it wasn’t you, maybe it was myself. I might not…be straight.”

Deciding that was probably all she needed to say, she looked back at Dela again. Her expression hadn’t changed, and Shangela felt more embarrassed than ever. She couldn’t quite believe that she’d actually said it out loud, the thing she’d been suspecting but had never wanted to entertain. Holding Shangela’s gaze, Dela finally spoke.      

“Well you know there’s a definite way to find out, right?” she said, her tone level as she took a single step towards Shangela, slid both her arms around her waist and pulled her closer.

And suddenly Dela was kissing her, and her mind fell silent for the first time that day. Something seemed to click into place, something that immediately made her feel calm, as if nothing else mattered. As Dela tangled her fingers in Shangela’s hair, Shangela brought her arms up around the other girl’s neck, one hand cupping her jaw as she deepened the kiss, completely in awe of how soft Dela’s lips were and how absolutely fucking perfect her mouth felt, how all of this felt.

It was all just…right.

Shangela was the one to break the kiss, only because she was desperate to see Dela smile at her again. Sure enough, she had a sort of intoxicated grin on her face, her eyes glazed over as if she was high.

“Fuck, I’ve wanted to do that for about a month and a half,” she smiled languidly, not yet removing her arms from around Shangela’s waist.

Shangela bit her lip shyly. “So…this means I’m gay, right?”

Dela shrugged. “Well, you could be. Could be bi. Could be pan. But I’m happy to stay with you to help you find out. Especially if it means we can do that again.”

Then she scrunched up her face in disgust. “Sorry. That was really cringey, I’ll never say that again.”

Shangela always prided herself on being the total opposite of shy and yet here she was, redder than a fire extinguisher and completely smitten. Dela said she’d stay with her. It was way too early to say if they were together or not- girlfriends, she supposed- but the thought of getting to try and figure out who she was with Dela helping her sounded pretty fucking amazing.

“So…does this mean I’m forgiven?” she asked softly, looking at the other girl from under her lashes. Dela snorted.

“Only if you promise to grow a damn backbone,” she gave Shangela a little squeeze. Laughing, Shangela pulled her in closer and kissed her again, purely because she could.

This time it was Dela who broke the kiss, taking Shangela by the hand and leading her over to the sofa. “We’ve had a shitty day so we’re getting takeaway and you’re showing me this Game of Thrones you keep going on about.”

Happy, Shangela threw herself on the couch and wrapped herself around the other girl, head resting against her shoulder. She was almost content until she drew her head back and gave Dela a questioning glare. “Who pays for the food if it’s two girls?”

Dela simply burst out laughing and shook her head. “Oh, Shangie. You are such a princess it’s adorable.”

She wasn’t really satisfied with her answer, or her nickname, but cuddling closer to Dela she supposed she was satisfied with everything else that was happening right now.

***

Shangela awoke on the sofa at 6am. Her alarm hadn’t been set until 7.15, but the light from a streetlamp was streaming through the curtains, nearly blinding against the dark October sky. Although her neck hurt from her night on the sofa, she didn’t really mind- Dela was there behind her, her face nuzzled against Shangela’s neck and her body warm despite the thin blanket they’d pulled over themselves doing nothing to protect from the cold. Ordinarily, Shangela would have gone back to sleep, but there was something running through her mind that was preventing her. Dela had been so kind and so forgiving, and Shangela had hurt her badly. She needed to fix things somehow.

Gently sitting up, she reached under the sofa and retrieved her Macbook. Opening it up and screwing up her eyes at the blinding white light from its screen, she mashed the brightness leveller until she could comfortably see. Opening up a blank document, she began to type. It didn’t take her long to finish the article. She fixed the formatting, skipped emailling it to her senior editor, and instead posted it straight to the website. Her stomach felt fluttery, as if she’d just taken a leap into the great unknown- and Shangela supposed she had- but she had Dela and for now, that was the most important thing.

As Shangela closed the laptop, she felt Dela stir on the couch beside her. Her eyes slowly blinked open as she took in her surroundings, at first confused but then remembering where she was.

“Shangie? What are you doing?” she asked, in a voice thick with sleep.

Shangela just gave a smirk and stroked the other girl’s cheek gently before laying down next to her again. “Oh, you know. Just growing a backbone.”

She didn’t see the confused expression over Dela’s face as other girl pulled her closer to her and wrapped her arms around her. Shangela didn’t mind as long as they were both happy.

***

Later that morning, Cabinet Minister Sharon Needles woke up, made herself a coffee, and began to scroll through the day’s headlines. In one bizarre turn of events, it seemed the insufferable journalist who had interviewed her just yesterday had made waves by quitting her job quite spectacularly. The article had been taken down, but every news outlet was reporting on how Shangela Wadely had written a featurette for Femail entitled 25 Things the LGBT Community Should Just Avoid Doing, with every bullet point being quite simply “Don’t read the Daily Mail”. There had been a short, but to the point sentence at the end of it all basically telling her senior editor in so many words where he could stick his job.

Sharon was confused by it all, but not as confused as when she answered the doorbell to a man from Interflora who was holding a huge bunch of flowers with a note sticking out the top of them. Shutting the door and taking the flowers back to the kitchen, she narrowed her eyes as she began to read the note.

Dear Ms. Needles,

Thank you for being such a great ambassador for the LGBT community. I’m sorry it took that disasterous interview and my shitshow of an article for me to realise that.

Regards,

Shangela

She was just getting her head around things when she heard her girlfriend emerging from another room. Sure enough, Alaska made her way into the kitchen wearing a huge t shirt and yesterday’s makeup.

“Noodles, it’s 10am on a Saturday. What are you doing awake?” she drawled, walking over to the minister and hugging her from behind. Sharon looked once again at the note and smiled.

“I think Shangela Wadely might be gay.”

“Okay, you’re still drunk from last night. Come on. Back to bed.”

[laughawayeternity]

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[justrazorboy-blog]

Decaying Words

For the @bfu60min prompt this week! (Prison AU)

Page 1 

Time – what a weird concept. It exists, but is simultaneously just another thing the human race has come up with to bring order to society. The change between night and day, the change of seasons, our failed attempts to keep from growing old and dying in this cruel, short existence; all real. But who was the fool to come up with the measurement of time? Hours, minutes, seconds? Why did everyone agree to follow this? I theorize it’s because as humans, we feel the need to understand. Understand why it is things work the way they do, and to bring some kind of closure to life. We need time because without it, we’d be lost.

I’m lost. I don’t know how long I’ve been here, or what time of day it even is. Has the sun risen? Is it just starting to set? Is there snow, or is summer just beginning? Without the ability to tell time, everything just feels… Slow. Time is passing, that I know, but only because I can hear others going about their day. Prisoners yelling from somewhere distant, and the occasional footsteps of guards walking past. Without those indicators, I’d be stuck in a dark hole. Unable to control my thoughts. My dark, regretful thoughts.“

"Ryan-”

Ryan whipped around, the book slipping from his grasp and plummeting to the cemented floor. As he steadied his breathing, which had quickened at twice its usual pace to keep up with his beating heart, his eyes narrowed at the man in front of him. “Jesus Christ, Brent! You can’t just sneak up on me like that.” Ryan hissed, shielding his eyes as the beam of light from his partner’s flashlight passed by his face.

“Me, scare you? You’re the one who suddenly disappeared!” Brent pushed the rest of his body through the cell’s doorway, his head barely missing a cobweb hanging above. “What the hell are you doing?”

Ryan bent down to retrieve the book he had been reading. Considering its age, it was in decent condition. The pages were stained yellow and only a few were detached from its spine, but the words still readable. The cover, however, was skimmed in mold after years of abandonment and rot. “I found a journal of sorts. I think it may have belonged to a prisoner here.” He turned and held the object out for Brent to inspect. The camera crew following his lead got closer, hoping for a nice shot for the episode.

“You’re telling me this thing has been sitting here for nearly fifty years?” Brent asked with obvious disgust. He waved his flashlight across the cell, taking in the surroundings of which it had been discovered in. It was a nearly empty room with nothing but a rusted toilet in one corner, and piles of rubble littering the majority of the floor’s surface.

“Precisely, yes.”

Page 103

My stomach won’t stop begging for food, and my throat for water. I can practically feel the inside of my body rotting away with each passing moment. How long has it been since I’ve eaten? Guards pass by regularly but never stop. Perhaps they’ve forgotten about me. Or, more likely, decided I should finally die for my crimes. But that’s quite an unfair situation, dare I say. They have the death penalty for a reason.

I resorted to drinking my piss a few hours ago (hours? days? minutes? I can’t tell anymore). It’s certainly not the most ideal, but at least I can quench my dehydration a little bit. Less suffering on my part. More suffering; much more suffering. What a stupid idea. Prolonged death is never a good option.

Hah. So this is how I’ll die. Covered in my own piss and shit, as pale and thin as a skeleton. Perhaps already a skeleton, if the guards truly did forget about me. Those idiots. I can see their faces now, the smell of my decaying body overwhelming their senses – opening my cell door to find my lifeless corpse, propped against this wall. The news headlines would probably be praising my death; ‘Serial Killer Shane Madej Found Dead in Solitary Cell, Covered in Own Bodily Excretions.’

“This is horrific.” Brent interrupted, his face scrunching up.

Ryan nodded slowly. “Sad, too. Even if he was a serial killer…” His words trailed off as his mind began to wander. He pictured what it would be like to be in Shane’s position; all alone, going insane.

Dying.

A shiver ran up his spine. They weren’t pleasant thoughts at all.

“How did a guy in solitary have access to a journal and ink anyway?” Brent questioned, gesturing for one of the camera guys to get a close-up of the page they had just read from.

“Must have smuggled it in somehow. Prisoners in this solitary block were rarely checked on, so it makes sense if it was never discovered.” Ryan shrugged, not entirely sure of his answer. The situation was weird in itself; a prisoner just being abandoned like that. Surely the staff couldn’t be that forgetful.

Page 132

Footsteps. I hear them. Coming closer, echoing down the hall! Maybe if I scream I can finally get their attention-

… They ignored me. I screamed until I collapsed, but they just kept walking. My body is too weak to move anymore. I won’t be surprised if these are the last words I write before finally succumbing to my death. I wonder what will be waiting for me on the other side? Huh, I really am going crazy. I’ve never been a religious person, so darkness. That’s the only logical explanation. No God, no afterlife… Just eternal sleep.

Before his passing, my old cellmate used to talk constantly about ghosts. Spirits. The people who are leaving something behind when they die, unfinished business that they have, so their souls are stuck on Earth.

Even if ghosts existed, that’s not where I’ll end up. I have nothing to keep me here. My family hates me, always have. But who can blame them? I’m a maniac. Insane. Fucked up in the head. I’ve done all of the work I needed to do. All those lives I took; I’m repaying for them by being here. I don’t owe money. Nothing.

I’m ghost-proof.

I’ll just slip into the darkness and wither away.

“Ryan we need to go, our time is up. That tour lady will be back any minute to lead us out.” Brent moved his flashlight from where it was directed at the book and started to talk with the camera crew.

“We skipped so much of his story, though…” Ryan whispered, flipping back through the many pages they had jumped across. So many words gone unread. How could they just leave it here, to probably never be found again? Without a second thought, Ryan grabbed one of their equipment bags and stuffed the book inside. He absolutely could not leave it behind.

“Yo- Dude, what the fuck is wrong with you?” Brent asked worriedly, catching Ryan’s act. “That’s stealing!”

Ryan zipped the bag shut and laughed darkly. “Stealing? They wouldn’t even know it’s gone, clearly if it’s been sitting here for decades!” Usually, he wasn’t the type to take risks or commit crimes, but something about this man’s story made him need to take it with him. Before either could get another word out, they were approached by the lady from earlier who had guided them through the prison.

“Any luck?” She asked, eyeing the two boys.

“Nah. Nothing very compelling,” Brent replied, his gaze shifting to Ryan. He wasn’t about to rat his friend out, but he would much rather leave with a guilt-free conscious.

“May I ask a question about this cell?” Ryan asked the woman, who nodded. “According to our research, a man named Shane Madej once resided here. Do you have any information on him?”

Brent could have very well strangled Ryan right there but remained silent. After all, he was a little curious himself.

“Ah, Shane Madej – he was jailed for murder, about seven counts if I recall correctly. While in prison he murdered his cellmate for no given explanation and was sent here to solitary. It’s actually kind of a scary thought, because he was here for about four months in total, including when the prison was shut down and abandoned. All of the other prisoners were relocated across the country, but somehow their records got messed up. He was left behind, unheard of for years. Nobody had any reason to enter this place until a new landowner swept the place clean. He found Shane’s skeleton right there,” she pointed to a corner of the cell, close to where Ryan had originally found the journal. “And that was that. They identified him after finding out from the old warden that he had been the only one in solitary within a month before the shutdown. He insisted they had moved Shane back to his regular cell but, obviously, that wasn’t the case. After determining the timeline, and using modern testing, it is believed that he would have been alive in this cell for over a week after the shutdown, before his death. So, in short, it’s quite a mystery. No one is exactly sure of how that had happened.”

Ryan gaped at the woman. “They just… Left him here? That’s absurd!” He exclaimed, trying to fit together the story in his mind. How was that even possible?

Leaving him to his thoughts, the group followed the woman out of the prison. It was only four in the morning so it was still dark outside. He, Brent and their crew thanked the woman before parting ways. It wasn’t until they were back at their hotel, Ryan flipping through the pages of the stolen journal, when something suddenly clicked in his mind.

“Brent… If the prison was abandoned over a week before Shane’s death, then whose footsteps and voices was he hearing?”

Brent was silent for several moments before his lips tugged upwards, producing a grin. “I guess the guy wasn’t so ghost-proof after all.”

[a-non-sequitur]

Rogue One: Catalyst: Thoughts

- link to my other Rogue One blabberings -

Finally finished reading Rogue One: Catalyst by James Luceno, or as it's also known by:

Lyra Erso: Badass;

Lyra Erso: They Could Have Easily Created Parallels Between You and Chirrut+Baze in the Film Instead of Ignoring Your Existence;

Lyra/Galen OTP Fever: How to Write a Strong, Balanced Couple While Still Giving Them Relationship Hurdles;

"I'm Thirsty for You and Your D, Galen," Screams Krennic Into the Rain

with foreword by Galen Erso, "Who Is This? And What Does He Mean By My D?"

and annotated by Lyra Erso, *The dickbag is talking about the Death Star, honey.

Tarkin/Krennic: Hux/Kylo Ren Got Nothing On This Hate Couple

and finally: Jyn Erso Is A Normal Human Child: how this makes her future character arc 1000x more painful

NB: Have only seen the RO film and have now read this book. This is going to be long and about 90% quotes related to characterization.

General Impression:

Writing was okay. Not great, but not bad. (This is especially apparent since I've just started reading the RO novelization, and the difference in quality is pretty startling.) Nice quick read.

Lyra is fantastic.

Galen is pretty interesting.

Jyn is adorable and normal, and it breaks my heart.

Krennic is... wow, I just want to laugh because he's so absurd but also a Terrible Human Being.

Tarkin is fascinating (see waaaay below for details).

Lyra Erso

No one holds this bitch down.

"She had no recourse. She wasn’t built to hold things in; to be complacent or compliant."

"Some of Orson’s remarks had made her wonder whether she and Galen were under surveillance, or even whether her personal comlink might be bugged. But she didn’t care either way. Orson may have drawn the line in the sand, but she would be the one to step over it."

Lyra loves exercising and exploring. She wants to go everywhere in the galaxy!

"She needed wind and rain, cyclones, quakes, and the threat of avalanches. Unpredictability. Natural forces at work."

She sees the galaxy with very, very clear eyes.

“Who knows to what ends Dooku might have put this crystal.”// “I can guess,” Lyra said carefully, “since Dooku loosed a droid army on the galaxy.”

"This is the Emperor’s dream,” [said Galen.] // Lyra wrinkled her nose. “Can’t we just call him Palpatine—in private, I mean?

Lyra is probably mildly Force-sensitive.

She was against coming to Vallt, where she and Galen would later be imprisoned, from the start. 

"Her reverence for the Force had evolved from an enduring love of nature."

"... even if she wasn’t able to use the Force, she could at least feel it."

"But being pregnant with Jyn—especially while in captivity—had made her aware of the Force in a way she imagined the Jedi experienced: a profound connection with life that went beyond mere understanding."

"...she was secretly glad that [Galen] was no longer attempting to synthesize or create facsimiles of kyber crystals. One might as well try to clone the Force itself, or turn to magic in an effort to simulate the power."

"She would often sky-cab to the Jedi Temple grounds and exercise there, basking in the energy of that elegant site, surrounded by a nexus of the Force."

"The Jedi killed by the thousands, their Temple the scene of a battle, scant survivors scattered to the stars, the Force dispersed…She was as heartbroken as if she had lost a family member, and had cried for hours."

[Saw] pulled his datapad from his pant pocket and showed them the image of a green, black, and blue planet with a wide ring. “It’s called Lah’mu.” / Papa looked at the image and said, “It looks unspoiled.”

this is significant because Lyra talks a whole bunch about “untouched” nature and its strong connection to the Force throughout the book.

Galen Erso

has a very interesting brain

"he felt as if he already held the entire galaxy in his thoughts."

"He had a greater fear of attention than he did failure, refusing even to celebrate his birthday much less receive gifts or acclamation. With romance he was hopeless, pretending disinterest when in fact he was confused by his changing body and how it sometimes took him out of his mind, out of his deep thinking."

"...inability to find refuge even in his thoughts; to find what one of his mentors had called the still point in the turning world."

"He was suddenly lost without his research; torn between uncompromising tenderness for Lyra and Jyn and a sense of burden in being able to provide a flawless future for them."

"In his daily life he would sometimes go out of his way to introduce imperfection—in his drawings, his routines, his attempts at housecleaning—as a means of keeping himself from becoming overly occupied with results."

"It wasn’t that he didn’t wish to see the world as others did; he was unable to. He saw more deeply into things, and was attuned to nature’s own musings and inner dialogues."

"At times it seemed as if, in attempting to unlock the secrets of the kyber, he was trying to decode something about himself."

is very plain-spoken and direct.

"Most would have remembered him as the one who was always speaking out of turn."

"Galen merely shrugged. “Normalcy has taken leave of the galaxy.” / [A scientist named] Herbane’s jaw dropped a bit and he looked at Lyra. “Is your husband always so confrontational?” / “He speaks his mind,” Lyra said."

"But he was a terrible liar; he had no practice in the art. Never wanting to be involved in games, he had always spoken his mind. Where he was forever attempting to simplify his thinking, lying introduced complications."

“You could have at least made him work to get the current data,” [said Lyra, after escaping with Galen from Coruscant.] / “He’s welcome to whatever he finds. I could have sabotaged everything, but I don’t want to give the Empire a reason to hunt us down. We’re simply dropping out—although covertly. Besides, what I left will keep them occupied for a while.” / “Revenge was never your style.” / Galen considered it. “Orson may have worked me, but he didn’t force me.” 

Galen has such a rigid sense of principles that even though Krennic had blatantly lied to Galen and was weaponizing his research - the! very! last! thing! Galen! wanted! - Galen didn’t sabotage or delete anything because technically Krennic didn’t force him at blasterpoint.

And this, plus the quote about the inability to lie, makes me see RO!Galen in a whole different light? Because Galen ends up changing fundamental parts of his character because of the trauma Krennic puts him through (aka losing his family). And Jyn ends up irrevocably changed from who she was as a child because of Krennic. And it makes me wonder - what would have happened to Lyra if she had not died? How would she have been changed?

so basically the only reason Galen isn't known throughout the galaxy as a genius of the highest caliber is because he can't write scientific papers.

 when Krennic shows Galen the ruins of a facility on another planet, Galen (rightly) assumes that the scientific team there fucked up duplicating his kyber research, causing the experiment to explode.  Galen says, "I was very precise in my notes."  But when Krennic had interviewed the team a couple of chapters earlier, they said that the data and methods they'd be given "aren't specific enough in many instances" and that provided equations were "in a shorthand difficult to decipher."

Galen sent out his research findings to his colleagues in his own special shorthand without thinking of defining anything

And it's mentioned throughout the book that the way he writes is very rambly and with tangents and he'll write in different directions on a page and cram every bit of space with words

what makes this even funnier is that it's Lyra who he trusts to transcribe his notes. Which means that she transcribes all this down, doesn't get most of what it means but assumes any of Galen's scientific peers must understand it, and sends it on as is. And Galen trusts Lyra, so when she doesn't ask for further clarification on the notes, that must mean they're okay for sending!

like, i imagine galen could never figure out why he never got published, and Lyra's just like, "Honey, they'll realize they're missing out on something great soon." and on another planet, scientific journal editors and peer review boards internally scream when looking at the gibberish this supposedly hotshot scientist is sending them AGAIN and they throw everything into the trash compactor AGAIN because what the fuck they had told him to clarify, not write more nonsense

you don’t understand. this is h.i.l.a.r.i.o.u.s.

headcanon:

one way that Galen slows down work on the Death Star is that he takes his terrible research writing habits and exaggerates it to the max.  You know how Leonardo da Vinci used to write backwards, right-to-left?  Galen starts pulling off that shit ASAP but adds vertical/diagonal/loop-de-loop writing, too.

Krennic had to actually hire codebreakers to be part of the "Transcribe Galen Erso's Notes" team just because Galen's notes became so illegible.

Galen used to take the time to simplify and re-simplify and re-simplify whatever crazy, complicated idea was in his head when he talked to Lyra until she could understand.  On Eadu, when scientists and engineers ask for clarification, he'll restate whatever concept in equally if not moreso confusing terms, using long weirdass metaphors. Or he'll just completely ignore them, saying, "Leave me be! I'm at a breakthrough!" And woe be those who interrupt Galen when he's breakthrough-ing.

Dr. Erso is such a nice - if quiet - man, think his coworkers. But every time he writes some indecipherable equation on his lab's boards, they have the intense, passionate urge to wring his neck.

Lyra/Galen, my OTP (with Lyra/Galen/Bodhi being my OTThreesome that will never be, apparently):

They're hot for each other:

"[Lyra] recalled the first time she’d set eyes on [Galen] on Espinar, thinking: If this guy was any more magnetic, pieces of metal would fly across the room and start sticking to him…"

"that what [Lyra] interpreted as hostility was actually a ploy that allowed [Galen] to maintain a safe distance from her while he sorted out what she wanted from him and solved the calculus of their relationship."

"what Galen had found in [Lyra]: his opposite."

"The expedition lasted six local months, and by the end of it they were lovers. She had made the first move, but he had gotten the hang of things very quickly."

aka: Galen was a virgin or with little experience, and the two ended up fucking like bunnies.

They have an incredibly healthy relationship where they respect each other's abilities?!

"With her maternal instincts running strong, she had to resist an urge to intercede [on Galen's behalf]. After all, she wasn’t Galen’s parent; she was his partner."

Lyra to Krennic, who is trying to shame Lyra for making Galen's work "harder for him": “He’s his own person, in any case, and whatever stress I introduce isn’t going to cripple his concentration or interfere with his work.”

"She restrained an impulse to touch Galen or send him any kind of reassuring message. The job was his choice and she was determined to stay out of it."

“I’m hardly sacrificing myself, Galen. Being here was as much my choice as yours.” She looked from Galen to Krennic and back again. “Anything else either of you want to say about my life?”

But are also incredibly devoted to each other and hold the other's opinions in the highest esteem?!

Galen to Lyra, regarding providing his research to the Separatists, who'll probably weaponize it: "Should I simply accept their terms? I will do it—for your sake, for the sake of our unborn daughter. You need only say the word."

Galen, while experiencing moral conflict over his research on Coruscant: "Would Lyra understand? Or would she accuse him of being so driven by a need to measure up to the challenge that he had not only abandoned caution and scientific discernment, but also dragged her and Jyn down with him? What would his legacy be then? Lyra might not see it as a noble lie so much as a grand betrayal."

When Jyn, Galen, and Lyra are doing research on a different planet that ends up being targeted by Separatists, they end up trying to run away from their over-run town but end up being cornered by Separatist droids. Galen is constantly putting himself in between the droids and Lyra/Jyn.

[Galen] turned to face [Lyra]. “I had myself convinced that I was doing it for you and Jyn and to safeguard future generations. Instead I failed as a husband, a father, and a scientist.” He snorted in a sad way, then said: “I can’t do anything about being a failed scientist, but I can correct the rest—if it’s not too late.” / She smiled in encouragement. “Don’t be an idiot. I didn’t fall in love with your research, Galen. I fell in love with you.” / He took her into his embrace and held her tightly, saying into her ear: “I love you and Jyn. You’re all that matter to me.” He’s back, she thought, resting her head against his chest.

Kyber Crystals

How kybers are found:

“In most cases, kybers are brought to the surface by seismic activity—movements along slippage fault lines, and typically only when an oceanic plate is sliding against a continental plate. But even then the movement has to be horizontal. The crystals rise, gathering impurities or other minerals along the way. That’s why it has always been said of kybers that they are more often grown than mined."

Characteristics:

Close and extended contact with kybers is detrimental to sleep.

"Even on the nights when sheer exhaustion overwhelmed his racing thoughts, the crystals infiltrated his dreams. The Jedi were believed to have been able to establish a kind of rapport with the kybers through the Force. Was it possible that the crystals could affect non-Force-users as well?"

“The internal structure is unlike anything I’ve seen. It’s almost a bridge between organic and inorganic, as close to alive as a stone can be—which I suspect is why the Jedi were able to interact with kybers through the Force."

"It warmed as he curled his hand around it, but he knew from previous research that the crystal would show no change in temperature; and he knew also that it would not warm a sheath or a towel or any inanimate object. It responded only to life, even plant life. Which made the Jedi’s use of it to power their lightsabers all the more ironic and mysterious."

"kyber’s mix of transparency and opacity—characteristics the ancient Jedi had referred to as “the water of the kyber.”"

"By rights lightsabers shouldn’t have been able to cut through meter-thick durasteel and yet they could, which lent credence to the notion of their being augmented by the Force itself."

"One Jedi commentator had called the kyber a somnolent stone that needed to be woken up to perform its purpose. But that same commentator had cautioned that the crystal was also easily insulted and a Jedi needed to take care."

Galen: "Now that he’d found a way to alter the internal structure of the crystals, the kybers seemed in turn to have found a way to alter his."

Kyber Necklace

Krennic had showed Lyra & Galen some kyber crystals as a way to tempt Galen to continue his kyber research. Lyra is the one who realizes that they came from Jedi lightsabers. Later on in the novel, Galen reveals that he keeps one of those crystals in his pocket. There's never any mention of Lyra's necklace throughout the book, so I'm pretty sure that Galen gives Lyra the kyber crystal post-escape

WHOSE LIGHTSABER DID IT COME FROM

c'mon, someone write about how that Jedi hangs around Lyra and Jyn as a Force Ghost. please please please.

Orson Krennic

started as an engineer.  Helped design/build a bunch of buildings, including on Coruscant

actually thinks, "Vader’s eccentric fashion sense notwithstanding"

[Krennic] turned back to Galen. “I wasn’t born brilliant or especially talented, but I’m capable and I’m driven, and that’s brought me to where I am."

Gotta give him credit: he really is a great manipulator. Tricked Has Obitt - the smuggler who would later smuggle the Ersos off Coruscant - and Tarkin into starting an all-out war between the Empire and an independent star system.

Krennic/Galen

One-Sided As Fuckkkkkk

I tried so hard to figure out how to describe their relationship.

Krennic is a Nice Guy (TM).

Krennics's that Guy who hangs around you a lot and you're kind of ???? about it but don't really say anything for or against said hovering, so he makes this epic love story between the two of you?  And gets weirdly jealous around your friends?

Krennic is kinda like the Star Wars version of Severus Snape, with Galen serving as Lily, Lyra as James, and Jyn as Harry. Except the "friendship" is pretty one-sided all the time, Krennic doesn't have any redemption attempts for his shitty-ass decisions, and Lyra was never a bully. Jyn as Harry seems pretty damn accurate, tho.

“except it seems I no longer have to fight your battles,” [said Krennic.] Galen wiped the drink from his face and nursed his fist. “You never did.”

“It can’t have escaped your attention that you have a powerful ally in Orson Krennic,” [said Tarkin.] / Galen raised his eyes from the carpet. “We were acquaintances in the Futures Program. Years ago.”

Quotes showing Krennic's Thirst for Galen:

[After rescuing the Ersos from Vallt:] Once inside, Krennic whirled Galen into an embrace. “How wonderful to see you after all this time!”

“We have to put some meat back on those bones of yours,” he said as he crossed the cabin to Galen, “but I think I could get used to the beard.”

"... and on a couple of occasions [Krennic] had been Galen’s protector in fights or brawls."  

[Lyra said,] “You realize that he’s never going to stop looking for you, Galen. You’re in his blood, crystal research or no. He’s never going to let go of you entirely.”

[When Krennic suspects the Ersos are escaping, but Krennic's stuck in traffic.] The anger and despair he had felt in the airspeeder returned and settled on him like a great weight. “Galen,” he said, as if orphaned. Then: “Galen!” shouting it to the busy sky.

Yes, Krennic just shouted Galen's name into the sky.

Krennic haaaaaaates Lyra omg (the feelings becomes increasingly mutual)

Krennic thinking about Lyra/Galen's courtship: "Still, he hadn’t expected the love affair to last more than a couple of months, and was shocked when they wed."

Thinking about the courtship again: "[Krennic was] being entertained by [Galen’s] bright-eyed confession that he had fallen in love. Galen, who would scarcely raise his eyes when a pretty woman entered a room, in love? It had to be a joke. The thought of Galen’s genius being undermined by some grasping creature drove him to distraction."

drove him to distraction

those words were actually written and published

Krennic said, "The Emperor has made reparations and reconstruction a priority, and one way he hopes to achieve this is by being able to provide sustainable energy to worlds that have suffered on both sides of the conflict.” He gestured with his chin to Galen. “Even your own Grange [Galen's home planet].” / Lyra’s brows quirked in a sign of doubt. “This is the same Palpatine who couldn’t get anything done as supreme chancellor?” / Krennic stared at her. “He defeated the Separatists.” / “With a lot of help.”

[When Krennic tries to make Lyra resent Galen for "holding her back":] [Lyra] regarded [Krennic] frankly. “I haven’t put my life on hold, Orson. My career, maybe, but certainly not my life.”

[Krennic said to Galen,] “You know what I find interesting—or maybe ironic is the word. It’s that each of us wants what’s best for you. In a way, we’re competing to make you happy, as old-fashioned as that sounds. And each of us has a different idea about what you should be doing. Especially now that you two have a child, Lyra wants you to be settled on a course that will mean the most for the family—fulfilled in a somewhat conventional way—and I maintain that you’re meant for bigger things, and will continue to do whatever I can to bring opportunities to your attention.” / Galen smiled thinly. “Don’t think I don’t appreciate it.”

[Krennic, regarding Lyra:] "That left only one person who still needed to be broken."

[Krennic said to Galen,] “Don’t you see what Lyra’s really trying to do? She’s using these alleged concerns to persuade you to abandon your research. Her goal is to keep you to herself—to stand in the way of your legacy.”

[Lyra, when thinking about Krennic's machinations:] "Was Galen to become the prize in a contest between them? Well, hadn’t he always been that?"

Krennic also hates Jyn

probably because she reminds him how Galen didn't Choose Him (the Snape parallels are strongggg)

he forgets her name 2/3 of the book and calls her "it" in his head

"Orson tracked [toddler Jyn], his upper lip curled in what seemed disapproval. “She’s feisty.”

“Yes, how is the child?” Krennic asked, all but sneering. “Into everything, I’ll bet.”

"The fact was that work on the superlaser was stalled, and Galen’s insights were needed more than ever. After all [Krennic] had done for Galen! Fame would have come to him. Grandeur. Legacy. Without his science, Galen was a nonentity. And Lyra… Flushed with anger, he peeled his gloves off as he walked and threw them violently to the polished floor. He would leave no stone unturned in the search for them.

Two things:

one: he's walking down a hallway in this scene. he literally throws his gloves to the ground and keeps walking down a hallway. our fave drama queen.

two: i honestly cannot decide whether that last line was a massive piece of dramatic irony purposefully written by the author. It's just... so good?! And hilarious?!  Looks like Krennic forgot to give that order on Lah'mu to his troopers.

Tarkin/Krennic: A Never-ending Dick Measuring Contest

"The two officers [Krennic and Tarkin] had begun to circle each other as they spoke. “Our main weapon will have more firepower than ten vessels that size,” Krennic said. / Tarkin looked at him out of the corner of his eye. “Should it ever reach completion.”"

Ok, so I'm not going to get into all the scenes/lines that the two had between them (mostly because I didn't highlight them on my Kindle), but:

the greatest reveal of this book (other than Lyra's awesomeness)

is that the reason the Ersos escaped to Lah'mu in the first place

is because Tarkin facilitated their flight

ok, it's not confirmed, but it's heavily implied

remember that unexpected war I mentioned earlier that Krennic tricked Tarkin into fighting? So Tarkin saves Has - originally Krennic's agent, who betrayed the Empire after being Shown The Light by Lyra - in order to question him, and realizes that Krennic had played both of them. and so Tarkin is PISSED (and relunctantly impressed). And Tarkin knows Has is anti-Krennic. So Tarkin goes, "Hey, I'll let you live if you play as MY spy in Krennic's employees," and Has thinks quickly and goes, "Oh, sure, but let me send out this message to Coruscant to make my return seem natural," and  sends a message to the Ersos that BASICALLY says, "Yo, you want me to grab your family and ditch?" Like, five minutes prior, Has had confessed to Krennic that Lyra Erso had Made Him See The Light. Tarkin ABSOLUTELY knew what Has was planning to do.

and that's how Tarkin's dick grew a centimeter the next time he and Krennic compared

Jyn Erso

born on the first day of Vallt's spring.

is technically a Vallti citizen

nicknamed "Stardust" by Galen because her eyes changed colors and "became flecked."

“Stardust,” Galen said. “That’s what’s in her eyes.”

YOU MONSTER:

"Having hurried over to have a look [at the kyber crystals], Jyn said: “I want one!”

“Maybe someday,” Lyra said.

Jyn is an incredibly normal child, and it friggin HURTS to think about what she’s forced to become

3 year-old Jyn used to travel around in the Coruscant research facility on the Star Wars equivalent of a hoverboard. Her parents forced her to wear a helmet. a;lsdkjfasdf socute

She's a pretty independent child, able to entertain herself for hours

She'd run around around with a toy sword in a scabbard and her stuffed animals.

"Instantly adopted by everyone, Jyn—indefatigable as ever—reveled in being the center of attention, entertaining everyone with her antics, watching closely, learning.

There's this kids' holodrama called The Octave Stairway, which Jyn is obsessed with

one: i had to shoo the Discworld reactions away.

two: the story is about this kid Brin who wants to go home, but to go home, he has to go down these eight floors of challenges in a castle. And at the very bottom he'll get the item that will help him fly up through all of those floors and out of the castle and back home

two-a: so in the book, Galen directly compares himself to Brin (he thinks Jyn drew Brin to look like him), and this scene is basically where he breaks down and realizes how he's pushed his family away and he cries and asks Jyn for forgiveness and Jyn is sweet and says, “It’s okay, Papa. Can we follow Brin home now?”

two-b: but you know how in my Second Viewing post I mentioned how falling/climbing (or, more accurately: going down/going up) seemed to happen waaaaay too often with Jyn for it to not be some sort of theme?  

two-c: WELL THIS STUPID HOLODRAMA JUST ADDS TO MY CONSPIRACY THEORY.  and possibly gives me a better idea as to what the dichotomy symbolizes.  

Saw Gerrera

"[Saw] wasn’t shouting, but he might as well have been, such was the force of his personality."

[Saw talking to Has during the unexpected war] “Cheery thought. Throw dirt in your enemy’s face, get crushed underfoot.” / Saw stopped what he was doing and walked over to him. “Look at it this way, Has. If we can persuade enough people to start throwing dirt…” / Realizing that he was supposed to finish the thought, Has considered it, then said: “Eventually we bury them.”

Random Bits and Pieces that Didn't Fit Above

“You [clonetroopers] are never less than predictable,” [said the smuggler Has.] / “Yeah, we’re made that way,” the other clone said.

“Is there some equation that can put an end to all this, Dr. Erso?” one of the shaken insectoids asked. Galen set himself down on the floor to join him. 

 “If sentient beings were moved by the same laws that govern nature, there might be. But as we’ve come to embody entropy, I don’t hold out much hope.”

A second Lokori countered: “Surely the Jedi have unlocked the secrets of reversing chaos and will be able to outwit nature at its own game.”

“The Force derives from nature,” Galen said somberly. “Against such chaos, even the Jedi are capable of accomplishing only so much.”

oh my god the Death Star project is codenamed "Project Celestial Power" POWAAAAAAH

names of Cantinas: Malicious Moondog on Suba, Contented Krayt on Tatooine,

The Hiitian [a member of the independent solar system that wars with the Empire] agreed. “Occupation? Captain Obitt, you’ve obviously visited worlds that have chosen that route. How is life there?” 

Has smiled in solidarity. “I’d rather fight.” Again he glanced at Saw and his fellow smugglers. 

“That’s why all of us are here.” The humanoid flexed his feathered back. “What we fail to protect, Captain, we will leave in ruins.”

There's a celebration called All-Species Week on Coruscant

GIMME THE HISTORY OF SPECIESISM IN THE GALAXY

- link to my other Rogue One blabberings -

[rfield87]

Writing Advice from Best-Selling Authors: Danielle Steel

This week’s re-blog was written by Danielle Steel herself and is titled: Writing. This post does have some writing advice, but it’s mostly a blog about Danielle’s writing process and how she got to where she is today, but I still found it rather interesting and wanted to share it. It doesn’t have a publish date, but if you would like to read the blog in her web site, I will leave the link below.

https://www.daniellesteel.net/writing/

                                                   Writing

As I start another book, I’m getting off another message to those of you who read my blogs. And I notice that some of the recent responses from you ask about my writing habits.

For those of you who also write, I always say that there is no ‘right way’ to do it (or anything in life). Some people write half a page a day and agonize over each word and sentence. Others write pages and pages, and that’s fine too. Whatever works. Don’t compare yourself to anyone else’s writing style or habits. We each do whatever works best for us.

One of you asked ‘where to start’ when you finish your novel. The first thing you need is an agent. Most publishers won’t read books that don’t come through an agent. So, you need to find an agent to get your work published. I know there are lists of agents in literary journals, and it can be harder to find an agent than a publisher, but you really have to. And then it’s the agent’s job to send your book to publishers. It’s usually a long slow process, and perseverance is the name of the game. I was very lucky that my first book was published - but the next 5 weren’t and were never sold or published. But my 7th book was. If I had given up before that, I would never have had the career I have today. So, you just have to keep at it and not give up (as with most things in life) and keep writing.

Someone else asked if I would consider writing a book about how I write, and the answer to that is: No, I wouldn’t. That seems pretty dull to me. (You just have to plant your bottom in a chair, keep it there, and do it. There’s not a lot of mystery to it). So, no, I would never write a book about how I write.

Another person asked about my writing schedule, do I write all year round, etc. And that person very wisely guessed that my success is based on hard work - and oh boy, is that true! I work very, very hard. Very early in my career (I only had one baby when I started writing), I figured out that if you wait for time and the opportunity to present themselves - it never happens, and you don’t get anything done. So, I made writing my priority, and I turned down just about everything else. For about 30 years, I never had lunch with friends, never broke into my writing time. And my rule of thumb about school related activities for my kids, was that if the child was actually involved (like a school play or a track meet), I was always there - but if my kid wasn’t present, I didn’t go - which meant no ‘coffees for Mom’s, no PTA meetings, etc.) The only greater priority in my life was my family, my children and husband. They always came first - but after that, I turned down just about everything else so I could write.

In one form or another, I do pretty much write every day. Not always on a book, sometimes it’s an article or an essay, a poem or a thought, this blog, or a series of letters and emails. In order to feel comfortable, I need big chunks of time to write. I always allow myself more time than I need for a book, because if I feel crowded, or pressed for time, then I can’t write. I need the luxury of time, with nothing else to do.

My process is that first I have an idea, and it may only be a tiny kernel of an idea, something that intrigues me. It may just be a thought, a tiny piece of something about a person, a news item, something in history, or a philosophy about life. I start making notes, and so so for several months usually, as the story emerges in my head. Sometimes I sit for hours, just staring into space, pursuing the idea. And then about the characters to go with it. And then one day, I sit down at my typewriter and write the outline for the story. By then, I pretty much know the story. And the outline tells the story chapter by chapter. The outlines are anywhere from 40 to 70 pages long. And then I go over the outline correcting it and making changes. And when I’m comfortable with it, I send it to my editor and agent, and they suggest some changes. I make those changes if I agree with them, without compromising the essence of the book, and then send the outline to my publisher. And then, it is a total mess, with things crossed out, corrected, written over, full of asterisks (my editors hate the mess I make!! And beg me to change my typewriter ribbon more often, which I forget to do, and when I’m excited about what I’m writing). And then my publisher suggests changes too, so I do another re-write on the outline. And whenever I write, I do nothing else. That’s all I do, so as not to be distracted from the book. When my kids were little, I only wrote at night after they were in bed. But now they’re grown up and in college, I write night and day when I’m working.

Once the outline is set, I put it away, and let it simmer for a while. And I am usually working on 3 to 5 different books, in various stages at the same time. I work it all the way though to the end of the story, and then put it away for a while, and it continues to cook somewhere, in the back of my head.

When I start a book, it is like climbing a mountain. Brutal, exhausting, an endurance contest. I start the book and don’t leave my desk until the first draft is finished. I work from the outline, but the book just flows on its own (like a movie I see and hear in my head - and sometimes even I’m surprised at what I’m seeing and hearing!) I cry at parts, laugh at something funny one of the characters said. My life becomes populated by the people of the book. I don’t talk to anyone, and don’t leave the house. I go from my bed to my desk, to my bathtub at the end of my workday, then back to bed, and then back to work. I work 20 to 22 hours straight, sleep 3 or 4 hours, and then go back to work. And I do that until I have told the story and the first draft is finished. Michelangelo called it ‘stealing it from the stone’, when he carved a statue. I’m almost afraid to stop working at night because I’m afraid I’ll forget where I was going with the story, but I don’t forget. And I keep on going until I’m through. That fist draft is very rough, and full of mistakes. I read it many, many times afterwards, making corrections, and then when I’m satisfied with it, I send it to my editor (and agent), and then she sends me back a ton of corrections and changes she wants made. I do most of them and re-write it, and the book goes back and forth that way for many months, while I correct it and polish it. And between rounds of working on that book, I work on others. And each time I come back to a book, I see new things I want to improve, polish, or change. I usually re-write a book off and on for well over a year, even a year and a half. And if I need historical research, or about an industry, or geography, my researcher gives it to me (to read and digest) before, during, and after the book, and I weave it in where I need it. So, as you can see, it’s a long, arduous process.

I write in old, comfy wool nightgowns, bundled up at my desk. I don’t see anyone. I don’t comb my hair for weeks. And my only concessions to beauty are soap and toothpaste. I just don’t exist while I’m writing, except to tell the story. And if readers say they couldn’t put it down, it’s because I didn’t either, and if they cried, so did I. People bring me food on trays and I literally don’t stop until I’m finished. I don’t go out; I don’t have fun. But I get to go out and play when I finish the book!!

One of the odd things I’ve noticed is that when I’m working on a book, I always have ideas for other books and things I want to write. I’m working on all my burners and all fired up. But when I’m not working, everything goes to sleep, and I rarely get ideas. It’s only when I’m working furiously that I get more ideas. I know, it’s weird.

So that’s how I do it, and it’s fun to do, although a huge amount of work. When you work 22 hours a day, or even slightly less, everything hurts a little (at any age), your back hurts, your neck is killing you, every muscle is shrieking. I write until I damn near stop. And even once I’m exhausted, I keep going, and push myself harder. Sometimes that’s when you do your best work. Sometimes my fingers get swollen from typing (I have ice mittens), and often my nails bleed from so much typing. It’s a crazy way to make a living but I love it.

I don’t know where the ideas come from, they just do. I try to know that I’m unimportant in the process, that I’m just a vehicle for the story, like a pane of glass that light shines though. When I start to feel important, light shines through me like linoleum. I think you need a certain amount of humility to do it. It’s a gift, and I’m very grateful for it.

It’s pretty brutal physically, but somewhere you find the strength to do it.

One person asked if I do it all year round. I try not to. For more than 30 years, my life has revolved around my children and their schedules, so I always tried to work it so that I was totally free during their vacations, and I never worked in summer so I could be free for them. That’s still true now as they vacation with me in summer, and three are still in college. So, I work like a dog all winter (I work hardest between October and May/June), and take the summer months off. Sometimes now I get a re-write to do in summer, but I try to stay free during June through September, and I don’t work over the Christmas holidays so I can be with them, without distractions, although I’m often making notes on an outline.

When they were young, I was with them all day, and wrote from about 8 pm till 3 am, then I’d sleep (provided no one got an ear ache, a stomach ache, and didn’t have a nightmare), and up in the morning. Once they were in school, I’d write while they were is school, and then stop in time to pick them up at school and take them to their activities. I’m always in my office by 8 am. And I’m blessed that I don’t need a lot of sleep. I manage fine on 4 or 5 hours, which with a writing career and 9 kids is a huge blessing! And my deal with my husband who is the father of my children, and the man I married after him - was that I would go to bed with them at night, but get up to write as soon as they went to sleep. I was happy to adjust my life to my husband and kids, but now that I’m alone I push harder and keep writing. And I’m always a little sad when I finish a book, I miss the people in it. But once the book is finished, it’s over for me, and I move to the next one. I work a lot of the time. (And I’ve written 106 books, since the first one when I was 19). 

Somebody else asked me when and how much I read. Not enough!! I have always been extremely careful not to read anyone else’s work while I’m writing. There is always the possibility that you could be inspired by someone without even realizing it, so I don’t take that chance. I only read when I am not working at all, usually in the summer months, and never when I’m in high writing mode. The only thing I read then is the Bible, or religious articles to inspire me.

So that’s pretty much the story of how I write. Occasionally a rude or crabby reader will write to suggest that I must have other people writing for me. No. No such luck, there are no elves in my basement. I do it all myself...and I’m so glad that most of my readers seem to enjoy what I do. And now...I’m off to start a new book. Talk to you soon.

[endenogatai]

The facts about Facebook

This is a critical reading of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s article in the WSJ on Thursday, also entitled The Facts About Facebook. 

Yes Mark, you’re right; Facebook turns 15 next month. What a long time you’ve been in the social media business! We’re curious as to whether you’ve also been keeping count of how many times you’ve been forced to apologize for breaching people’s trust or, well, otherwise royally messing up over the years.

It’s also true you weren’t setting out to build “a global company”. The predecessor to Facebook was a ‘hot or not’ game called ‘FaceMash’ that you hacked together while drinking beer in your Harvard dormroom. Your late night brainwave was to get fellow students to rate each others’ attractiveness — and you weren’t at all put off by not being in possession of the necessary photo data to do this. You just took it; hacking into the college’s online facebooks and grabbing people’s selfies without permission.

Blogging about what you were doing as you did it, you wrote: “I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.” Just in case there was any doubt as to the ugly nature of your intention. 

The seeds of Facebook’s global business were thus sewn in a crude and consentless game of clickbait whose idea titillated you so much you thought nothing of breaching security, privacy, copyright and decency norms just to grab a few eyeballs.

So while you may not have instantly understood how potent this ‘outrageous and divisive’ eyeball-grabbing content tactic would turn out to be — oh hai future global scale! — the core DNA of Facebook’s business sits in that frat boy discovery where your eureka Internet moment was finding you could win the attention jackpot by pitting people against each other.

Pretty quickly you also realized you could exploit and commercialize human one-upmanship — gotta catch em all friend lists! popularity poke wars! — and stick a badge on the resulting activity, dubbing it ‘social’.

FaceMash was antisocial, though. And the unpleasant flipside that can clearly flow from ‘social’ platforms is something you continue not being nearly honest nor open enough about. Whether it’s political disinformation, hate speech or bullying, the individual and societal impacts of maliciously minded content shared and amplified using massively mainstream tools you control is now impossible to ignore.

Yet you prefer to play down these human impacts; as a “crazy idea”, or by implying that ‘a little’ amplified human nastiness is the necessary cost of being in the big multinational business of connecting everyone and ‘socializing’ everything.

But did you ask the father of 14-year-old Molly Russell, a British schoolgirl who took her own life in 2017, whether he’s okay with your growth vs controls trade-off? “I have no doubt that Instagram helped kill my daughter,” said Russell in an interview with the BBC this week.

After her death, Molly’s parents found she had been following accounts on Instagram that were sharing graphic material related to self-harming and suicide, including some accounts that actively encourage people to cut themselves. “We didn’t know that anything like that could possibly exist on a platform like Instagram,” said Russell.

Without a human editor in the mix, your algorithmic recommendations are blind to risk and suffering. Built for global scale, they get on with the expansionist goal of maximizing clicks and views by serving more of the same sticky stuff. And more extreme versions of things users show an interest in to keep the eyeballs engaged.

So when you write about making services that “billions” of “people around the world love and use” forgive us for thinking that sounds horribly glib. The scales of suffering don’t sum like that. If your entertainment product has whipped up genocide anywhere in the world — as the UN said Facebook did in Myanmar — it’s failing regardless of the proportion of users who are having their time pleasantly wasted on and by Facebook.

And if your algorithms can’t incorporate basic checks and safeguards so they don’t accidentally encourage vulnerable teens to commit suicide you really don’t deserve to be in any consumer-facing business at all.

Yet your article shows no sign you’ve been reflecting on the kinds of human tragedies that don’t just play out on your platform but can be an emergent property of your targeting algorithms.

You focus instead on what you call “clear benefits to this business model”.

The benefits to Facebook’s business are certainly clear. You have the billions in quarterly revenue to stand that up. But what about the costs to the rest of us? Human costs are harder to quantify but you don’t even sound like you’re trying.

You do write that you’ve heard “many questions” about Facebook’s business model. Which is most certainly true but once again you’re playing down the level of political and societal concern about how your platform operates (and how you operate your platform) — deflecting and reframing what Facebook is to cast your ad business a form of quasi philanthropy; a comfortable discussion topic and self-serving idea you’d much prefer we were all sold on.

It’s also hard to shake the feeling that your phrasing at this point is intended as a bit of an in-joke for Facebook staffers — to smirk at the ‘dumb politicians’ who don’t even know how Facebook makes money.

Y’know, like you smirked…

Then you write that you want to explain how Facebook operates. But, thing is, you don’t explain — you distract, deflect, equivocate and mislead, which has been your business’ strategy through many months of scandal (that and worst tactics — such as paying a PR firm that used oppo research tactics to discredit Facebook critics with smears).

Dodging is another special power; such as how you dodged repeat requests from international parliamentarians to be held accountable for major data misuse and security breaches.

The Zuckerberg ‘open letter’ mansplain, which typically runs to thousands of blame-shifting words, is another standard issue production from the Facebook reputation crisis management toolbox.

And here you are again, ironically enough, mansplaining in a newspaper; an industry that your platform has worked keenly to gut and usurp, hungry to supplant editorially guided journalism with the moral vacuum of algorithmically geared space-filler which, left unchecked, has been shown, time and again, lifting divisive and damaging content into public view.

The latest Zuckerberg screed has nothing new to say. It’s pure spin. We’ve read scores of self-serving Facebook apologias over the years and can confirm Facebook’s founder has made a very tedious art of selling abject failure as some kind of heroic lack of perfection.

But the spin has been going on for far, far too long. Fifteen years, as you remind us. Yet given that hefty record it’s little wonder you’re moved to pen again — imagining that another word blast is all it’ll take for the silly politicians to fall in line.

Thing is, no one is asking Facebook for perfection, Mark. We’re looking for signs that you and your company have a moral compass. Because the opposite appears to be true. (Or as one UK parliamentarian put it to your CTO last year: “I remain to be convinced that your company has integrity”.)

Facebook has scaled to such an unprecedented, global size exactly because it has no editorial values. And you say again now you want to be all things to all men. Put another way that means there’s a moral vacuum sucking away at your platform’s core; a supermassive ethical blackhole that scales ad dollars by the billions because you won’t tie the kind of process knots necessary to treat humans like people, not pairs of eyeballs.

You don’t design against negative consequences or to pro-actively avoid terrible impacts — you let stuff happen and then send in the ‘trust & safety’ team once the damage has been done.

You might call designing against negative consequences a ‘growth bottleneck’; others would say it’s having a conscience.

Everything standing in the way of scaling Facebook’s usage is, under the Zuckerberg regime, collateral damage — hence the old mantra of ‘move fast and break things’ — whether it’s social cohesion, civic values or vulnerable individuals.

This is why it takes a celebrity defamation lawsuit to force your company to dribble a little more resource into doing something about scores of professional scammers paying you to pop their fraudulent schemes in a Facebook “ads” wrapper. (Albeit, you’re only taking some action in the UK in this particular case.)

Funnily enough — though it’s not at all funny and it doesn’t surprise us — Facebook is far slower and patchier when it comes to fixing things it broke.

Of course there will always be people who thrive with a digital megaphone like Facebook thrust in their hand. Scammers being a pertinent example. But the measure of a civilized society is how it protects those who can’t defend themselves from targeted attacks or scams because they lack the protective wrap of privilege. Which means people who aren’t famous. Not public figures like Martin Lewis, the consumer champion who has his own platform and enough financial resources to file a lawsuit to try to make Facebook do something about how its platform supercharges scammers.

Zuckerberg’s slippery call to ‘fight bad content with more content’ — or to fight Facebook-fuelled societal division by shifting even more of the apparatus of civic society onto Facebook — fails entirely to recognize this asymmetry.

And even in the Lewis case, Facebook remains a winner; Lewis dropped his suit and Facebook got to make a big show of signing over £500k worth of ad credit coupons to a consumer charity that will end up giving them right back to Facebook.

The company’s response to problems its platform creates is to look the other way until a trigger point of enough bad publicity gets reached. At which critical point it flips the usual crisis PR switch and sends in a few token clean up teams — who scrub a tiny proportion of terrible content; or take down a tiny number of fake accounts; or indeed make a few token and heavily publicized gestures — before leaning heavily on civil society (and on users) to take the real strain.

You might think Facebook reaching out to respected external institutions is a positive step. A sign of a maturing mindset and a shift towards taking greater responsibility for platform impacts. (And in the case of scam ads in the UK it’s donating £3M in cash and ad credits to a bona fide consumer advice charity.)

But this is still Facebook dumping problems of its making on an already under-resourced and over-worked civic sector at the same time as its platform supersizes their workload.

In recent years the company has also made a big show of getting involved with third party fact checking organizations across various markets — using these independents to stencil in a PR strategy for ‘fighting fake news’ that also entails Facebook offloading the lion’s share of the work. (It’s not paying fact checkers anything, given the clear conflict that would represent it obviously can’t).

So again external organizations are being looped into Facebook’s mess — in this case to try to drain the swamp of fakes being fenced and amplified on its platform — even as the scale of the task remains hopeless, and all sorts of junk continues to flood into and pollute the public sphere.

What’s clear is that none of these organizations has the scale or the resources to fix problems Facebook’s platform creates. Yet it serves Facebook’s purposes to be able to point to them trying.

And all the while Zuckerberg is hard at work fighting to fend off regulation that could force his company to take far more care and spend far more of its own resources (and profits) monitoring the content it monetizes by putting it in front of eyeballs.

The Facebook founder is fighting because he knows his platform is a targeted attack; On individual attention, via privacy-hostile behaviorally targeted ads (his euphemism for this is “relevant ads”); on social cohesion, via divisive algorithms that drive outrage in order to maximize platform engagement; and on democratic institutions and norms, by systematically eroding consensus and the potential for compromise between the different groups that every society is comprised of.

In his WSJ post Zuckerberg can only claim Facebook doesn’t “leave harmful or divisive content up”. He has no defence against Facebook having put it up and enabled it to spread in the first place.

Sociopaths relish having a soapbox so unsurprisingly these people find a wonderful home on Facebook. But where does empathy fit into the antisocial media equation?

As for Facebook being a ‘free’ service — a point Zuckerberg is most keen to impress in his WSJ post — it’s of course a cliché to point out that ‘if it’s free you’re the product’. (Or as the even older saying goes: ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’).

But for the avoidance of doubt, “free” access does not mean cost-free access. And in Facebook’s case the cost is both individual (to your attention and your privacy); and collective (to the public’s attention and to social cohesion).

The much bigger question is who actually benefits if “everyone” is on Facebook, as Zuckerberg would prefer. Facebook isn’t the Internet. Facebook doesn’t offer the sole means of communication, digital or otherwise. People can, and do, ‘connect’ (if you want to use such a transactional word for human relations) just fine without Facebook.

So beware the hard and self-serving sell in which Facebook’s 15-year founder seeks yet again to recast privacy as an unaffordable luxury.

Actually, Mark, it’s a fundamental human right.

The best argument Zuckerberg can muster for his goal of universal Facebook usage being good for anything other than his own business’ bottom line is to suggest small businesses could use that kind of absolute reach to drive extra growth of their own.

Though he only provides a few general data-points to support the claim; saying there are “more than 90M small businesses on Facebook” which “make up a large part of our business” (how large?) — and claiming “most” (51%?) couldn’t afford TV ads or billboards (might they be able to afford other online or newspaper ads though?); he also cites a “global survey” (how many businesses surveyed?), presumably run by Facebook itself, which he says found “half the businesses on Facebook say they’ve hired more people since they joined” (but how did you ask the question, Mark?; we’re concerned it might have been rather leading), and from there he leaps to the implied conclusion that “millions” of jobs have essentially been created by Facebook.

But did you control for common causes Mark? Or are you just trying to take credit for others’ hard work because, well, it’s politically advantageous for you to do so?

Whether Facebook’s claims about being great for small business stand up to scrutiny or not, if people’s fundamental rights are being wholesale flipped for SMEs to make a few extra bucks that’s an unacceptable trade off.

“Millions” of jobs suggestively linked to Facebook sure sounds great — but you can’t and shouldn’t overlook disproportionate individual and societal costs, as Zuckerberg is urging policymakers to here.

Let’s also not forget that some of the small business ‘jobs’ that Facebook’s platform can take definitive and major credit for creating include the Macedonia teens who became hyper-adept at seeding Facebook with fake U.S. political news, around the 2016 presidential election. But presumably those aren’t the kind of jobs Zuckerberg is advocating for.

He also repeats the spurious claim that Facebook gives users “complete control” over what it does with personal information collected for advertising.

We’ve heard this time and time again from Zuckerberg and yet it remains pure BS.

WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 10: Facebook co-founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg concludes his testimony before a combined Senate Judiciary and Commerce committee hearing in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill April 10, 2018 in Washington, DC. Zuckerberg, 33, was called to testify after it was reported that 87 million Facebook users had their personal information harvested by Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm linked to the Trump campaign. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Yo Mark! First up we’re still waiting for your much trumpeted ‘Clear History’ tool. You know, the one you claimed you thought of under questioning in Congress last year (and later used to fend off follow up questions in the European Parliament).

Reportedly the tool is due this Spring. But even when it does finally drop it represents another classic piece of gaslighting by Facebook, given how it seeks to normalize (and so enable) the platform’s pervasive abuse of its users’ data.

Truth is, there is no master ‘off’ switch for Facebook’s ongoing surveillance. Such a switch — were it to exist — would represent a genuine control for users. But Zuckerberg isn’t offering it.

Instead his company continues to groom users into accepting being creeped on by offering pantomime settings that boil down to little more than privacy theatre — if they even realize they’re there.

‘Hit the button! Reset cookies! Delete browsing history! Keep playing Facebook!’

An interstitial reset is clearly also a dilute decoy. It’s not the same as being able to erase all extracted insights Facebook’s infrastructure continuously mines from users, using these derivatives to target people with behavioral ads; tracking and profiling on an ongoing basis by creeping on browsing activity (on and off Facebook), and also by buying third party data on its users from brokers.

Multiple signals and inferences are used to flesh out individual ad profiles on an ongoing basis, meaning the files are never static. And there’s simply no way to tell Facebook to burn your digital ad mannequin. Not even if you delete your Facebook account.

Nor, indeed, is there a way to get a complete read out from Facebook on all the data it’s attached to your identity. Even in Europe, where companies are subject to strict privacy laws that place a legal requirement on data controllers to disclose all personal data they hold on a person on request, as well as who they’re sharing it with, for what purposes, under what legal grounds.

Last year Paul-Olivier Dehaye, the founder of PersonalData.IO, a startup that aims to help people control how their personal data is accessed by companies, recounted in the UK parliament how he’d spent years trying to obtain all his personal information from Facebook — with the company resorting to legal arguments to block his subject access request.

Dehaye said he had succeeded in extracting a bit more of his data from Facebook than it initially handed over. But it was still just a “snapshot”, not an exhaustive list, of all the advertisers who Facebook had shared his data with. This glimpsed tip implies a staggeringly massive personal data iceberg lurking beneath the surface of each and every one of the 2.2BN+ Facebook users. (Though the figure is likely even more massive because it tracks non-users too.)

Zuckerberg’s “complete control” wording is therefore at best self-serving and at worst an outright lie. Facebook’s business has complete control of users by offering only a superficial layer of confusing and fiddly, ever-shifting controls that demand continued presence on the platform to use them, and ongoing effort to keep on top of settings changes (which are always, to a fault, privacy hostile), making managing your personal data a life-long chore.

Facebook’s power dynamic puts the onus squarely on the user to keep finding and hitting reset button.

But this too is a distraction. Resetting anything on its platform is largely futile, given Facebook retains whatever behavioral insights it already stripped off of your data (and fed to its profiling machinery). And its omnipresent background snooping carries on unchecked, amassing fresh insights you also can’t clear.

Nor does Clear History offer any control for the non-users Facebook tracks via the pixels and social plug-ins it’s larded around the mainstream web. Zuckerberg was asked about so-called shadow profiles in Congress last year — which led to this awkward exchange where he claimed not to know what the phrase refers to.

EU MEPs also seized on the issue, pushing him to respond. He did so by attempting to conflate surveillance and security — by claiming it’s necessary for Facebook to hold this data to keep “bad content out”. Which seems a bit of an ill-advised argument to make given how badly that mission is generally going for Facebook.

Still, Zuckerberg repeats the claim in the WSJ post, saying information collected for ads is “generally important for security and operating our services” — using this to address what he couches as “the important question of whether the advertising model encourages companies like ours to use and store more information than we otherwise would”.

So, essentially, Facebook’s founder is saying that the price for Facebook’s existence is pervasive surveillance of everyone, everywhere, with or without your permission.

Though he doesn’t express that ‘fact’ as a cost of his “free” platform. RIP privacy indeed.

Another pertinent example of Zuckerberg simply not telling the truth when he wrongly claims Facebook users can control their information vis-a-vis his ad business — an example which also happens to underline how pernicious his attempts to use “security” to justify eroding privacy really are — bubbled into view last fall, when Facebook finally confessed that mobile phone numbers users had provided for the specific purpose of enabling two-factor authentication (2FA) to increase the security of their accounts were also used by Facebook for ad targeting.

A company spokesperson told us that if a user wanted to opt out of the ad-based repurposing of their mobile phone data they could use non-phone number based 2FA — though Facebook only added the ability to use an app for 2FA in May last year.

What Facebook is doing on the security front is especially disingenuous BS in that it risks undermining security practice by bundling a respected tool (2FA) with ads that creep on people.

And there’s plenty more of this kind of disingenuous nonsense in Zuckerberg’s WSJ post — where he repeats a claim we first heard him utter last May, at a conference in Paris, when he suggested that following changes made to Facebook’s consent flow, ahead of updated privacy rules coming into force in Europe, the fact European users had (mostly) swallowed the new terms, rather than deleting their accounts en masse, was a sign people were majority approving of “more relevant” (i.e more creepy) Facebook ads.

Au contraire, it shows nothing of the sort. It simply underlines the fact Facebook still does not offer users a free and fair choice when it comes to consenting to their personal data being processed for behaviorally targeted ads — despite free choice being a requirement under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

If Facebook users are forced to ‘choose’ between being creeped on or deleting their account on the dominant social service where all their friends are it’s hardly a free choice. (And GDPR complaints have been filed over this exact issue of ‘forced consent‘.)

Add to that, as we said at the time, Facebook’s GDPR tweaks were lousy with manipulative, dark pattern design. So again the company is leaning on users to get the outcomes it wants.

It’s not a fair fight, any which way you look at it. But here we have Zuckerberg, the BS salesman, trying to claim his platform’s ongoing manipulation of people already enmeshed in the network is evidence for people wanting creepy ads.

The truth is that most Facebook users remain unaware of how extensively the company creeps on them (per this recent Pew research). And fiddly controls are of course even harder to get a handle on if you’re sitting in the dark.

Zuckerberg appears to concede a little ground on the transparency and control point when he writes that: “Ultimately, I believe the most important principles around data are transparency, choice and control.” But all the privacy-hostile choices he’s made; and the faux controls he’s offered; and the data mountain he simply won’t ‘fess up to sitting on shows, beyond reasonable doubt, the company cannot and will not self-regulate.

If Facebook is allowed to continue setting its own parameters and choosing its own definitions (for “transparency, choice and control”) users won’t have even one of the three principles, let alone the full house, as well they should. Facebook will just keep moving the goalposts and marking its own homework.

You can see this in the way Zuckerberg fuzzes and elides what his company really does with people’s data; and how he muddies and muddles uses for the data — such as by saying he doesn’t know what shadow profiles are; or claiming users can download ‘all their data’; or that ad profiles are somehow essential for security; or by repurposing 2FA digits to personalize ads too.

How do you try to prevent the purpose limitation principle being applied to regulate your surveillance-reliant big data ad business? Why by mixing the data streams of course! And then trying to sew confusion among regulators and policymakers by forcing them to unpick your mess.

Much like Facebook is forcing civic society to clean up its messy antisocial impacts.

Europe’s GDPR is focusing the conversation, though, and targeted complaints filed under the bloc’s new privacy regime have shown they can have teeth and so bite back against rights incursions.

But before we put another self-serving Zuckerberg screed to rest, let’s take a final look at his description of how Facebook’s ad business works. Because this is also seriously misleading. And cuts to the very heart of the “transparency, choice and control” issue he’s quite right is central to the personal data debate. (He just wants to get to define what each of those words means.)

In the article, Zuckerberg claims “people consistently tell us that if they’re going to see ads, they want them to be relevant”. But who are these “people” of which he speaks? If he’s referring to the aforementioned European Facebook users, who accepted updated terms with the same horribly creepy ads because he didn’t offer them any alternative, we would suggest that’s not a very affirmative signal.

Now if it were true that a generic group of ‘Internet people’ were consistently saying anything about online ads the loudest message would most likely be that they don’t like them. Click through rates are fantastically small. And hence also lots of people using ad blocking tools. (Growth in usage of ad blockers has also occurred in parallel with the increasing incursions of the adtech industrial surveillance complex.)

So Zuckerberg’s logical leap to claim users of free services want to be shown only the most creepy ads is really a very odd one.

Let’s now turn to Zuckerberg’s use of the word “relevant”. As we noted above, this is a euphemism. It conflates many concepts but principally it’s used by Facebook as a cloak to shield and obscure the reality of what it’s actually doing (i.e. privacy-hostile people profiling to power intrusive, behaviourally microtargeted ads) in order to avoid scrutiny of exactly those creepy and intrusive Facebook practices.

Yet the real sleight of hand is how Zuckerberg glosses over the fact that ads can be relevant without being creepy. Because ads can be contextual. They don’t have to be behaviorally targeted.

Ads can be based on — for example — a real-time search/action plus a user’s general location. Without needing to operate a vast, all-pervasive privacy-busting tracking infrastructure to feed open-ended surveillance dossiers on what everyone does online, as Facebook chooses to.

And here Zuckerberg gets really disingenuous because he uses a benign-sounding example of a contextual ad (the example he chooses contains an interest and a general location) to gloss over a detail-light explanation of how Facebook’s people tracking and profiling apparatus works.

“Based on what pages people like, what they click on, and other signals, we create categories — for example, people who like pages about gardening and live in Spain — and then charge advertisers to show ads to that category,” he writes, with that slipped in reference to “other signals” doing some careful shielding work there.

Other categories that Facebook’s algorithms have been found ready and willing to accept payment to run ads against in recent years include “jew-hater”, “How to burn Jews” and “Hitler did nothing wrong”.

Funnily enough Zuckerberg doesn’t mention those actual Facebook microtargeting categories in his glossy explainer of how its “relevant” ads business works. But they offer a far truer glimpse of the kinds of labels Facebook’s business sticks on people.

As we wrote last week, the case against behavioral ads is stacking up. Zuckerberg’s attempt to spin the same self-serving lines should really fool no one at this point.

Nor should regulators be derailed by the lie that Facebook’s creepy business model is the only version of adtech possible. It’s not even the only version of profitable adtech currently available. (Contextual ads have made Google alternative search engine DuckDuckGo profitable since 2014, for example.)

Simply put, adtech doesn’t have to be creepy to work. And ads that don’t creep on people would give publishers greater ammunition to sell ad block using readers on whitelisting their websites. A new generation of people-sensitive startups are also busy working on new forms of ad targeting that bake in privacy by design.

And with legal and regulatory risk rising, intrusive and creepy adtech that demands the equivalent of ongoing strip searches of every Internet user on the planet really look to be on borrowed time.

Facebook’s problem is it scrambled for big data and, finding it easy to suck up tonnes of the personal stuff on the unregulated Internet, built an antisocial surveillance business that needs to capture both sides of its market — eyeballs and advertisers — and keep them buying to an exploitative and even abusive relationship for its business to keep minting money.

Pivoting that tanker would certainly be tough, and in any case who’d trust a Zuckerberg who suddenly proclaimed himself the privacy messiah?

But it sure is a long way from ‘move fast and break things’ to trying to claim there’s only one business model to rule them all.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8204425 https://tcrn.ch/2S42YXt via IFTTT

[sheminecrafts]

The facts about Facebook

This is a critical reading of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s article in the WSJ on Thursday, also entitled The Facts About Facebook. 

Yes Mark, you’re right; Facebook turns 15 next month. What a long time you’ve been in the social media business! We’re curious as to whether you’ve also been keeping count of how many times you’ve been forced to apologize for breaching people’s trust or, well, otherwise royally messing up over the years.

It’s also true you weren’t setting out to build “a global company”. The predecessor to Facebook was a ‘hot or not’ game called ‘FaceMash’ that you hacked together while drinking beer in your Harvard dormroom. Your late night brainwave was to get fellow students to rate each others’ attractiveness — and you weren’t at all put off by not being in possession of the necessary photo data to do this. You just took it; hacking into the college’s online facebooks and grabbing people’s selfies without permission.

Blogging about what you were doing as you did it, you wrote: “I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.” Just in case there was any doubt as to the ugly nature of your intention. 

The seeds of Facebook’s global business were thus sewn in a crude and consentless game of clickbait whose idea titillated you so much you thought nothing of breaching security, privacy, copyright and decency norms just to grab a few eyeballs.

So while you may not have instantly understood how potent this ‘outrageous and divisive’ eyeball-grabbing content tactic would turn out to be — oh hai future global scale! — the core DNA of Facebook’s business sits in that frat boy discovery where your eureka Internet moment was finding you could win the attention jackpot by pitting people against each other.

Pretty quickly you also realized you could exploit and commercialize human one-upmanship — gotta catch em all friend lists! popularity poke wars! — and stick a badge on the resulting activity, dubbing it ‘social’.

FaceMash was antisocial, though. And the unpleasant flipside that can clearly flow from ‘social’ platforms is something you continue not being nearly honest nor open enough about. Whether it’s political disinformation, hate speech or bullying, the individual and societal impacts of maliciously minded content shared and amplified using massively mainstream tools you control is now impossible to ignore.

Yet you prefer to play down these human impacts; as a “crazy idea”, or by implying that ‘a little’ amplified human nastiness is the necessary cost of being in the big multinational business of connecting everyone and ‘socializing’ everything.

But did you ask the father of 14-year-old Molly Russell, a British schoolgirl who took her own life in 2017, whether he’s okay with your growth vs controls trade-off? “I have no doubt that Instagram helped kill my daughter,” said Russell in an interview with the BBC this week.

After her death, Molly’s parents found she had been following accounts on Instagram that were sharing graphic material related to self-harming and suicide, including some accounts that actively encourage people to cut themselves. “We didn’t know that anything like that could possibly exist on a platform like Instagram,” said Russell.

Without a human editor in the mix, your algorithmic recommendations are blind to risk and suffering. Built for global scale, they get on with the expansionist goal of maximizing clicks and views by serving more of the same sticky stuff. And more extreme versions of things users show an interest in to keep the eyeballs engaged.

So when you write about making services that “billions” of “people around the world love and use” forgive us for thinking that sounds horribly glib. The scales of suffering don’t sum like that. If your entertainment product has whipped up genocide anywhere in the world — as the UN said Facebook did in Myanmar — it’s failing regardless of the proportion of users who are having their time pleasantly wasted on and by Facebook.

And if your algorithms can’t incorporate basic checks and safeguards so they don’t accidentally encourage vulnerable teens to commit suicide you really don’t deserve to be in any consumer-facing business at all.

Yet your article shows no sign you’ve been reflecting on the kinds of human tragedies that don’t just play out on your platform but can be an emergent property of your targeting algorithms.

You focus instead on what you call “clear benefits to this business model”.

The benefits to Facebook’s business are certainly clear. You have the billions in quarterly revenue to stand that up. But what about the costs to the rest of us? Human costs are harder to quantify but you don’t even sound like you’re trying.

You do write that you’ve heard “many questions” about Facebook’s business model. Which is most certainly true but once again you’re playing down the level of political and societal concern about how your platform operates (and how you operate your platform) — deflecting and reframing what Facebook is to cast your ad business a form of quasi philanthropy; a comfortable discussion topic and self-serving idea you’d much prefer we were all sold on.

It’s also hard to shake the feeling that your phrasing at this point is intended as a bit of an in-joke for Facebook staffers — to smirk at the ‘dumb politicians’ who don’t even know how Facebook makes money.

Y’know, like you smirked…

Then you write that you want to explain how Facebook operates. But, thing is, you don’t explain — you distract, deflect, equivocate and mislead, which has been your business’ strategy through many months of scandal (that and worst tactics — such as paying a PR firm that used oppo research tactics to discredit Facebook critics with smears).

Dodging is another special power; such as how you dodged repeat requests from international parliamentarians to be held accountable for major data misuse and security breaches.

The Zuckerberg ‘open letter’ mansplain, which typically runs to thousands of blame-shifting words, is another standard issue production from the Facebook reputation crisis management toolbox.

And here you are again, ironically enough, mansplaining in a newspaper; an industry that your platform has worked keenly to gut and usurp, hungry to supplant editorially guided journalism with the moral vacuum of algorithmically geared space-filler which, left unchecked, has been shown, time and again, lifting divisive and damaging content into public view.

The latest Zuckerberg screed has nothing new to say. It’s pure spin. We’ve read scores of self-serving Facebook apologias over the years and can confirm Facebook’s founder has made a very tedious art of selling abject failure as some kind of heroic lack of perfection.

But the spin has been going on for far, far too long. Fifteen years, as you remind us. Yet given that hefty record it’s little wonder you’re moved to pen again — imagining that another word blast is all it’ll take for the silly politicians to fall in line.

Thing is, no one is asking Facebook for perfection, Mark. We’re looking for signs that you and your company have a moral compass. Because the opposite appears to be true. (Or as one UK parliamentarian put it to your CTO last year: “I remain to be convinced that your company has integrity”.)

Facebook has scaled to such an unprecedented, global size exactly because it has no editorial values. And you say again now you want to be all things to all men. Put another way that means there’s a moral vacuum sucking away at your platform’s core; a supermassive ethical blackhole that scales ad dollars by the billions because you won’t tie the kind of process knots necessary to treat humans like people, not pairs of eyeballs.

You don’t design against negative consequences or to pro-actively avoid terrible impacts — you let stuff happen and then send in the ‘trust & safety’ team once the damage has been done.

You might call designing against negative consequences a ‘growth bottleneck’; others would say it’s having a conscience.

Everything standing in the way of scaling Facebook’s usage is, under the Zuckerberg regime, collateral damage — hence the old mantra of ‘move fast and break things’ — whether it’s social cohesion, civic values or vulnerable individuals.

This is why it takes a celebrity defamation lawsuit to force your company to dribble a little more resource into doing something about scores of professional scammers paying you to pop their fraudulent schemes in a Facebook “ads” wrapper. (Albeit, you’re only taking some action in the UK in this particular case.)

Funnily enough — though it’s not at all funny and it doesn’t surprise us — Facebook is far slower and patchier when it comes to fixing things it broke.

Of course there will always be people who thrive with a digital megaphone like Facebook thrust in their hand. Scammers being a pertinent example. But the measure of a civilized society is how it protects those who can’t defend themselves from targeted attacks or scams because they lack the protective wrap of privilege. Which means people who aren’t famous. Not public figures like Martin Lewis, the consumer champion who has his own platform and enough financial resources to file a lawsuit to try to make Facebook do something about how its platform supercharges scammers.

Zuckerberg’s slippery call to ‘fight bad content with more content’ — or to fight Facebook-fuelled societal division by shifting even more of the apparatus of civic society onto Facebook — fails entirely to recognize this asymmetry.

And even in the Lewis case, Facebook remains a winner; Lewis dropped his suit and Facebook got to make a big show of signing over £500k worth of ad credit coupons to a consumer charity that will end up giving them right back to Facebook.

The company’s response to problems its platform creates is to look the other way until a trigger point of enough bad publicity gets reached. At which critical point it flips the usual crisis PR switch and sends in a few token clean up teams — who scrub a tiny proportion of terrible content; or take down a tiny number of fake accounts; or indeed make a few token and heavily publicized gestures — before leaning heavily on civil society (and on users) to take the real strain.

You might think Facebook reaching out to respected external institutions is a positive step. A sign of a maturing mindset and a shift towards taking greater responsibility for platform impacts. (And in the case of scam ads in the UK it’s donating £3M in cash and ad credits to a bona fide consumer advice charity.)

But this is still Facebook dumping problems of its making on an already under-resourced and over-worked civic sector at the same time as its platform supersizes their workload.

In recent years the company has also made a big show of getting involved with third party fact checking organizations across various markets — using these independents to stencil in a PR strategy for ‘fighting fake news’ that also entails Facebook offloading the lion’s share of the work. (It’s not paying fact checkers anything, given the clear conflict that would represent it obviously can’t).

So again external organizations are being looped into Facebook’s mess — in this case to try to drain the swamp of fakes being fenced and amplified on its platform — even as the scale of the task remains hopeless, and all sorts of junk continues to flood into and pollute the public sphere.

What’s clear is that none of these organizations has the scale or the resources to fix problems Facebook’s platform creates. Yet it serves Facebook’s purposes to be able to point to them trying.

And all the while Zuckerberg is hard at work fighting to fend off regulation that could force his company to take far more care and spend far more of its own resources (and profits) monitoring the content it monetizes by putting it in front of eyeballs.

The Facebook founder is fighting because he knows his platform is a targeted attack; On individual attention, via privacy-hostile behaviorally targeted ads (his euphemism for this is “relevant ads”); on social cohesion, via divisive algorithms that drive outrage in order to maximize platform engagement; and on democratic institutions and norms, by systematically eroding consensus and the potential for compromise between the different groups that every society is comprised of.

In his WSJ post Zuckerberg can only claim Facebook doesn’t “leave harmful or divisive content up”. He has no defence against Facebook having put it up and enabled it to spread in the first place.

Sociopaths relish having a soapbox so unsurprisingly these people find a wonderful home on Facebook. But where does empathy fit into the antisocial media equation?

As for Facebook being a ‘free’ service — a point Zuckerberg is most keen to impress in his WSJ post — it’s of course a cliché to point out that ‘if it’s free you’re the product’. (Or as the even older saying goes: ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’).

But for the avoidance of doubt, “free” access does not mean cost-free access. And in Facebook’s case the cost is both individual (to your attention and your privacy); and collective (to the public’s attention and to social cohesion).

The much bigger question is who actually benefits if “everyone” is on Facebook, as Zuckerberg would prefer. Facebook isn’t the Internet. Facebook doesn’t offer the sole means of communication, digital or otherwise. People can, and do, ‘connect’ (if you want to use such a transactional word for human relations) just fine without Facebook.

So beware the hard and self-serving sell in which Facebook’s 15-year founder seeks yet again to recast privacy as an unaffordable luxury.

Actually, Mark, it’s a fundamental human right.

The best argument Zuckerberg can muster for his goal of universal Facebook usage being good for anything other than his own business’ bottom line is to suggest small businesses could use that kind of absolute reach to drive extra growth of their own.

Though he only provides a few general data-points to support the claim; saying there are “more than 90M small businesses on Facebook” which “make up a large part of our business” (how large?) — and claiming “most” (51%?) couldn’t afford TV ads or billboards (might they be able to afford other online or newspaper ads though?); he also cites a “global survey” (how many businesses surveyed?), presumably run by Facebook itself, which he says found “half the businesses on Facebook say they’ve hired more people since they joined” (but how did you ask the question, Mark?; we’re concerned it might have been rather leading), and from there he leaps to the implied conclusion that “millions” of jobs have essentially been created by Facebook.

But did you control for common causes Mark? Or are you just trying to take credit for others’ hard work because, well, it’s politically advantageous for you to do so?

Whether Facebook’s claims about being great for small business stand up to scrutiny or not, if people’s fundamental rights are being wholesale flipped for SMEs to make a few extra bucks that’s an unacceptable trade off.

“Millions” of jobs suggestively linked to Facebook sure sounds great — but you can’t and shouldn’t overlook disproportionate individual and societal costs, as Zuckerberg is urging policymakers to here.

Let’s also not forget that some of the small business ‘jobs’ that Facebook’s platform can take definitive and major credit for creating include the Macedonia teens who became hyper-adept at seeding Facebook with fake U.S. political news, around the 2016 presidential election. But presumably those aren’t the kind of jobs Zuckerberg is advocating for.

He also repeats the spurious claim that Facebook gives users “complete control” over what it does with personal information collected for advertising.

We’ve heard this time and time again from Zuckerberg and yet it remains pure BS.

WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 10: Facebook co-founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg concludes his testimony before a combined Senate Judiciary and Commerce committee hearing in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill April 10, 2018 in Washington, DC. Zuckerberg, 33, was called to testify after it was reported that 87 million Facebook users had their personal information harvested by Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm linked to the Trump campaign. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Yo Mark! First up we’re still waiting for your much trumpeted ‘Clear History’ tool. You know, the one you claimed you thought of under questioning in Congress last year (and later used to fend off follow up questions in the European Parliament).

Reportedly the tool is due this Spring. But even when it does finally drop it represents another classic piece of gaslighting by Facebook, given how it seeks to normalize (and so enable) the platform’s pervasive abuse of its users’ data.

Truth is, there is no master ‘off’ switch for Facebook’s ongoing surveillance. Such a switch — were it to exist — would represent a genuine control for users. But Zuckerberg isn’t offering it.

Instead his company continues to groom users into accepting being creeped on by offering pantomime settings that boil down to little more than privacy theatre — if they even realize they’re there.

‘Hit the button! Reset cookies! Delete browsing history! Keep playing Facebook!’

An interstitial reset is clearly also a dilute decoy. It’s not the same as being able to erase all extracted insights Facebook’s infrastructure continuously mines from users, using these derivatives to target people with behavioral ads; tracking and profiling on an ongoing basis by creeping on browsing activity (on and off Facebook), and also by buying third party data on its users from brokers.

Multiple signals and inferences are used to flesh out individual ad profiles on an ongoing basis, meaning the files are never static. And there’s simply no way to tell Facebook to burn your digital ad mannequin. Not even if you delete your Facebook account.

Nor, indeed, is there a way to get a complete read out from Facebook on all the data it’s attached to your identity. Even in Europe, where companies are subject to strict privacy laws that place a legal requirement on data controllers to disclose all personal data they hold on a person on request, as well as who they’re sharing it with, for what purposes, under what legal grounds.

Last year Paul-Olivier Dehaye, the founder of PersonalData.IO, a startup that aims to help people control how their personal data is accessed by companies, recounted in the UK parliament how he’d spent years trying to obtain all his personal information from Facebook — with the company resorting to legal arguments to block his subject access request.

Dehaye said he had succeeded in extracting a bit more of his data from Facebook than it initially handed over. But it was still just a “snapshot”, not an exhaustive list, of all the advertisers who Facebook had shared his data with. This glimpsed tip implies a staggeringly massive personal data iceberg lurking beneath the surface of each and every one of the 2.2BN+ Facebook users. (Though the figure is likely even more massive because it tracks non-users too.)

Zuckerberg’s “complete control” wording is therefore at best self-serving and at worst an outright lie. Facebook’s business has complete control of users by offering only a superficial layer of confusing and fiddly, ever-shifting controls that demand continued presence on the platform to use them, and ongoing effort to keep on top of settings changes (which are always, to a fault, privacy hostile), making managing your personal data a life-long chore.

Facebook’s power dynamic puts the onus squarely on the user to keep finding and hitting reset button.

But this too is a distraction. Resetting anything on its platform is largely futile, given Facebook retains whatever behavioral insights it already stripped off of your data (and fed to its profiling machinery). And its omnipresent background snooping carries on unchecked, amassing fresh insights you also can’t clear.

Nor does Clear History offer any control for the non-users Facebook tracks via the pixels and social plug-ins it’s larded around the mainstream web. Zuckerberg was asked about so-called shadow profiles in Congress last year — which led to this awkward exchange where he claimed not to know what the phrase refers to.

EU MEPs also seized on the issue, pushing him to respond. He did so by attempting to conflate surveillance and security — by claiming it’s necessary for Facebook to hold this data to keep “bad content out”. Which seems a bit of an ill-advised argument to make given how badly that mission is generally going for Facebook.

Still, Zuckerberg repeats the claim in the WSJ post, saying information collected for ads is “generally important for security and operating our services” — using this to address what he couches as “the important question of whether the advertising model encourages companies like ours to use and store more information than we otherwise would”.

So, essentially, Facebook’s founder is saying that the price for Facebook’s existence is pervasive surveillance of everyone, everywhere, with or without your permission.

Though he doesn’t express that ‘fact’ as a cost of his “free” platform. RIP privacy indeed.

Another pertinent example of Zuckerberg simply not telling the truth when he wrongly claims Facebook users can control their information vis-a-vis his ad business — an example which also happens to underline how pernicious his attempts to use “security” to justify eroding privacy really are — bubbled into view last fall, when Facebook finally confessed that mobile phone numbers users had provided for the specific purpose of enabling two-factor authentication (2FA) to increase the security of their accounts were also used by Facebook for ad targeting.

A company spokesperson told us that if a user wanted to opt out of the ad-based repurposing of their mobile phone data they could use non-phone number based 2FA — though Facebook only added the ability to use an app for 2FA in May last year.

What Facebook is doing on the security front is especially disingenuous BS in that it risks undermining security practice by bundling a respected tool (2FA) with ads that creep on people.

And there’s plenty more of this kind of disingenuous nonsense in Zuckerberg’s WSJ post — where he repeats a claim we first heard him utter last May, at a conference in Paris, when he suggested that following changes made to Facebook’s consent flow, ahead of updated privacy rules coming into force in Europe, the fact European users had (mostly) swallowed the new terms, rather than deleting their accounts en masse, was a sign people were majority approving of “more relevant” (i.e more creepy) Facebook ads.

Au contraire, it shows nothing of the sort. It simply underlines the fact Facebook still does not offer users a free and fair choice when it comes to consenting to their personal data being processed for behaviorally targeted ads — despite free choice being a requirement under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

If Facebook users are forced to ‘choose’ between being creeped on or deleting their account on the dominant social service where all their friends are it’s hardly a free choice. (And GDPR complaints have been filed over this exact issue of ‘forced consent‘.)

Add to that, as we said at the time, Facebook’s GDPR tweaks were lousy with manipulative, dark pattern design. So again the company is leaning on users to get the outcomes it wants.

It’s not a fair fight, any which way you look at it. But here we have Zuckerberg, the BS salesman, trying to claim his platform’s ongoing manipulation of people already enmeshed in the network is evidence for people wanting creepy ads.

The truth is that most Facebook users remain unaware of how extensively the company creeps on them (per this recent Pew research). And fiddly controls are of course even harder to get a handle on if you’re sitting in the dark.

Zuckerberg appears to concede a little ground on the transparency and control point when he writes that: “Ultimately, I believe the most important principles around data are transparency, choice and control.” But all the privacy-hostile choices he’s made; and the faux controls he’s offered; and the data mountain he simply won’t ‘fess up to sitting on shows, beyond reasonable doubt, the company cannot and will not self-regulate.

If Facebook is allowed to continue setting its own parameters and choosing its own definitions (for “transparency, choice and control”) users won’t have even one of the three principles, let alone the full house, as well they should. Facebook will just keep moving the goalposts and marking its own homework.

You can see this in the way Zuckerberg fuzzes and elides what his company really does with people’s data; and how he muddies and muddles uses for the data — such as by saying he doesn’t know what shadow profiles are; or claiming users can download ‘all their data’; or that ad profiles are somehow essential for security; or by repurposing 2FA digits to personalize ads too.

How do you try to prevent the purpose limitation principle being applied to regulate your surveillance-reliant big data ad business? Why by mixing the data streams of course! And then trying to sew confusion among regulators and policymakers by forcing them to unpick your mess.

Much like Facebook is forcing civic society to clean up its messy antisocial impacts.

Europe’s GDPR is focusing the conversation, though, and targeted complaints filed under the bloc’s new privacy regime have shown they can have teeth and so bite back against rights incursions.

But before we put another self-serving Zuckerberg screed to rest, let’s take a final look at his description of how Facebook’s ad business works. Because this is also seriously misleading. And cuts to the very heart of the “transparency, choice and control” issue he’s quite right is central to the personal data debate. (He just wants to get to define what each of those words means.)

In the article, Zuckerberg claims “people consistently tell us that if they’re going to see ads, they want them to be relevant”. But who are these “people” of which he speaks? If he’s referring to the aforementioned European Facebook users, who accepted updated terms with the same horribly creepy ads because he didn’t offer them any alternative, we would suggest that’s not a very affirmative signal.

Now if it were true that a generic group of ‘Internet people’ were consistently saying anything about online ads the loudest message would most likely be that they don’t like them. Click through rates are fantastically small. And hence also lots of people using ad blocking tools. (Growth in usage of ad blockers has also occurred in parallel with the increasing incursions of the adtech industrial surveillance complex.)

So Zuckerberg’s logical leap to claim users of free services want to be shown only the most creepy ads is really a very odd one.

Let’s now turn to Zuckerberg’s use of the word “relevant”. As we noted above, this is a euphemism. It conflates many concepts but principally it’s used by Facebook as a cloak to shield and obscure the reality of what it’s actually doing (i.e. privacy-hostile people profiling to power intrusive, behaviourally microtargeted ads) in order to avoid scrutiny of exactly those creepy and intrusive Facebook practices.

Yet the real sleight of hand is how Zuckerberg glosses over the fact that ads can be relevant without being creepy. Because ads can be contextual. They don’t have to be behaviorally targeted.

Ads can be based on — for example — a real-time search/action plus a user’s general location. Without needing to operate a vast, all-pervasive privacy-busting tracking infrastructure to feed open-ended surveillance dossiers on what everyone does online, as Facebook chooses to.

And here Zuckerberg gets really disingenuous because he uses a benign-sounding example of a contextual ad (the example he chooses contains an interest and a general location) to gloss over a detail-light explanation of how Facebook’s people tracking and profiling apparatus works.

“Based on what pages people like, what they click on, and other signals, we create categories — for example, people who like pages about gardening and live in Spain — and then charge advertisers to show ads to that category,” he writes, with that slipped in reference to “other signals” doing some careful shielding work there.

Other categories that Facebook’s algorithms have been found ready and willing to accept payment to run ads against in recent years include “jew-hater”, “How to burn Jews” and “Hitler did nothing wrong”.

Funnily enough Zuckerberg doesn’t mention those actual Facebook microtargeting categories in his glossy explainer of how its “relevant” ads business works. But they offer a far truer glimpse of the kinds of labels Facebook’s business sticks on people.

As we wrote last week, the case against behavioral ads is stacking up. Zuckerberg’s attempt to spin the same self-serving lines should really fool no one at this point.

Nor should regulators be derailed by the lie that Facebook’s creepy business model is the only version of adtech possible. It’s not even the only version of profitable adtech currently available. (Contextual ads have made Google alternative search engine DuckDuckGo profitable since 2014, for example.)

Simply put, adtech doesn’t have to be creepy to work. And ads that don’t creep on people would give publishers greater ammunition to sell ad block using readers on whitelisting their websites. A new generation of people-sensitive startups are also busy working on new forms of ad targeting that bake in privacy by design.

And with legal and regulatory risk rising, intrusive and creepy adtech that demands the equivalent of ongoing strip searches of every Internet user on the planet really look to be on borrowed time.

Facebook’s problem is it scrambled for big data and, finding it easy to suck up tonnes of the personal stuff on the unregulated Internet, built an antisocial surveillance business that needs to capture both sides of its market — eyeballs and advertisers — and keep them buying to an exploitative and even abusive relationship for its business to keep minting money.

Pivoting that tanker would certainly be tough, and in any case who’d trust a Zuckerberg who suddenly proclaimed himself the privacy messiah?

But it sure is a long way from ‘move fast and break things’ to trying to claim there’s only one business model to rule them all.

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://tcrn.ch/2S42YXt via IFTTT

[technicalsolutions88]

This is a critical reading of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s article in the WSJ on Thursday, also entitled The Facts About Facebook. 

Yes Mark, you’re right; Facebook turns 15 next month. What a long time you’ve been in the social media business! We’re curious as to whether you’ve also been keeping count of how many times you’ve been forced to apologize for breaching people’s trust or, well, otherwise royally messing up over the years.

It’s also true you weren’t setting out to build “a global company”. The predecessor to Facebook was a ‘hot or not’ game called ‘FaceMash’ that you hacked together while drinking beer in your Harvard dormroom. Your late night brainwave was to get fellow students to rate each others’ attractiveness — and you weren’t at all put off by not being in possession of the necessary photo data to do this. You just took it; hacking into the college’s online facebooks and grabbing people’s selfies without permission.

Blogging about what you were doing as you did it, you wrote: “I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.” Just in case there was any doubt as to the ugly nature of your intention. 

The seeds of Facebook’s global business were thus sewn in a crude and consentless game of clickbait whose idea titillated you so much you thought nothing of breaching security, privacy, copyright and decency norms just to grab a few eyeballs.

So while you may not have instantly understood how potent this ‘outrageous and divisive’ eyeball-grabbing content tactic would turn out to be — oh hai future global scale! — the core DNA of Facebook’s business sits in that frat boy discovery where your eureka Internet moment was finding you could win the attention jackpot by pitting people against each other.

Pretty quickly you also realized you could exploit and commercialize human one-upmanship — gotta catch em all friend lists! popularity poke wars! — and stick a badge on the resulting activity, dubbing it ‘social’.

FaceMash was antisocial, though. And the unpleasant flipside that can clearly flow from ‘social’ platforms is something you continue not being nearly honest nor open enough about. Whether it’s political disinformation, hate speech or bullying, the individual and societal impacts of maliciously minded content shared and amplified using massively mainstream tools you control is now impossible to ignore.

Yet you prefer to play down these human impacts; as a “crazy idea”, or by implying that ‘a little’ amplified human nastiness is the necessary cost of being in the big multinational business of connecting everyone and ‘socializing’ everything.

But did you ask the father of 14-year-old Molly Russell, a British schoolgirl who took her own life in 2017, whether he’s okay with your growth vs controls trade-off? “I have no doubt that Instagram helped kill my daughter,” said Russell in an interview with the BBC this week.

After her death, Molly’s parents found she had been following accounts on Instagram that were sharing graphic material related to self-harming and suicide, including some accounts that actively encourage people to cut themselves. “We didn’t know that anything like that could possibly exist on a platform like Instagram,” said Russell.

Without a human editor in the mix, your algorithmic recommendations are blind to risk and suffering. Built for global scale, they get on with the expansionist goal of maximizing clicks and views by serving more of the same sticky stuff. And more extreme versions of things users show an interest in to keep the eyeballs engaged.

So when you write about making services that “billions” of “people around the world love and use” forgive us for thinking that sounds horribly glib. The scales of suffering don’t sum like that. If your entertainment product has whipped up genocide anywhere in the world — as the UN said Facebook did in Myanmar — it’s failing regardless of the proportion of users who are having their time pleasantly wasted on and by Facebook.

And if your algorithms can’t incorporate basic checks and safeguards so they don’t accidentally encourage vulnerable teens to commit suicide you really don’t deserve to be in any consumer-facing business at all.

Yet your article shows no sign you’ve been reflecting on the kinds of human tragedies that don’t just play out on your platform but can be an emergent property of your targeting algorithms.

You focus instead on what you call “clear benefits to this business model”.

The benefits to Facebook’s business are certainly clear. You have the billions in quarterly revenue to stand that up. But what about the costs to the rest of us? Human costs are harder to quantify but you don’t even sound like you’re trying.

You do write that you’ve heard “many questions” about Facebook’s business model. Which is most certainly true but once again you’re playing down the level of political and societal concern about how your platform operates (and how you operate your platform) — deflecting and reframing what Facebook is to cast your ad business a form of quasi philanthropy; a comfortable discussion topic and self-serving idea you’d much prefer we were all sold on.

It’s also hard to shake the feeling that your phrasing at this point is intended as a bit of an in-joke for Facebook staffers — to smirk at the ‘dumb politicians’ who don’t even know how Facebook makes money.

Y’know, like you smirked…

Then you write that you want to explain how Facebook operates. But, thing is, you don’t explain — you distract, deflect, equivocate and mislead, which has been your business’ strategy through many months of scandal (that and worst tactics — such as paying a PR firm that used oppo research tactics to discredit Facebook critics with smears).

Dodging is another special power; such as how you dodged repeat requests from international parliamentarians to be held accountable for major data misuse and security breaches.

The Zuckerberg ‘open letter’ mansplain, which typically runs to thousands of blame-shifting words, is another standard issue production from the Facebook reputation crisis management toolbox.

And here you are again, ironically enough, mansplaining in a newspaper; an industry that your platform has worked keenly to gut and usurp, hungry to supplant editorially guided journalism with the moral vacuum of algorithmically geared space-filler which, left unchecked, has been shown, time and again, lifting divisive and damaging content into public view.

The latest Zuckerberg screed has nothing new to say. It’s pure spin. We’ve read scores of self-serving Facebook apologias over the years and can confirm Facebook’s founder has made a very tedious art of selling abject failure as some kind of heroic lack of perfection.

But the spin has been going on for far, far too long. Fifteen years, as you remind us. Yet given that hefty record it’s little wonder you’re moved to pen again — imagining that another word blast is all it’ll take for the silly politicians to fall in line.

Thing is, no one is asking Facebook for perfection, Mark. We’re looking for signs that you and your company have a moral compass. Because the opposite appears to be true. (Or as one UK parliamentarian put it to your CTO last year: “I remain to be convinced that your company has integrity”.)

Facebook has scaled to such an unprecedented, global size exactly because it has no editorial values. And you say again now you want to be all things to all men. Put another way that means there’s a moral vacuum sucking away at your platform’s core; a supermassive ethical blackhole that scales ad dollars by the billions because you won’t tie the kind of process knots necessary to treat humans like people, not pairs of eyeballs.

You don’t design against negative consequences or to pro-actively avoid terrible impacts — you let stuff happen and then send in the ‘trust & safety’ team once the damage has been done.

You might call designing against negative consequences a ‘growth bottleneck’; others would say it’s having a conscience.

Everything standing in the way of scaling Facebook’s usage is, under the Zuckerberg regime, collateral damage — hence the old mantra of ‘move fast and break things’ — whether it’s social cohesion, civic values or vulnerable individuals.

This is why it takes a celebrity defamation lawsuit to force your company to dribble a little more resource into doing something about scores of professional scammers paying you to pop their fraudulent schemes in a Facebook “ads” wrapper. (Albeit, you’re only taking some action in the UK in this particular case.)

Funnily enough — though it’s not at all funny and it doesn’t surprise us — Facebook is far slower and patchier when it comes to fixing things it broke.

Of course there will always be people who thrive with a digital megaphone like Facebook thrust in their hand. Scammers being a pertinent example. But the measure of a civilized society is how it protects those who can’t defend themselves from targeted attacks or scams because they lack the protective wrap of privilege. Which means people who aren’t famous. Not public figures like Martin Lewis, the consumer champion who has his own platform and enough financial resources to file a lawsuit to try to make Facebook do something about how its platform supercharges scammers.

Zuckerberg’s slippery call to ‘fight bad content with more content’ — or to fight Facebook-fuelled societal division by shifting even more of the apparatus of civic society onto Facebook — fails entirely to recognize this asymmetry.

And even in the Lewis case, Facebook remains a winner; Lewis dropped his suit and Facebook got to make a big show of signing over £500k worth of ad credit coupons to a consumer charity that will end up giving them right back to Facebook.

The company’s response to problems its platform creates is to look the other way until a trigger point of enough bad publicity gets reached. At which critical point it flips the usual crisis PR switch and sends in a few token clean up teams — who scrub a tiny proportion of terrible content; or take down a tiny number of fake accounts; or indeed make a few token and heavily publicized gestures — before leaning heavily on civil society (and on users) to take the real strain.

You might think Facebook reaching out to respected external institutions is a positive step. A sign of a maturing mindset and a shift towards taking greater responsibility for platform impacts. (And in the case of scam ads in the UK it’s donating £3M in cash and ad credits to a bona fide consumer advice charity.)

But this is still Facebook dumping problems of its making on an already under-resourced and over-worked civic sector at the same time as its platform supersizes their workload.

In recent years the company has also made a big show of getting involved with third party fact checking organizations across various markets — using these independents to stencil in a PR strategy for ‘fighting fake news’ that also entails Facebook offloading the lion’s share of the work. (It’s not paying fact checkers anything, given the clear conflict that would represent it obviously can’t).

So again external organizations are being looped into Facebook’s mess — in this case to try to drain the swamp of fakes being fenced and amplified on its platform — even as the scale of the task remains hopeless, and all sorts of junk continues to flood into and pollute the public sphere.

What’s clear is that none of these organizations has the scale or the resources to fix problems Facebook’s platform creates. Yet it serves Facebook’s purposes to be able to point to them trying.

And all the while Zuckerberg is hard at work fighting to fend off regulation that could force his company to take far more care and spend far more of its own resources (and profits) monitoring the content it monetizes by putting it in front of eyeballs.

The Facebook founder is fighting because he knows his platform is a targeted attack; On individual attention, via privacy-hostile behaviorally targeted ads (his euphemism for this is “relevant ads”); on social cohesion, via divisive algorithms that drive outrage in order to maximize platform engagement; and on democratic institutions and norms, by systematically eroding consensus and the potential for compromise between the different groups that every society is comprised of.

In his WSJ post Zuckerberg can only claim Facebook doesn’t “leave harmful or divisive content up”. He has no defence against Facebook having put it up and enabled it to spread in the first place.

Sociopaths relish having a soapbox so unsurprisingly these people find a wonderful home on Facebook. But where does empathy fit into the antisocial media equation?

As for Facebook being a ‘free’ service — a point Zuckerberg is most keen to impress in his WSJ post — it’s of course a cliché to point out that ‘if it’s free you’re the product’. (Or as the even older saying goes: ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’).

But for the avoidance of doubt, “free” access does not mean cost-free access. And in Facebook’s case the cost is both individual (to your attention and your privacy); and collective (to the public’s attention and to social cohesion).

The much bigger question is who actually benefits if “everyone” is on Facebook, as Zuckerberg would prefer. Facebook isn’t the Internet. Facebook doesn’t offer the sole means of communication, digital or otherwise. People can, and do, ‘connect’ (if you want to use such a transactional word for human relations) just fine without Facebook.

So beware the hard and self-serving sell in which Facebook’s 15-year founder seeks yet again to recast privacy as an unaffordable luxury.

Actually, Mark, it’s a fundamental human right.

The best argument Zuckerberg can muster for his goal of universal Facebook usage being good for anything other than his own business’ bottom line is to suggest small businesses could use that kind of absolute reach to drive extra growth of their own.

Though he only provides a few general data-points to support the claim; saying there are “more than 90M small businesses on Facebook” which “make up a large part of our business” (how large?) — and claiming “most” (51%?) couldn’t afford TV ads or billboards (might they be able to afford other online or newspaper ads though?); he also cites a “global survey” (how many businesses surveyed?), presumably run by Facebook itself, which he says found “half the businesses on Facebook say they’ve hired more people since they joined” (but how did you ask the question, Mark?; we’re concerned it might have been rather leading), and from there he leaps to the implied conclusion that “millions” of jobs have essentially been created by Facebook.

But did you control for common causes Mark? Or are you just trying to take credit for others’ hard work because, well, it’s politically advantageous for you to do so?

Whether Facebook’s claims about being great for small business stand up to scrutiny or not, if people’s fundamental rights are being wholesale flipped for SMEs to make a few extra bucks that’s an unacceptable trade off.

“Millions” of jobs suggestively linked to Facebook sure sounds great — but you can’t and shouldn’t overlook disproportionate individual and societal costs, as Zuckerberg is urging policymakers to here.

Let’s also not forget that some of the small business ‘jobs’ that Facebook’s platform can take definitive and major credit for creating include the Macedonia teens who became hyper-adept at seeding Facebook with fake U.S. political news, around the 2016 presidential election. But presumably those aren’t the kind of jobs Zuckerberg is advocating for.

He also repeats the spurious claim that Facebook gives users “complete control” over what it does with personal information collected for advertising.

We’ve heard this time and time again from Zuckerberg and yet it remains pure BS.

WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 10: Facebook co-founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg concludes his testimony before a combined Senate Judiciary and Commerce committee hearing in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill April 10, 2018 in Washington, DC. Zuckerberg, 33, was called to testify after it was reported that 87 million Facebook users had their personal information harvested by Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm linked to the Trump campaign. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Yo Mark! First up we’re still waiting for your much trumpeted ‘Clear History’ tool. You know, the one you claimed you thought of under questioning in Congress last year (and later used to fend off follow up questions in the European Parliament).

Reportedly the tool is due this Spring. But even when it does finally drop it represents another classic piece of gaslighting by Facebook, given how it seeks to normalize (and so enable) the platform’s pervasive abuse of its users’ data.

Truth is, there is no master ‘off’ switch for Facebook’s ongoing surveillance. Such a switch — were it to exist — would represent a genuine control for users. But Zuckerberg isn’t offering it.

Instead his company continues to groom users into accepting being creeped on by offering pantomime settings that boil down to little more than privacy theatre — if they even realize they’re there.

‘Hit the button! Reset cookies! Delete browsing history! Keep playing Facebook!’

An interstitial reset is clearly also a dilute decoy. It’s not the same as being able to erase all extracted insights Facebook’s infrastructure continuously mines from users, using these derivatives to target people with behavioral ads; tracking and profiling on an ongoing basis by creeping on browsing activity (on and off Facebook), and also by buying third party data on its users from brokers.

Multiple signals and inferences are used to flesh out individual ad profiles on an ongoing basis, meaning the files are never static. And there’s simply no way to tell Facebook to burn your digital ad mannequin. Not even if you delete your Facebook account.

Nor, indeed, is there a way to get a complete read out from Facebook on all the data it’s attached to your identity. Even in Europe, where companies are subject to strict privacy laws that place a legal requirement on data controllers to disclose all personal data they hold on a person on request, as well as who they’re sharing it with, for what purposes, under what legal grounds.

Last year Paul-Olivier Dehaye, the founder of PersonalData.IO, a startup that aims to help people control how their personal data is accessed by companies, recounted in the UK parliament how he’d spent years trying to obtain all his personal information from Facebook — with the company resorting to legal arguments to block his subject access request.

Dehaye said he had succeeded in extracting a bit more of his data from Facebook than it initially handed over. But it was still just a “snapshot”, not an exhaustive list, of all the advertisers who Facebook had shared his data with. This glimpsed tip implies a staggeringly massive personal data iceberg lurking beneath the surface of each and every one of the 2.2BN+ Facebook users. (Though the figure is likely even more massive because it tracks non-users too.)

Zuckerberg’s “complete control” wording is therefore at best self-serving and at worst an outright lie. Facebook’s business has complete control of users by offering only a superficial layer of confusing and fiddly, ever-shifting controls that demand continued presence on the platform to use them, and ongoing effort to keep on top of settings changes (which are always, to a fault, privacy hostile), making managing your personal data a life-long chore.

Facebook’s power dynamic puts the onus squarely on the user to keep finding and hitting reset button.

But this too is a distraction. Resetting anything on its platform is largely futile, given Facebook retains whatever behavioral insights it already stripped off of your data (and fed to its profiling machinery). And its omnipresent background snooping carries on unchecked, amassing fresh insights you also can’t clear.

Nor does Clear History offer any control for the non-users Facebook tracks via the pixels and social plug-ins it’s larded around the mainstream web. Zuckerberg was asked about so-called shadow profiles in Congress last year — which led to this awkward exchange where he claimed not to know what the phrase refers to.

EU MEPs also seized on the issue, pushing him to respond. He did so by attempting to conflate surveillance and security — by claiming it’s necessary for Facebook to hold this data to keep “bad content out”. Which seems a bit of an ill-advised argument to make given how badly that mission is generally going for Facebook.

Still, Zuckerberg repeats the claim in the WSJ post, saying information collected for ads is “generally important for security and operating our services” — using this to address what he couches as “the important question of whether the advertising model encourages companies like ours to use and store more information than we otherwise would”.

So, essentially, Facebook’s founder is saying that the price for Facebook’s existence is pervasive surveillance of everyone, everywhere, with or without your permission.

Though he doesn’t express that ‘fact’ as a cost of his “free” platform. RIP privacy indeed.

Another pertinent example of Zuckerberg simply not telling the truth when he wrongly claims Facebook users can control their information vis-a-vis his ad business — an example which also happens to underline how pernicious his attempts to use “security” to justify eroding privacy really are — bubbled into view last fall, when Facebook finally confessed that mobile phone numbers users had provided for the specific purpose of enabling two-factor authentication (2FA) to increase the security of their accounts were also used by Facebook for ad targeting.

A company spokesperson told us that if a user wanted to opt out of the ad-based repurposing of their mobile phone data they could use non-phone number based 2FA — though Facebook only added the ability to use an app for 2FA in May last year.

What Facebook is doing on the security front is especially disingenuous BS in that it risks undermining security practice by bundling a respected tool (2FA) with ads that creep on people.

And there’s plenty more of this kind of disingenuous nonsense in Zuckerberg’s WSJ post — where he repeats a claim we first heard him utter last May, at a conference in Paris, when he suggested that following changes made to Facebook’s consent flow, ahead of updated privacy rules coming into force in Europe, the fact European users had (mostly) swallowed the new terms, rather than deleting their accounts en masse, was a sign people were majority approving of “more relevant” (i.e more creepy) Facebook ads.

Au contraire, it shows nothing of the sort. It simply underlines the fact Facebook still does not offer users a free and fair choice when it comes to consenting to their personal data being processed for behaviorally targeted ads — despite free choice being a requirement under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

If Facebook users are forced to ‘choose’ between being creeped on or deleting their account on the dominant social service where all their friends are it’s hardly a free choice. (And GDPR complaints have been filed over this exact issue of ‘forced consent‘.)

Add to that, as we said at the time, Facebook’s GDPR tweaks were lousy with manipulative, dark pattern design. So again the company is leaning on users to get the outcomes it wants.

It’s not a fair fight, any which way you look at it. But here we have Zuckerberg, the BS salesman, trying to claim his platform’s ongoing manipulation of people already enmeshed in the network is evidence for people wanting creepy ads.

The truth is that most Facebook users remain unaware of how extensively the company creeps on them (per this recent Pew research). And fiddly controls are of course even harder to get a handle on if you’re sitting in the dark.

Zuckerberg appears to concede a little ground on the transparency and control point when he writes that: “Ultimately, I believe the most important principles around data are transparency, choice and control.” But all the privacy-hostile choices he’s made; and the faux controls he’s offered; and the data mountain he simply won’t ‘fess up to sitting on shows, beyond reasonable doubt, the company cannot and will not self-regulate.

If Facebook is allowed to continue setting its own parameters and choosing its own definitions (for “transparency, choice and control”) users won’t have even one of the three principles, let alone the full house, as well they should. Facebook will just keep moving the goalposts and marking its own homework.

You can see this in the way Zuckerberg fuzzes and elides what his company really does with people’s data; and how he muddies and muddles uses for the data — such as by saying he doesn’t know what shadow profiles are; or claiming users can download ‘all their data’; or that ad profiles are somehow essential for security; or by repurposing 2FA digits to personalize ads too.

How do you try to prevent the purpose limitation principle being applied to regulate your surveillance-reliant big data ad business? Why by mixing the data streams of course! And then trying to sew confusion among regulators and policymakers by forcing them to unpick your mess.

Much like Facebook is forcing civic society to clean up its messy antisocial impacts.

Europe’s GDPR is focusing the conversation, though, and targeted complaints filed under the bloc’s new privacy regime have shown they can have teeth and so bite back against rights incursions.

But before we put another self-serving Zuckerberg screed to rest, let’s take a final look at his description of how Facebook’s ad business works. Because this is also seriously misleading. And cuts to the very heart of the “transparency, choice and control” issue he’s quite right is central to the personal data debate. (He just wants to get to define what each of those words means.)

In the article, Zuckerberg claims “people consistently tell us that if they’re going to see ads, they want them to be relevant”. But who are these “people” of which he speaks? If he’s referring to the aforementioned European Facebook users, who accepted updated terms with the same horribly creepy ads because he didn’t offer them any alternative, we would suggest that’s not a very affirmative signal.

Now if it were true that a generic group of ‘Internet people’ were consistently saying anything about online ads the loudest message would most likely be that they don’t like them. Click through rates are fantastically small. And hence also lots of people using ad blocking tools. (Growth in usage of ad blockers has also occurred in parallel with the increasing incursions of the adtech industrial surveillance complex.)

So Zuckerberg’s logical leap to claim users of free services want to be shown only the most creepy ads is really a very odd one.

Let’s now turn to Zuckerberg’s use of the word “relevant”. As we noted above, this is a euphemism. It conflates many concepts but principally it’s used by Facebook as a cloak to shield and obscure the reality of what it’s actually doing (i.e. privacy-hostile people profiling to power intrusive, behaviourally microtargeted ads) in order to avoid scrutiny of exactly those creepy and intrusive Facebook practices.

Yet the real sleight of hand is how Zuckerberg glosses over the fact that ads can be relevant without being creepy. Because ads can be contextual. They don’t have to be behaviorally targeted.

Ads can be based on — for example — a real-time search/action plus a user’s general location. Without needing to operate a vast, all-pervasive privacy-busting tracking infrastructure to feed open-ended surveillance dossiers on what everyone does online, as Facebook chooses to.

And here Zuckerberg gets really disingenuous because he uses a benign-sounding example of a contextual ad (the example he chooses contains an interest and a general location) to gloss over a detail-light explanation of how Facebook’s people tracking and profiling apparatus works.

“Based on what pages people like, what they click on, and other signals, we create categories — for example, people who like pages about gardening and live in Spain — and then charge advertisers to show ads to that category,” he writes, with that slipped in reference to “other signals” doing some careful shielding work there.

Other categories that Facebook’s algorithms have been found ready and willing to accept payment to run ads against in recent years include “jew-hater”, “How to burn Jews” and “Hitler did nothing wrong”.

Funnily enough Zuckerberg doesn’t mention those actual Facebook microtargeting categories in his glossy explainer of how its “relevant” ads business works. But they offer a far truer glimpse of the kinds of labels Facebook’s business sticks on people.

As we wrote last week, the case against behavioral ads is stacking up. Zuckerberg’s attempt to spin the same self-serving lines should really fool no one at this point.

Nor should regulators be derailed by the lie that Facebook’s creepy business model is the only version of adtech possible. It’s not even the only version of profitable adtech currently available. (Contextual ads have made Google alternative search engine DuckDuckGo profitable since 2014, for example.)

Simply put, adtech doesn’t have to be creepy to work. And ads that don’t creep on people would give publishers greater ammunition to sell ad block using readers on whitelisting their websites. A new generation of people-sensitive startups are also busy working on new forms of ad targeting that bake in privacy by design.

And with legal and regulatory risk rising, intrusive and creepy adtech that demands the equivalent of ongoing strip searches of every Internet user on the planet really look to be on borrowed time.

Facebook’s problem is it scrambled for big data and, finding it easy to suck up tonnes of the personal stuff on the unregulated Internet, built an antisocial surveillance business that needs to capture both sides of its market — eyeballs and advertisers — and keep them buying to an exploitative and even abusive relationship for its business to keep minting money.

Pivoting that tanker would certainly be tough, and in any case who’d trust a Zuckerberg who suddenly proclaimed himself the privacy messiah?

But it sure is a long way from ‘move fast and break things’ to trying to claim there’s only one business model to rule them all.

from Social – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2S42YXt Original Content From: https://techcrunch.com

[toomanysinks]

The facts about Facebook

This is a critical reading of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s article in the WSJ on Thursday, also entitled The Facts About Facebook. 

Yes Mark, you’re right; Facebook turns 15 next month. What a long time you’ve been in the social media business! We’re curious as to whether you’ve also been keeping count of how many times you’ve been forced to apologize for breaching people’s trust or, well, otherwise royally messing up over the years.

It’s also true you weren’t setting out to build “a global company”. The predecessor to Facebook was a ‘hot or not’ game called ‘FaceMash’ that you hacked together while drinking beer in your Harvard dormroom. Your late night brainwave was to get fellow students to rate each others’ attractiveness — and you weren’t at all put off by not being in possession of the necessary photo data to do this. You just took it; hacking into the college’s online facebooks and grabbing people’s selfies without permission.

Blogging about what you were doing as you did it, you wrote: “I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.” Just in case there was any doubt as to the ugly nature of your intention. 

The seeds of Facebook’s global business were thus sewn in a crude and consentless game of clickbait whose idea titillated you so much you thought nothing of breaching security, privacy, copyright and decency norms just to grab a few eyeballs.

So while you may not have instantly understood how potent this ‘outrageous and divisive’ eyeball-grabbing content tactic would turn out to be — oh hai future global scale! — the core DNA of Facebook’s business sits in that frat boy discovery where your eureka Internet moment was finding you could win the attention jackpot by pitting people against each other.

Pretty quickly you also realized you could exploit and commercialize human one-upmanship — gotta catch em all friend lists! popularity poke wars! — and stick a badge on the resulting activity, dubbing it ‘social’.

FaceMash was antisocial, though. And the unpleasant flipside that can clearly flow from ‘social’ platforms is something you continue not being nearly honest nor open enough about. Whether it’s political disinformation, hate speech or bullying, the individual and societal impacts of maliciously minded content shared and amplified using massively mainstream tools you control is now impossible to ignore.

Yet you prefer to play down these human impacts; as a “crazy idea”, or by implying that ‘a little’ amplified human nastiness is the necessary cost of being in the big multinational business of connecting everyone and ‘socializing’ everything.

But did you ask the father of 14-year-old Molly Russell, a British schoolgirl who took her own life in 2017, whether he’s okay with your growth vs controls trade-off? “I have no doubt that Instagram helped kill my daughter,” said Russell in an interview with the BBC this week.

After her death, Molly’s parents found she had been following accounts on Instagram that were sharing graphic material related to self-harming and suicide, including some accounts that actively encourage people to cut themselves. “We didn’t know that anything like that could possibly exist on a platform like Instagram,” said Russell.

Without a human editor in the mix, your algorithmic recommendations are blind to risk and suffering. Built for global scale, they get on with the expansionist goal of maximizing clicks and views by serving more of the same sticky stuff. And more extreme versions of things users show an interest in to keep the eyeballs engaged.

So when you write about making services that “billions” of “people around the world love and use” forgive us for thinking that sounds horribly glib. The scales of suffering don’t sum like that. If your entertainment product has whipped up genocide anywhere in the world — as the UN said Facebook did in Myanmar — it’s failing regardless of the proportion of users who are having their time pleasantly wasted on and by Facebook.

And if your algorithms can’t incorporate basic checks and safeguards so they don’t accidentally encourage vulnerable teens to commit suicide you really don’t deserve to be in any consumer-facing business at all.

Yet your article shows no sign you’ve been reflecting on the kinds of human tragedies that don’t just play out on your platform but can be an emergent property of your targeting algorithms.

You focus instead on what you call “clear benefits to this business model”.

The benefits to Facebook’s business are certainly clear. You have the billions in quarterly revenue to stand that up. But what about the costs to the rest of us? Human costs are harder to quantify but you don’t even sound like you’re trying.

You do write that you’ve heard “many questions” about Facebook’s business model. Which is most certainly true but once again you’re playing down the level of political and societal concern about how your platform operates (and how you operate your platform) — deflecting and reframing what Facebook is to cast your ad business a form of quasi philanthropy; a comfortable discussion topic and self-serving idea you’d much prefer we were all sold on.

It’s also hard to shake the feeling that your phrasing at this point is intended as a bit of an in-joke for Facebook staffers — to smirk at the ‘dumb politicians’ who don’t even know how Facebook makes money.

Y’know, like you smirked…

Then you write that you want to explain how Facebook operates. But, thing is, you don’t explain — you distract, deflect, equivocate and mislead, which has been your business’ strategy through many months of scandal (that and worst tactics — such as paying a PR firm that used oppo research tactics to discredit Facebook critics with smears).

Dodging is another special power; such as how you dodged repeat requests from international parliamentarians to be held accountable for major data misuse and security breaches.

The Zuckerberg ‘open letter’ mansplain, which typically runs to thousands of blame-shifting words, is another standard issue production from the Facebook reputation crisis management toolbox.

And here you are again, ironically enough, mansplaining in a newspaper; an industry that your platform has worked keenly to gut and usurp, hungry to supplant editorially guided journalism with the moral vacuum of algorithmically geared space-filler which, left unchecked, has been shown, time and again, lifting divisive and damaging content into public view.

The latest Zuckerberg screed has nothing new to say. It’s pure spin. We’ve read scores of self-serving Facebook apologias over the years and can confirm Facebook’s founder has made a very tedious art of selling abject failure as some kind of heroic lack of perfection.

But the spin has been going on for far, far too long. Fifteen years, as you remind us. Yet given that hefty record it’s little wonder you’re moved to pen again — imagining that another word blast is all it’ll take for the silly politicians to fall in line.

Thing is, no one is asking Facebook for perfection, Mark. We’re looking for signs that you and your company have a moral compass. Because the opposite appears to be true. (Or as one UK parliamentarian put it to your CTO last year: “I remain to be convinced that your company has integrity”.)

Facebook has scaled to such an unprecedented, global size exactly because it has no editorial values. And you say again now you want to be all things to all men. Put another way that means there’s a moral vacuum sucking away at your platform’s core; a supermassive ethical blackhole that scales ad dollars by the billions because you won’t tie the kind of process knots necessary to treat humans like people, not pairs of eyeballs.

You don’t design against negative consequences or to pro-actively avoid terrible impacts — you let stuff happen and then send in the ‘trust & safety’ team once the damage has been done.

You might call designing against negative consequences a ‘growth bottleneck’; others would say it’s having a conscience.

Everything standing in the way of scaling Facebook’s usage is, under the Zuckerberg regime, collateral damage — hence the old mantra of ‘move fast and break things’ — whether it’s social cohesion, civic values or vulnerable individuals.

This is why it takes a celebrity defamation lawsuit to force your company to dribble a little more resource into doing something about scores of professional scammers paying you to pop their fraudulent schemes in a Facebook “ads” wrapper. (Albeit, you’re only taking some action in the UK in this particular case.)

Funnily enough — though it’s not at all funny and it doesn’t surprise us — Facebook is far slower and patchier when it comes to fixing things it broke.

Of course there will always be people who thrive with a digital megaphone like Facebook thrust in their hand. Scammers being a pertinent example. But the measure of a civilized society is how it protects those who can’t defend themselves from targeted attacks or scams because they lack the protective wrap of privilege. Which means people who aren’t famous. Not public figures like Martin Lewis, the consumer champion who has his own platform and enough financial resources to file a lawsuit to try to make Facebook do something about how its platform supercharges scammers.

Zuckerberg’s slippery call to ‘fight bad content with more content’ — or to fight Facebook-fuelled societal division by shifting even more of the apparatus of civic society onto Facebook — fails entirely to recognize this asymmetry.

And even in the Lewis case, Facebook remains a winner; Lewis dropped his suit and Facebook got to make a big show of signing over £500k worth of ad credit coupons to a consumer charity that will end up giving them right back to Facebook.

The company’s response to problems its platform creates is to look the other way until a trigger point of enough bad publicity gets reached. At which critical point it flips the usual crisis PR switch and sends in a few token clean up teams — who scrub a tiny proportion of terrible content; or take down a tiny number of fake accounts; or indeed make a few token and heavily publicized gestures — before leaning heavily on civil society (and on users) to take the real strain.

You might think Facebook reaching out to respected external institutions is a positive step. A sign of a maturing mindset and a shift towards taking greater responsibility for platform impacts. (And in the case of scam ads in the UK it’s donating £3M in cash and ad credits to a bona fide consumer advice charity.)

But this is still Facebook dumping problems of its making on an already under-resourced and over-worked civic sector at the same time as its platform supersizes their workload.

In recent years the company has also made a big show of getting involved with third party fact checking organizations across various markets — using these independents to stencil in a PR strategy for ‘fighting fake news’ that also entails Facebook offloading the lion’s share of the work. (It’s not paying fact checkers anything, given the clear conflict that would represent it obviously can’t).

So again external organizations are being looped into Facebook’s mess — in this case to try to drain the swamp of fakes being fenced and amplified on its platform — even as the scale of the task remains hopeless, and all sorts of junk continues to flood into and pollute the public sphere.

What’s clear is that none of these organizations has the scale or the resources to fix problems Facebook’s platform creates. Yet it serves Facebook’s purposes to be able to point to them trying.

And all the while Zuckerberg is hard at work fighting to fend off regulation that could force his company to take far more care and spend far more of its own resources (and profits) monitoring the content it monetizes by putting it in front of eyeballs.

The Facebook founder is fighting because he knows his platform is a targeted attack; On individual attention, via privacy-hostile behaviorally targeted ads (his euphemism for this is “relevant ads”); on social cohesion, via divisive algorithms that drive outrage in order to maximize platform engagement; and on democratic institutions and norms, by systematically eroding consensus and the potential for compromise between the different groups that every society is comprised of.

In his WSJ post Zuckerberg can only claim Facebook doesn’t “leave harmful or divisive content up”. He has no defence against Facebook having put it up and enabled it to spread in the first place.

Sociopaths relish having a soapbox so unsurprisingly these people find a wonderful home on Facebook. But where does empathy fit into the antisocial media equation?

As for Facebook being a ‘free’ service — a point Zuckerberg is most keen to impress in his WSJ post — it’s of course a cliché to point out that ‘if it’s free you’re the product’. (Or as the even older saying goes: ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’).

But for the avoidance of doubt, “free” access does not mean cost-free access. And in Facebook’s case the cost is both individual (to your attention and your privacy); and collective (to the public’s attention and to social cohesion).

The much bigger question is who actually benefits if “everyone” is on Facebook, as Zuckerberg would prefer. Facebook isn’t the Internet. Facebook doesn’t offer the sole means of communication, digital or otherwise. People can, and do, ‘connect’ (if you want to use such a transactional word for human relations) just fine without Facebook.

So beware the hard and self-serving sell in which Facebook’s 15-year founder seeks yet again to recast privacy as an unaffordable luxury.

Actually, Mark, it’s a fundamental human right.

The best argument Zuckerberg can muster for his goal of universal Facebook usage being good for anything other than his own business’ bottom line is to suggest small businesses could use that kind of absolute reach to drive extra growth of their own.

Though he only provides a few general data-points to support the claim; saying there are “more than 90M small businesses on Facebook” which “make up a large part of our business” (how large?) — and claiming “most” (51%?) couldn’t afford TV ads or billboards (might they be able to afford other online or newspaper ads though?); he also cites a “global survey” (how many businesses surveyed?), presumably run by Facebook itself, which he says found “half the businesses on Facebook say they’ve hired more people since they joined” (but how did you ask the question, Mark?; we’re concerned it might have been rather leading), and from there he leaps to the implied conclusion that “millions” of jobs have essentially been created by Facebook.

But did you control for common causes Mark? Or are you just trying to take credit for others’ hard work because, well, it’s politically advantageous for you to do so?

Whether Facebook’s claims about being great for small business stand up to scrutiny or not, if people’s fundamental rights are being wholesale flipped for SMEs to make a few extra bucks that’s an unacceptable trade off.

“Millions” of jobs suggestively linked to Facebook sure sounds great — but you can’t and shouldn’t overlook disproportionate individual and societal costs, as Zuckerberg is urging policymakers to here.

Let’s also not forget that some of the small business ‘jobs’ that Facebook’s platform can take definitive and major credit for creating include the Macedonia teens who became hyper-adept at seeding Facebook with fake U.S. political news, around the 2016 presidential election. But presumably those aren’t the kind of jobs Zuckerberg is advocating for.

He also repeats the spurious claim that Facebook gives users “complete control” over what it does with personal information collected for advertising.

We’ve heard this time and time again from Zuckerberg and yet it remains pure BS.

WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 10: Facebook co-founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg concludes his testimony before a combined Senate Judiciary and Commerce committee hearing in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill April 10, 2018 in Washington, DC. Zuckerberg, 33, was called to testify after it was reported that 87 million Facebook users had their personal information harvested by Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm linked to the Trump campaign. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Yo Mark! First up we’re still waiting for your much trumpeted ‘Clear History’ tool. You know, the one you claimed you thought of under questioning in Congress last year (and later used to fend off follow up questions in the European Parliament).

Reportedly the tool is due this Spring. But even when it does finally drop it represents another classic piece of gaslighting by Facebook, given how it seeks to normalize (and so enable) the platform’s pervasive abuse of its users’ data.

Truth is, there is no master ‘off’ switch for Facebook’s ongoing surveillance. Such a switch — were it to exist — would represent a genuine control for users. But Zuckerberg isn’t offering it.

Instead his company continues to groom users into accepting being creeped on by offering pantomime settings that boil down to little more than privacy theatre — if they even realize they’re there.

‘Hit the button! Reset cookies! Delete browsing history! Keep playing Facebook!’

An interstitial reset is clearly also a dilute decoy. It’s not the same as being able to erase all extracted insights Facebook’s infrastructure continuously mines from users, using these derivatives to target people with behavioral ads; tracking and profiling on an ongoing basis by creeping on browsing activity (on and off Facebook), and also by buying third party data on its users from brokers.

Multiple signals and inferences are used to flesh out individual ad profiles on an ongoing basis, meaning the files are never static. And there’s simply no way to tell Facebook to burn your digital ad mannequin. Not even if you delete your Facebook account.

Nor, indeed, is there a way to get a complete read out from Facebook on all the data it’s attached to your identity. Even in Europe, where companies are subject to strict privacy laws that place a legal requirement on data controllers to disclose all personal data they hold on a person on request, as well as who they’re sharing it with, for what purposes, under what legal grounds.

Last year Paul-Olivier Dehaye, the founder of PersonalData.IO, a startup that aims to help people control how their personal data is accessed by companies, recounted in the UK parliament how he’d spent years trying to obtain all his personal information from Facebook — with the company resorting to legal arguments to block his subject access request.

Dehaye said he had succeeded in extracting a bit more of his data from Facebook than it initially handed over. But it was still just a “snapshot”, not an exhaustive list, of all the advertisers who Facebook had shared his data with. This glimpsed tip implies a staggeringly massive personal data iceberg lurking beneath the surface of each and every one of the 2.2BN+ Facebook users. (Though the figure is likely even more massive because it tracks non-users too.)

Zuckerberg’s “complete control” wording is therefore at best self-serving and at worst an outright lie. Facebook’s business has complete control of users by offering only a superficial layer of confusing and fiddly, ever-shifting controls that demand continued presence on the platform to use them, and ongoing effort to keep on top of settings changes (which are always, to a fault, privacy hostile), making managing your personal data a life-long chore.

Facebook’s power dynamic puts the onus squarely on the user to keep finding and hitting reset button.

But this too is a distraction. Resetting anything on its platform is largely futile, given Facebook retains whatever behavioral insights it already stripped off of your data (and fed to its profiling machinery). And its omnipresent background snooping carries on unchecked, amassing fresh insights you also can’t clear.

Nor does Clear History offer any control for the non-users Facebook tracks via the pixels and social plug-ins it’s larded around the mainstream web. Zuckerberg was asked about so-called shadow profiles in Congress last year — which led to this awkward exchange where he claimed not to know what the phrase refers to.

EU MEPs also seized on the issue, pushing him to respond. He did so by attempting to conflate surveillance and security — by claiming it’s necessary for Facebook to hold this data to keep “bad content out”. Which seems a bit of an ill-advised argument to make given how badly that mission is generally going for Facebook.

Still, Zuckerberg repeats the claim in the WSJ post, saying information collected for ads is “generally important for security and operating our services” — using this to address what he couches as “the important question of whether the advertising model encourages companies like ours to use and store more information than we otherwise would”.

So, essentially, Facebook’s founder is saying that the price for Facebook’s existence is pervasive surveillance of everyone, everywhere, with or without your permission.

Though he doesn’t express that ‘fact’ as a cost of his “free” platform. RIP privacy indeed.

Another pertinent example of Zuckerberg simply not telling the truth when he wrongly claims Facebook users can control their information vis-a-vis his ad business — an example which also happens to underline how pernicious his attempts to use “security” to justify eroding privacy really are — bubbled into view last fall, when Facebook finally confessed that mobile phone numbers users had provided for the specific purpose of enabling two-factor authentication (2FA) to increase the security of their accounts were also used by Facebook for ad targeting.

A company spokesperson told us that if a user wanted to opt out of the ad-based repurposing of their mobile phone data they could use non-phone number based 2FA — though Facebook only added the ability to use an app for 2FA in May last year.

What Facebook is doing on the security front is especially disingenuous BS in that it risks undermining security practice by bundling a respected tool (2FA) with ads that creep on people.

And there’s plenty more of this kind of disingenuous nonsense in Zuckerberg’s WSJ post — where he repeats a claim we first heard him utter last May, at a conference in Paris, when he suggested that following changes made to Facebook’s consent flow, ahead of updated privacy rules coming into force in Europe, the fact European users had (mostly) swallowed the new terms, rather than deleting their accounts en masse, was a sign people were majority approving of “more relevant” (i.e more creepy) Facebook ads.

Au contraire, it shows nothing of the sort. It simply underlines the fact Facebook still does not offer users a free and fair choice when it comes to consenting to their personal data being processed for behaviorally targeted ads — despite free choice being a requirement under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

If Facebook users are forced to ‘choose’ between being creeped on or deleting their account on the dominant social service where all their friends are it’s hardly a free choice. (And GDPR complaints have been filed over this exact issue of ‘forced consent‘.)

Add to that, as we said at the time, Facebook’s GDPR tweaks were lousy with manipulative, dark pattern design. So again the company is leaning on users to get the outcomes it wants.

It’s not a fair fight, any which way you look at it. But here we have Zuckerberg, the BS salesman, trying to claim his platform’s ongoing manipulation of people already enmeshed in the network is evidence for people wanting creepy ads.

The truth is that most Facebook users remain unaware of how extensively the company creeps on them (per this recent Pew research). And fiddly controls are of course even harder to get a handle on if you’re sitting in the dark.

Zuckerberg appears to concede a little ground on the transparency and control point when he writes that: “Ultimately, I believe the most important principles around data are transparency, choice and control.” But all the privacy-hostile choices he’s made; and the faux controls he’s offered; and the data mountain he simply won’t ‘fess up to sitting on shows, beyond reasonable doubt, the company cannot and will not self-regulate.

If Facebook is allowed to continue setting its own parameters and choosing its own definitions (for “transparency, choice and control”) users won’t have even one of the three principles, let alone the full house, as well they should. Facebook will just keep moving the goalposts and marking its own homework.

You can see this in the way Zuckerberg fuzzes and elides what his company really does with people’s data; and how he muddies and muddles uses for the data — such as by saying he doesn’t know what shadow profiles are; or claiming users can download ‘all their data’; or that ad profiles are somehow essential for security; or by repurposing 2FA digits to personalize ads too.

How do you try to prevent the purpose limitation principle being applied to regulate your surveillance-reliant big data ad business? Why by mixing the data streams of course! And then trying to sew confusion among regulators and policymakers by forcing them to unpick your mess.

Much like Facebook is forcing civic society to clean up its messy antisocial impacts.

Europe’s GDPR is focusing the conversation, though, and targeted complaints filed under the bloc’s new privacy regime have shown they can have teeth and so bite back against rights incursions.

But before we put another self-serving Zuckerberg screed to rest, let’s take a final look at his description of how Facebook’s ad business works. Because this is also seriously misleading. And cuts to the very heart of the “transparency, choice and control” issue he’s quite right is central to the personal data debate. (He just wants to get to define what each of those words means.)

In the article, Zuckerberg claims “people consistently tell us that if they’re going to see ads, they want them to be relevant”. But who are these “people” of which he speaks? If he’s referring to the aforementioned European Facebook users, who accepted updated terms with the same horribly creepy ads because he didn’t offer them any alternative, we would suggest that’s not a very affirmative signal.

Now if it were true that a generic group of ‘Internet people’ were consistently saying anything about online ads the loudest message would most likely be that they don’t like them. Click through rates are fantastically small. And hence also lots of people using ad blocking tools. (Growth in usage of ad blockers has also occurred in parallel with the increasing incursions of the adtech industrial surveillance complex.)

So Zuckerberg’s logical leap to claim users of free services want to be shown only the most creepy ads is really a very odd one.

Let’s now turn to Zuckerberg’s use of the word “relevant”. As we noted above, this is a euphemism. It conflates many concepts but principally it’s used by Facebook as a cloak to shield and obscure the reality of what it’s actually doing (i.e. privacy-hostile people profiling to power intrusive, behaviourally microtargeted ads) in order to avoid scrutiny of exactly those creepy and intrusive Facebook practices.

Yet the real sleight of hand is how Zuckerberg glosses over the fact that ads can be relevant without being creepy. Because ads can be contextual. They don’t have to be behaviorally targeted.

Ads can be based on — for example — a real-time search/action plus a user’s general location. Without needing to operate a vast, all-pervasive privacy-busting tracking infrastructure to feed open-ended surveillance dossiers on what everyone does online, as Facebook chooses to.

And here Zuckerberg gets really disingenuous because he uses a benign-sounding example of a contextual ad (the example he chooses contains an interest and a general location) to gloss over a detail-light explanation of how Facebook’s people tracking and profiling apparatus works.

“Based on what pages people like, what they click on, and other signals, we create categories — for example, people who like pages about gardening and live in Spain — and then charge advertisers to show ads to that category,” he writes, with that slipped in reference to “other signals” doing some careful shielding work there.

Other categories that Facebook’s algorithms have been found ready and willing to accept payment to run ads against in recent years include “jew-hater”, “How to burn Jews” and “Hitler did nothing wrong”.

Funnily enough Zuckerberg doesn’t mention those actual Facebook microtargeting categories in his glossy explainer of how its “relevant” ads business works. But they offer a far truer glimpse of the kinds of labels Facebook’s business sticks on people.

As we wrote last week, the case against behavioral ads is stacking up. Zuckerberg’s attempt to spin the same self-serving lines should really fool no one at this point.

Nor should regulators be derailed by the lie that Facebook’s creepy business model is the only version of adtech possible. It’s not even the only version of profitable adtech currently available. (Contextual ads have made Google alternative search engine DuckDuckGo profitable since 2014, for example.)

Simply put, adtech doesn’t have to be creepy to work. And ads that don’t creep on people would give publishers greater ammunition to sell ad block using readers on whitelisting their websites. A new generation of people-sensitive startups are also busy working on new forms of ad targeting that bake in privacy by design.

And with legal and regulatory risk rising, intrusive and creepy adtech that demands the equivalent of ongoing strip searches of every Internet user on the planet really look to be on borrowed time.

Facebook’s problem is it scrambled for big data and, finding it easy to suck up tonnes of the personal stuff on the unregulated Internet, built an antisocial surveillance business that needs to capture both sides of its market — eyeballs and advertisers — and keep them buying to an exploitative and even abusive relationship for its business to keep minting money.

Pivoting that tanker would certainly be tough, and in any case who’d trust a Zuckerberg who suddenly proclaimed himself the privacy messiah?

But it sure is a long way from ‘move fast and break things’ to trying to claim there’s only one business model to rule them all.

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/26/the-facts-about-facebook/

[cryptswahili]

The facts about Facebook

This is a critical reading of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s article in the WSJ on Thursday, also entitled The Facts About Facebook. 

Yes Mark, you’re right; Facebook turns 15 next month. What a long time you’ve been in the social media business! We’re curious as to whether you’ve also been keeping count of how many times you’ve been forced to apologize for breaching people’s trust or, well, otherwise royally messing up over the years.

It’s also true you weren’t setting out to build “a global company”. The predecessor to Facebook was a ‘hot or not’ game called ‘FaceMash’ that you hacked together while drinking beer in your Harvard dormroom. Your late night brainwave was to get fellow students to rate each others’ attractiveness — and you weren’t at all put off by not being in possession of the necessary photo data to do this. You just took it; hacking into the college’s online facebooks and grabbing people’s selfies without permission.

Blogging about what you were doing as you did it, you wrote: “I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.” Just in case there was any doubt as to the ugly nature of your intention. 

The seeds of Facebook’s global business were thus sewn in a crude and consentless game of clickbait whose idea titillated you so much you thought nothing of breaching security, privacy, copyright and decency norms just to grab a few eyeballs.

So while you may not have instantly understood how potent this ‘outrageous and divisive’ eyeball-grabbing content tactic would turn out to be — oh hai future global scale! — the core DNA of Facebook’s business sits in that frat boy discovery where your eureka Internet moment was finding you could win the attention jackpot by pitting people against each other.

Pretty quickly you also realized you could exploit and commercialize human one-upmanship — gotta catch em all friend lists! popularity poke wars! — and stick a badge on the resulting activity, dubbing it ‘social’.

FaceMash was antisocial, though. And the unpleasant flipside that can clearly flow from ‘social’ platforms is something you continue not being nearly honest nor open enough about. Whether it’s political disinformation, hate speech or bullying, the individual and societal impacts of maliciously minded content shared and amplified using massively mainstream tools you control is now impossible to ignore.

Yet you prefer to play down these human impacts; as a “crazy idea”, or by implying that ‘a little’ amplified human nastiness is the necessary cost of being in the big multinational business of connecting everyone and ‘socializing’ everything.

But did you ask the father of 14-year-old Molly Russell, a British schoolgirl who took her own life in 2017, whether he’s okay with your growth vs controls trade-off? “I have no doubt that Instagram helped kill my daughter,” said Russell in an interview with the BBC this week.

After her death, Molly’s parents found she had been following accounts on Instagram that were sharing graphic material related to self-harming and suicide, including some accounts that actively encourage people to cut themselves. “We didn’t know that anything like that could possibly exist on a platform like Instagram,” said Russell.

Without a human editor in the mix, your algorithmic recommendations are blind to risk and suffering. Built for global scale, they get on with the expansionist goal of maximizing clicks and views by serving more of the same sticky stuff. And more extreme versions of things users show an interest in to keep the eyeballs engaged.

So when you write about making services that “billions” of “people around the world love and use” forgive us for thinking that sounds horribly glib. The scales of suffering don’t sum like that. If your entertainment product has whipped up genocide anywhere in the world — as the UN said Facebook did in Myanmar — it’s failing regardless of the proportion of users who are having their time pleasantly wasted on and by Facebook.

And if your algorithms can’t incorporate basic checks and safeguards so they don’t accidentally encourage vulnerable teens to commit suicide you really don’t deserve to be in any consumer-facing business at all.

Yet your article shows no sign you’ve been reflecting on the kinds of human tragedies that don’t just play out on your platform but can be an emergent property of your targeting algorithms.

You focus instead on what you call “clear benefits to this business model”.

The benefits to Facebook’s business are certainly clear. You have the billions in quarterly revenue to stand that up. But what about the costs to the rest of us? Human costs are harder to quantify but you don’t even sound like you’re trying.

You do write that you’ve heard “many questions” about Facebook’s business model. Which is most certainly true but once again you’re playing down the level of political and societal concern about how your platform operates (and how you operate your platform) — deflecting and reframing what Facebook is to cast your ad business a form of quasi philanthropy; a comfortable discussion topic and self-serving idea you’d much prefer we were all sold on.

It’s also hard to shake the feeling that your phrasing at this point is intended as a bit of an in-joke for Facebook staffers — to smirk at the ‘dumb politicians’ who don’t even know how Facebook makes money.

Y’know, like you smirked…

Then you write that you want to explain how Facebook operates. But, thing is, you don’t explain — you distract, deflect, equivocate and mislead, which has been your business’ strategy through many months of scandal (that and worst tactics — such as paying a PR firm that used oppo research tactics to discredit Facebook critics with smears).

Dodging is another special power; such as how you dodged repeat requests from international parliamentarians to be held accountable for major data misuse and security breaches.

The Zuckerberg ‘open letter’ mansplain, which typically runs to thousands of blame-shifting words, is another standard issue production from the Facebook reputation crisis management toolbox.

And here you are again, ironically enough, mansplaining in a newspaper; an industry that your platform has worked keenly to gut and usurp, hungry to supplant editorially guided journalism with the moral vacuum of algorithmically geared space-filler which, left unchecked, has been shown, time and again, lifting divisive and damaging content into public view.

The latest Zuckerberg screed has nothing new to say. It’s pure spin. We’ve read scores of self-serving Facebook apologias over the years and can confirm Facebook’s founder has made a very tedious art of selling abject failure as some kind of heroic lack of perfection.

But the spin has been going on for far, far too long. Fifteen years, as you remind us. Yet given that hefty record it’s little wonder you’re moved to pen again — imagining that another word blast is all it’ll take for the silly politicians to fall in line.

Thing is, no one is asking Facebook for perfection, Mark. We’re looking for signs that you and your company have a moral compass. Because the opposite appears to be true. (Or as one UK parliamentarian put it to your CTO last year: “I remain to be convinced that your company has integrity”.)

Facebook has scaled to such an unprecedented, global size exactly because it has no editorial values. And you say again now you want to be all things to all men. Put another way that means there’s a moral vacuum sucking away at your platform’s core; a supermassive ethical blackhole that scales ad dollars by the billions because you won’t tie the kind of process knots necessary to treat humans like people, not pairs of eyeballs.

You don’t design against negative consequences or to pro-actively avoid terrible impacts — you let stuff happen and then send in the ‘trust & safety’ team once the damage has been done.

You might call designing against negative consequences a ‘growth bottleneck’; others would say it’s having a conscience.

Everything standing in the way of scaling Facebook’s usage is, under the Zuckerberg regime, collateral damage — hence the old mantra of ‘move fast and break things’ — whether it’s social cohesion, civic values or vulnerable individuals.

This is why it takes a celebrity defamation lawsuit to force your company to dribble a little more resource into doing something about scores of professional scammers paying you to pop their fraudulent schemes in a Facebook “ads” wrapper. (Albeit, you’re only taking some action in the UK in this particular case.)

Funnily enough — though it’s not at all funny and it doesn’t surprise us — Facebook is far slower and patchier when it comes to fixing things it broke.

Of course there will always be people who thrive with a digital megaphone like Facebook thrust in their hand. Scammers being a pertinent example. But the measure of a civilized society is how it protects those who can’t defend themselves from targeted attacks or scams because they lack the protective wrap of privilege. Which means people who aren’t famous. Not public figures like Martin Lewis, the consumer champion who has his own platform and enough financial resources to file a lawsuit to try to make Facebook do something about how its platform supercharges scammers.

Zuckerberg’s slippery call to ‘fight bad content with more content’ — or to fight Facebook-fuelled societal division by shifting even more of the apparatus of civic society onto Facebook — fails entirely to recognize this asymmetry.

And even in the Lewis case, Facebook remains a winner; Lewis dropped his suit and Facebook got to make a big show of signing over £500k worth of ad credit coupons to a consumer charity that will end up giving them right back to Facebook.

The company’s response to problems its platform creates is to look the other way until a trigger point of enough bad publicity gets reached. At which critical point it flips the usual crisis PR switch and sends in a few token clean up teams — who scrub a tiny proportion of terrible content; or take down a tiny number of fake accounts; or indeed make a few token and heavily publicized gestures — before leaning heavily on civil society (and on users) to take the real strain.

You might think Facebook reaching out to respected external institutions is a positive step. A sign of a maturing mindset and a shift towards taking greater responsibility for platform impacts. (And in the case of scam ads in the UK it’s donating £3M in cash and ad credits to a bona fide consumer advice charity.)

But this is still Facebook dumping problems of its making on an already under-resourced and over-worked civic sector at the same time as its platform supersizes their workload.

In recent years the company has also made a big show of getting involved with third party fact checking organizations across various markets — using these independents to stencil in a PR strategy for ‘fighting fake news’ that also entails Facebook offloading the lion’s share of the work. (It’s not paying fact checkers anything, given the clear conflict that would represent it obviously can’t).

So again external organizations are being looped into Facebook’s mess — in this case to try to drain the swamp of fakes being fenced and amplified on its platform — even as the scale of the task remains hopeless, and all sorts of junk continues to flood into and pollute the public sphere.

What’s clear is that none of these organizations has the scale or the resources to fix problems Facebook’s platform creates. Yet it serves Facebook’s purposes to be able to point to them trying.

And all the while Zuckerberg is hard at work fighting to fend off regulation that could force his company to take far more care and spend far more of its own resources (and profits) monitoring the content it monetizes by putting it in front of eyeballs.

The Facebook founder is fighting because he knows his platform is a targeted attack; On individual attention, via privacy-hostile behaviorally targeted ads (his euphemism for this is “relevant ads”); on social cohesion, via divisive algorithms that drive outrage in order to maximize platform engagement; and on democratic institutions and norms, by systematically eroding consensus and the potential for compromise between the different groups that every society is comprised of.

In his WSJ post Zuckerberg can only claim Facebook doesn’t “leave harmful or divisive content up”. He has no defence against Facebook having put it up and enabled it to spread in the first place.

Sociopaths relish having a soapbox so unsurprisingly these people find a wonderful home on Facebook. But where does empathy fit into the antisocial media equation?

As for Facebook being a ‘free’ service — a point Zuckerberg is most keen to impress in his WSJ post — it’s of course a cliché to point out that ‘if it’s free you’re the product’. (Or as the even older saying goes: ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’).

But for the avoidance of doubt, “free” access does not mean cost-free access. And in Facebook’s case the cost is both individual (to your attention and your privacy); and collective (to the public’s attention and to social cohesion).

The much bigger question is who actually benefits if “everyone” is on Facebook, as Zuckerberg would prefer. Facebook isn’t the Internet. Facebook doesn’t offer the sole means of communication, digital or otherwise. People can, and do, ‘connect’ (if you want to use such a transactional word for human relations) just fine without Facebook.

So beware the hard and self-serving sell in which Facebook’s 15-year founder seeks yet again to recast privacy as an unaffordable luxury.

Actually, Mark, it’s a fundamental human right.

The best argument Zuckerberg can muster for his goal of universal Facebook usage being good for anything other than his own business’ bottom line is to suggest small businesses could use that kind of absolute reach to drive extra growth of their own.

Though he only provides a few general data-points to support the claim; saying there are “more than 90M small businesses on Facebook” which “make up a large part of our business” (how large?) — and claiming “most” (51%?) couldn’t afford TV ads or billboards (might they be able to afford other online or newspaper ads though?); he also cites a “global survey” (how many businesses surveyed?), presumably run by Facebook itself, which he says found “half the businesses on Facebook say they’ve hired more people since they joined” (but how did you ask the question, Mark?; we’re concerned it might have been rather leading), and from there he leaps to the implied conclusion that “millions” of jobs have essentially been created by Facebook.

But did you control for common causes Mark? Or are you just trying to take credit for others’ hard work because, well, it’s politically advantageous for you to do so?

Whether Facebook’s claims about being great for small business stand up to scrutiny or not, if people’s fundamental rights are being wholesale flipped for SMEs to make a few extra bucks that’s an unacceptable trade off.

“Millions” of jobs suggestively linked to Facebook sure sounds great — but you can’t and shouldn’t overlook disproportionate individual and societal costs, as Zuckerberg is urging policymakers to here.

Let’s also not forget that some of the small business ‘jobs’ that Facebook’s platform can take definitive and major credit for creating include the Macedonia teens who became hyper-adept at seeding Facebook with fake U.S. political news, around the 2016 presidential election. But presumably those aren’t the kind of jobs Zuckerberg is advocating for.

He also repeats the spurious claim that Facebook gives users “complete control” over what it does with personal information collected for advertising.

We’ve heard this time and time again from Zuckerberg and yet it remains pure BS.

WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 10: Facebook co-founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg concludes his testimony before a combined Senate Judiciary and Commerce committee hearing in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill April 10, 2018 in Washington, DC. Zuckerberg, 33, was called to testify after it was reported that 87 million Facebook users had their personal information harvested by Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm linked to the Trump campaign. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Yo Mark! First up we’re still waiting for your much trumpeted ‘Clear History’ tool. You know, the one you claimed you thought of under questioning in Congress last year (and later used to fend off follow up questions in the European Parliament).

Reportedly the tool is due this Spring. But even when it does finally drop it represents another classic piece of gaslighting by Facebook, given how it seeks to normalize (and so enable) the platform’s pervasive abuse of its users’ data.

Truth is, there is no master ‘off’ switch for Facebook’s ongoing surveillance. Such a switch — were it to exist — would represent a genuine control for users. But Zuckerberg isn’t offering it.

Instead his company continues to groom users into accepting being creeped on by offering pantomime settings that boil down to little more than privacy theatre — if they even realize they’re there.

‘Hit the button! Reset cookies! Delete browsing history! Keep playing Facebook!’

An interstitial reset is clearly also a dilute decoy. It’s not the same as being able to erase all extracted insights Facebook’s infrastructure continuously mines from users, using these derivatives to target people with behavioral ads; tracking and profiling on an ongoing basis by creeping on browsing activity (on and off Facebook), and also by buying third party data on its users from brokers.

Multiple signals and inferences are used to flesh out individual ad profiles on an ongoing basis, meaning the files are never static. And there’s simply no way to tell Facebook to burn your digital ad mannequin. Not even if you delete your Facebook account.

Nor, indeed, is there a way to get a complete read out from Facebook on all the data it’s attached to your identity. Even in Europe, where companies are subject to strict privacy laws that place a legal requirement on data controllers to disclose all personal data they hold on a person on request, as well as who they’re sharing it with, for what purposes, under what legal grounds.

Last year Paul-Olivier Dehaye, the founder of PersonalData.IO, a startup that aims to help people control how their personal data is accessed by companies, recounted in the UK parliament how he’d spent years trying to obtain all his personal information from Facebook — with the company resorting to legal arguments to block his subject access request.

Dehaye said he had succeeded in extracting a bit more of his data from Facebook than it initially handed over. But it was still just a “snapshot”, not an exhaustive list, of all the advertisers who Facebook had shared his data with. This glimpsed tip implies a staggeringly massive personal data iceberg lurking beneath the surface of each and every one of the 2.2BN+ Facebook users. (Though the figure is likely even more massive because it tracks non-users too.)

Zuckerberg’s “complete control” wording is therefore at best self-serving and at worst an outright lie. Facebook’s business has complete control of users by offering only a superficial layer of confusing and fiddly, ever-shifting controls that demand continued presence on the platform to use them, and ongoing effort to keep on top of settings changes (which are always, to a fault, privacy hostile), making managing your personal data a life-long chore.

Facebook’s power dynamic puts the onus squarely on the user to keep finding and hitting reset button.

But this too is a distraction. Resetting anything on its platform is largely futile, given Facebook retains whatever behavioral insights it already stripped off of your data (and fed to its profiling machinery). And its omnipresent background snooping carries on unchecked, amassing fresh insights you also can’t clear.

Nor does Clear History offer any control for the non-users Facebook tracks via the pixels and social plug-ins it’s larded around the mainstream web. Zuckerberg was asked about so-called shadow profiles in Congress last year — which led to this awkward exchange where he claimed not to know what the phrase refers to.

EU MEPs also seized on the issue, pushing him to respond. He did so by attempting to conflate surveillance and security — by claiming it’s necessary for Facebook to hold this data to keep “bad content out”. Which seems a bit of an ill-advised argument to make given how badly that mission is generally going for Facebook.

Still, Zuckerberg repeats the claim in the WSJ post, saying information collected for ads is “generally important for security and operating our services” — using this to address what he couches as “the important question of whether the advertising model encourages companies like ours to use and store more information than we otherwise would”.

So, essentially, Facebook’s founder is saying that the price for Facebook’s existence is pervasive surveillance of everyone, everywhere, with or without your permission.

Though he doesn’t express that ‘fact’ as a cost of his “free” platform. RIP privacy indeed.

Another pertinent example of Zuckerberg simply not telling the truth when he wrongly claims Facebook users can control their information vis-a-vis his ad business — an example which also happens to underline how pernicious his attempts to use “security” to justify eroding privacy really are — bubbled into view last fall, when Facebook finally confessed that mobile phone numbers users had provided for the specific purpose of enabling two-factor authentication (2FA) to increase the security of their accounts were also used by Facebook for ad targeting.

A company spokesperson told us that if a user wanted to opt out of the ad-based repurposing of their mobile phone data they could use non-phone number based 2FA — though Facebook only added the ability to use an app for 2FA in May last year.

What Facebook is doing on the security front is especially disingenuous BS in that it risks undermining security practice by bundling a respected tool (2FA) with ads that creep on people.

And there’s plenty more of this kind of disingenuous nonsense in Zuckerberg’s WSJ post — where he repeats a claim we first heard him utter last May, at a conference in Paris, when he suggested that following changes made to Facebook’s consent flow, ahead of updated privacy rules coming into force in Europe, the fact European users had (mostly) swallowed the new terms, rather than deleting their accounts en masse, was a sign people were majority approving of “more relevant” (i.e more creepy) Facebook ads.

Au contraire, it shows nothing of the sort. It simply underlines the fact Facebook still does not offer users a free and fair choice when it comes to consenting to their personal data being processed for behaviorally targeted ads — despite free choice being a requirement under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

If Facebook users are forced to ‘choose’ between being creeped on or deleting their account on the dominant social service where all their friends are it’s hardly a free choice. (And GDPR complaints have been filed over this exact issue of ‘forced consent‘.)

Add to that, as we said at the time, Facebook’s GDPR tweaks were lousy with manipulative, dark pattern design. So again the company is leaning on users to get the outcomes it wants.

It’s not a fair fight, any which way you look at it. But here we have Zuckerberg, the BS salesman, trying to claim his platform’s ongoing manipulation of people already enmeshed in the network is evidence for people wanting creepy ads.

The truth is that most Facebook users remain unaware of how extensively the company creeps on them (per this recent Pew research). And fiddly controls are of course even harder to get a handle on if you’re sitting in the dark.

Zuckerberg appears to concede a little ground on the transparency and control point when he writes that: “Ultimately, I believe the most important principles around data are transparency, choice and control.” But all the privacy-hostile choices he’s made; and the faux controls he’s offered; and the data mountain he simply won’t ‘fess up to sitting on shows, beyond reasonable doubt, the company cannot and will not self-regulate.

If Facebook is allowed to continue setting its own parameters and choosing its own definitions (for “transparency, choice and control”) users won’t have even one of the three principles, let alone the full house, as well they should. Facebook will just keep moving the goalposts and marking its own homework.

You can see this in the way Zuckerberg fuzzes and elides what his company really does with people’s data; and how he muddies and muddles uses for the data — such as by saying he doesn’t know what shadow profiles are; or claiming users can download ‘all their data’; or that ad profiles are somehow essential for security; or by repurposing 2FA digits to personalize ads too.

How do you try to prevent the purpose limitation principle being applied to regulate your surveillance-reliant big data ad business? Why by mixing the data streams of course! And then trying to sew confusion among regulators and policymakers by forcing them to unpick your mess.

Much like Facebook is forcing civic society to clean up its messy antisocial impacts.

Europe’s GDPR is focusing the conversation, though, and targeted complaints filed under the bloc’s new privacy regime have shown they can have teeth and so bite back against rights incursions.

But before we put another self-serving Zuckerberg screed to rest, let’s take a final look at his description of how Facebook’s ad business works. Because this is also seriously misleading. And cuts to the very heart of the “transparency, choice and control” issue he’s quite right is central to the personal data debate. (He just wants to get to define what each of those words means.)

In the article, Zuckerberg claims “people consistently tell us that if they’re going to see ads, they want them to be relevant”. But who are these “people” of which he speaks? If he’s referring to the aforementioned European Facebook users, who accepted updated terms with the same horribly creepy ads because he didn’t offer them any alternative, we would suggest that’s not a very affirmative signal.

Now if it were true that a generic group of ‘Internet people’ were consistently saying anything about online ads the loudest message would most likely be that they don’t like them. Click through rates are fantastically small. And hence also lots of people using ad blocking tools. (Growth in usage of ad blockers has also occurred in parallel with the increasing incursions of the adtech industrial surveillance complex.)

So Zuckerberg’s logical leap to claim users of free services want to be shown only the most creepy ads is really a very odd one.

Let’s now turn to Zuckerberg’s use of the word “relevant”. As we noted above, this is a euphemism. It conflates many concepts but principally it’s used by Facebook as a cloak to shield and obscure the reality of what it’s actually doing (i.e. privacy-hostile people profiling to power intrusive, behaviourally microtargeted ads) in order to avoid scrutiny of exactly those creepy and intrusive Facebook practices.

Yet the real sleight of hand is how Zuckerberg glosses over the fact that ads can be relevant without being creepy. Because ads can be contextual. They don’t have to be behaviorally targeted.

Ads can be based on — for example — a real-time search/action plus a user’s general location. Without needing to operate a vast, all-pervasive privacy-busting tracking infrastructure to feed open-ended surveillance dossiers on what everyone does online, as Facebook chooses to.

And here Zuckerberg gets really disingenuous because he uses a benign-sounding example of a contextual ad (the example he chooses contains an interest and a general location) to gloss over a detail-light explanation of how Facebook’s people tracking and profiling apparatus works.

“Based on what pages people like, what they click on, and other signals, we create categories — for example, people who like pages about gardening and live in Spain — and then charge advertisers to show ads to that category,” he writes, with that slipped in reference to “other signals” doing some careful shielding work there.

Other categories that Facebook’s algorithms have been found ready and willing to accept payment to run ads against in recent years include “jew-hater”, “How to burn Jews” and “Hitler did nothing wrong”.

Funnily enough Zuckerberg doesn’t mention those actual Facebook microtargeting categories in his glossy explainer of how its “relevant” ads business works. But they offer a far truer glimpse of the kinds of labels Facebook’s business sticks on people.

As we wrote last week, the case against behavioral ads is stacking up. Zuckerberg’s attempt to spin the same self-serving lines should really fool no one at this point.

Nor should regulators be derailed by the lie that Facebook’s creepy business model is the only version of adtech possible. It’s not even the only version of profitable adtech currently available. (Contextual ads have made Google alternative search engine DuckDuckGo profitable since 2014, for example.)

Simply put, adtech doesn’t have to be creepy to work. And ads that don’t creep on people would give publishers greater ammunition to sell ad block using readers on whitelisting their websites. A new generation of people-sensitive startups are also busy working on new forms of ad targeting that bake in privacy by design.

And with legal and regulatory risk rising, intrusive and creepy adtech that demands the equivalent of ongoing strip searches of every Internet user on the planet really look to be on borrowed time.

Facebook’s problem is it scrambled for big data and, finding it easy to suck up tonnes of the personal stuff on the unregulated Internet, built an antisocial surveillance business that needs to capture both sides of its market — eyeballs and advertisers — and keep them buying to an exploitative and even abusive relationship for its business to keep minting money.

Pivoting that tanker would certainly be tough, and in any case who’d trust a Zuckerberg who suddenly proclaimed himself the privacy messiah?

But it sure is a long way from ‘move fast and break things’ to trying to claim there’s only one business model to rule them all.

[Telegram Channel | Original Article ]

[fmservers]

The facts about Facebook

This is a critical reading of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s article in the WSJ on Thursday, also entitled The Facts About Facebook. 

Yes Mark, you’re right; Facebook turns 15 next month. What a long time you’ve been in the social media business! We’re curious as to whether you’ve also been keeping count of how many times you’ve been forced to apologize for breaching people’s trust or, well, otherwise royally messing up over the years.

It’s also true you weren’t setting out to build “a global company”. The predecessor to Facebook was a ‘hot or not’ game called ‘FaceMash’ that you hacked together while drinking beer in your Harvard dormroom. Your late night brainwave was to get fellow students to rate each others’ attractiveness — and you weren’t at all put off by not being in possession of the necessary photo data to do this. You just took it; hacking into the college’s online facebooks and grabbing people’s selfies without permission.

Blogging about what you were doing as you did it, you wrote: “I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.” Just in case there was any doubt as to the ugly nature of your intention. 

The seeds of Facebook’s global business were thus sewn in a crude and consentless game of clickbait whose idea titillated you so much you thought nothing of breaching security, privacy, copyright and decency norms just to grab a few eyeballs.

So while you may not have instantly understood how potent this ‘outrageous and divisive’ eyeball-grabbing content tactic would turn out to be — oh hai future global scale! — the core DNA of Facebook’s business sits in that frat boy discovery where your eureka Internet moment was finding you could win the attention jackpot by pitting people against each other.

Pretty quickly you also realized you could exploit and commercialize human one-upmanship — gotta catch em all friend lists! popularity poke wars! — and stick a badge on the resulting activity, dubbing it ‘social’.

FaceMash was antisocial, though. And the unpleasant flipside that can clearly flow from ‘social’ platforms is something you continue not being nearly honest nor open enough about. Whether it’s political disinformation, hate speech or bullying, the individual and societal impacts of maliciously minded content shared and amplified using massively mainstream tools you control is now impossible to ignore.

Yet you prefer to play down these human impacts; as a “crazy idea”, or by implying that ‘a little’ amplified human nastiness is the necessary cost of being in the big multinational business of connecting everyone and ‘socializing’ everything.

But did you ask the father of 14-year-old Molly Russell, a British schoolgirl who took her own life in 2017, whether he’s okay with your growth vs controls trade-off? “I have no doubt that Instagram helped kill my daughter,” said Russell in an interview with the BBC this week.

After her death, Molly’s parents found she had been following accounts on Instagram that were sharing graphic material related to self-harming and suicide, including some accounts that actively encourage people to cut themselves. “We didn’t know that anything like that could possibly exist on a platform like Instagram,” said Russell.

Without a human editor in the mix, your algorithmic recommendations are blind to risk and suffering. Built for global scale, they get on with the expansionist goal of maximizing clicks and views by serving more of the same sticky stuff. And more extreme versions of things users show an interest in to keep the eyeballs engaged.

So when you write about making services that “billions” of “people around the world love and use” forgive us for thinking that sounds horribly glib. The scales of suffering don’t sum like that. If your entertainment product has whipped up genocide anywhere in the world — as the UN said Facebook did in Myanmar — it’s failing regardless of the proportion of users who are having their time pleasantly wasted on and by Facebook.

And if your algorithms can’t incorporate basic checks and safeguards so they don’t accidentally encourage vulnerable teens to commit suicide you really don’t deserve to be in any consumer-facing business at all.

Yet your article shows no sign you’ve been reflecting on the kinds of human tragedies that don’t just play out on your platform but can be an emergent property of your targeting algorithms.

You focus instead on what you call “clear benefits to this business model”.

The benefits to Facebook’s business are certainly clear. You have the billions in quarterly revenue to stand that up. But what about the costs to the rest of us? Human costs are harder to quantify but you don’t even sound like you’re trying.

You do write that you’ve heard “many questions” about Facebook’s business model. Which is most certainly true but once again you’re playing down the level of political and societal concern about how your platform operates (and how you operate your platform) — deflecting and reframing what Facebook is to cast your ad business a form of quasi philanthropy; a comfortable discussion topic and self-serving idea you’d much prefer we were all sold on.

It’s also hard to shake the feeling that your phrasing at this point is intended as a bit of an in-joke for Facebook staffers — to smirk at the ‘dumb politicians’ who don’t even know how Facebook makes money.

Y’know, like you smirked…

Then you write that you want to explain how Facebook operates. But, thing is, you don’t explain — you distract, deflect, equivocate and mislead, which has been your business’ strategy through many months of scandal (that and worst tactics — such as paying a PR firm that used oppo research tactics to discredit Facebook critics with smears).

Dodging is another special power; such as how you dodged repeat requests from international parliamentarians to be held accountable for major data misuse and security breaches.

The Zuckerberg ‘open letter’ mansplain, which typically runs to thousands of blame-shifting words, is another standard issue production from the Facebook reputation crisis management toolbox.

And here you are again, ironically enough, mansplaining in a newspaper; an industry that your platform has worked keenly to gut and usurp, hungry to supplant editorially guided journalism with the moral vacuum of algorithmically geared space-filler which, left unchecked, has been shown, time and again, lifting divisive and damaging content into public view.

The latest Zuckerberg screed has nothing new to say. It’s pure spin. We’ve read scores of self-serving Facebook apologias over the years and can confirm Facebook’s founder has made a very tedious art of selling abject failure as some kind of heroic lack of perfection.

But the spin has been going on for far, far too long. Fifteen years, as you remind us. Yet given that hefty record it’s little wonder you’re moved to pen again — imagining that another word blast is all it’ll take for the silly politicians to fall in line.

Thing is, no one is asking Facebook for perfection, Mark. We’re looking for signs that you and your company have a moral compass. Because the opposite appears to be true. (Or as one UK parliamentarian put it to your CTO last year: “I remain to be convinced that your company has integrity”.)

Facebook has scaled to such an unprecedented, global size exactly because it has no editorial values. And you say again now you want to be all things to all men. Put another way that means there’s a moral vacuum sucking away at your platform’s core; a supermassive ethical blackhole that scales ad dollars by the billions because you won’t tie the kind of process knots necessary to treat humans like people, not pairs of eyeballs.

You don’t design against negative consequences or to pro-actively avoid terrible impacts — you let stuff happen and then send in the ‘trust & safety’ team once the damage has been done.

You might call designing against negative consequences a ‘growth bottleneck’; others would say it’s having a conscience.

Everything standing in the way of scaling Facebook’s usage is, under the Zuckerberg regime, collateral damage — hence the old mantra of ‘move fast and break things’ — whether it’s social cohesion, civic values or vulnerable individuals.

This is why it takes a celebrity defamation lawsuit to force your company to dribble a little more resource into doing something about scores of professional scammers paying you to pop their fraudulent schemes in a Facebook “ads” wrapper. (Albeit, you’re only taking some action in the UK in this particular case.)

Funnily enough — though it’s not at all funny and it doesn’t surprise us — Facebook is far slower and patchier when it comes to fixing things it broke.

Of course there will always be people who thrive with a digital megaphone like Facebook thrust in their hand. Scammers being a pertinent example. But the measure of a civilized society is how it protects those who can’t defend themselves from targeted attacks or scams because they lack the protective wrap of privilege. Which means people who aren’t famous. Not public figures like Martin Lewis, the consumer champion who has his own platform and enough financial resources to file a lawsuit to try to make Facebook do something about how its platform supercharges scammers.

Zuckerberg’s slippery call to ‘fight bad content with more content’ — or to fight Facebook-fuelled societal division by shifting even more of the apparatus of civic society onto Facebook — fails entirely to recognize this asymmetry.

And even in the Lewis case, Facebook remains a winner; Lewis dropped his suit and Facebook got to make a big show of signing over £500k worth of ad credit coupons to a consumer charity that will end up giving them right back to Facebook.

The company’s response to problems its platform creates is to look the other way until a trigger point of enough bad publicity gets reached. At which critical point it flips the usual crisis PR switch and sends in a few token clean up teams — who scrub a tiny proportion of terrible content; or take down a tiny number of fake accounts; or indeed make a few token and heavily publicized gestures — before leaning heavily on civil society (and on users) to take the real strain.

You might think Facebook reaching out to respected external institutions is a positive step. A sign of a maturing mindset and a shift towards taking greater responsibility for platform impacts. (And in the case of scam ads in the UK it’s donating £3M in cash and ad credits to a bona fide consumer advice charity.)

But this is still Facebook dumping problems of its making on an already under-resourced and over-worked civic sector at the same time as its platform supersizes their workload.

In recent years the company has also made a big show of getting involved with third party fact checking organizations across various markets — using these independents to stencil in a PR strategy for ‘fighting fake news’ that also entails Facebook offloading the lion’s share of the work. (It’s not paying fact checkers anything, given the clear conflict that would represent it obviously can’t).

So again external organizations are being looped into Facebook’s mess — in this case to try to drain the swamp of fakes being fenced and amplified on its platform — even as the scale of the task remains hopeless, and all sorts of junk continues to flood into and pollute the public sphere.

What’s clear is that none of these organizations has the scale or the resources to fix problems Facebook’s platform creates. Yet it serves Facebook’s purposes to be able to point to them trying.

And all the while Zuckerberg is hard at work fighting to fend off regulation that could force his company to take far more care and spend far more of its own resources (and profits) monitoring the content it monetizes by putting it in front of eyeballs.

The Facebook founder is fighting because he knows his platform is a targeted attack; On individual attention, via privacy-hostile behaviorally targeted ads (his euphemism for this is “relevant ads”); on social cohesion, via divisive algorithms that drive outrage in order to maximize platform engagement; and on democratic institutions and norms, by systematically eroding consensus and the potential for compromise between the different groups that every society is comprised of.

In his WSJ post Zuckerberg can only claim Facebook doesn’t “leave harmful or divisive content up”. He has no defence against Facebook having put it up and enabled it to spread in the first place.

Sociopaths relish having a soapbox so unsurprisingly these people find a wonderful home on Facebook. But where does empathy fit into the antisocial media equation?

As for Facebook being a ‘free’ service — a point Zuckerberg is most keen to impress in his WSJ post — it’s of course a cliché to point out that ‘if it’s free you’re the product’. (Or as the even older saying goes: ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’).

But for the avoidance of doubt, “free” access does not mean cost-free access. And in Facebook’s case the cost is both individual (to your attention and your privacy); and collective (to the public’s attention and to social cohesion).

The much bigger question is who actually benefits if “everyone” is on Facebook, as Zuckerberg would prefer. Facebook isn’t the Internet. Facebook doesn’t offer the sole means of communication, digital or otherwise. People can, and do, ‘connect’ (if you want to use such a transactional word for human relations) just fine without Facebook.

So beware the hard and self-serving sell in which Facebook’s 15-year founder seeks yet again to recast privacy as an unaffordable luxury.

Actually, Mark, it’s a fundamental human right.

The best argument Zuckerberg can muster for his goal of universal Facebook usage being good for anything other than his own business’ bottom line is to suggest small businesses could use that kind of absolute reach to drive extra growth of their own.

Though he only provides a few general data-points to support the claim; saying there are “more than 90M small businesses on Facebook” which “make up a large part of our business” (how large?) — and claiming “most” (51%?) couldn’t afford TV ads or billboards (might they be able to afford other online or newspaper ads though?); he also cites a “global survey” (how many businesses surveyed?), presumably run by Facebook itself, which he says found “half the businesses on Facebook say they’ve hired more people since they joined” (but how did you ask the question, Mark?; we’re concerned it might have been rather leading), and from there he leaps to the implied conclusion that “millions” of jobs have essentially been created by Facebook.

But did you control for common causes Mark? Or are you just trying to take credit for others’ hard work because, well, it’s politically advantageous for you to do so?

Whether Facebook’s claims about being great for small business stand up to scrutiny or not, if people’s fundamental rights are being wholesale flipped for SMEs to make a few extra bucks that’s an unacceptable trade off.

“Millions” of jobs suggestively linked to Facebook sure sounds great — but you can’t and shouldn’t overlook disproportionate individual and societal costs, as Zuckerberg is urging policymakers to here.

Let’s also not forget that some of the small business ‘jobs’ that Facebook’s platform can take definitive and major credit for creating include the Macedonia teens who became hyper-adept at seeding Facebook with fake U.S. political news, around the 2016 presidential election. But presumably those aren’t the kind of jobs Zuckerberg is advocating for.

He also repeats the spurious claim that Facebook gives users “complete control” over what it does with personal information collected for advertising.

We’ve heard this time and time again from Zuckerberg and yet it remains pure BS.

WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 10: Facebook co-founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg concludes his testimony before a combined Senate Judiciary and Commerce committee hearing in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill April 10, 2018 in Washington, DC. Zuckerberg, 33, was called to testify after it was reported that 87 million Facebook users had their personal information harvested by Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm linked to the Trump campaign. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Yo Mark! First up we’re still waiting for your much trumpeted ‘Clear History’ tool. You know, the one you claimed you thought of under questioning in Congress last year (and later used to fend off follow up questions in the European Parliament).

Reportedly the tool is due this Spring. But even when it does finally drop it represents another classic piece of gaslighting by Facebook, given how it seeks to normalize (and so enable) the platform’s pervasive abuse of its users’ data.

Truth is, there is no master ‘off’ switch for Facebook’s ongoing surveillance. Such a switch — were it to exist — would represent a genuine control for users. But Zuckerberg isn’t offering it.

Instead his company continues to groom users into accepting being creeped on by offering pantomime settings that boil down to little more than privacy theatre — if they even realize they’re there.

‘Hit the button! Reset cookies! Delete browsing history! Keep playing Facebook!’

An interstitial reset is clearly also a dilute decoy. It’s not the same as being able to erase all extracted insights Facebook’s infrastructure continuously mines from users, using these derivatives to target people with behavioral ads; tracking and profiling on an ongoing basis by creeping on browsing activity (on and off Facebook), and also by buying third party data on its users from brokers.

Multiple signals and inferences are used to flesh out individual ad profiles on an ongoing basis, meaning the files are never static. And there’s simply no way to tell Facebook to burn your digital ad mannequin. Not even if you delete your Facebook account.

Nor, indeed, is there a way to get a complete read out from Facebook on all the data it’s attached to your identity. Even in Europe, where companies are subject to strict privacy laws that place a legal requirement on data controllers to disclose all personal data they hold on a person on request, as well as who they’re sharing it with, for what purposes, under what legal grounds.

Last year Paul-Olivier Dehaye, the founder of PersonalData.IO, a startup that aims to help people control how their personal data is accessed by companies, recounted in the UK parliament how he’d spent years trying to obtain all his personal information from Facebook — with the company resorting to legal arguments to block his subject access request.

Dehaye said he had succeeded in extracting a bit more of his data from Facebook than it initially handed over. But it was still just a “snapshot”, not an exhaustive list, of all the advertisers who Facebook had shared his data with. This glimpsed tip implies a staggeringly massive personal data iceberg lurking beneath the surface of each and every one of the 2.2BN+ Facebook users. (Though the figure is likely even more massive because it tracks non-users too.)

Zuckerberg’s “complete control” wording is therefore at best self-serving and at worst an outright lie. Facebook’s business has complete control of users by offering only a superficial layer of confusing and fiddly, ever-shifting controls that demand continued presence on the platform to use them, and ongoing effort to keep on top of settings changes (which are always, to a fault, privacy hostile), making managing your personal data a life-long chore.

Facebook’s power dynamic puts the onus squarely on the user to keep finding and hitting reset button.

But this too is a distraction. Resetting anything on its platform is largely futile, given Facebook retains whatever behavioral insights it already stripped off of your data (and fed to its profiling machinery). And its omnipresent background snooping carries on unchecked, amassing fresh insights you also can’t clear.

Nor does Clear History offer any control for the non-users Facebook tracks via the pixels and social plug-ins it’s larded around the mainstream web. Zuckerberg was asked about so-called shadow profiles in Congress last year — which led to this awkward exchange where he claimed not to know what the phrase refers to.

EU MEPs also seized on the issue, pushing him to respond. He did so by attempting to conflate surveillance and security — by claiming it’s necessary for Facebook to hold this data to keep “bad content out”. Which seems a bit of an ill-advised argument to make given how badly that mission is generally going for Facebook.

Still, Zuckerberg repeats the claim in the WSJ post, saying information collected for ads is “generally important for security and operating our services” — using this to address what he couches as “the important question of whether the advertising model encourages companies like ours to use and store more information than we otherwise would”.

So, essentially, Facebook’s founder is saying that the price for Facebook’s existence is pervasive surveillance of everyone, everywhere, with or without your permission.

Though he doesn’t express that ‘fact’ as a cost of his “free” platform. RIP privacy indeed.

Another pertinent example of Zuckerberg simply not telling the truth when he wrongly claims Facebook users can control their information vis-a-vis his ad business — an example which also happens to underline how pernicious his attempts to use “security” to justify eroding privacy really are — bubbled into view last fall, when Facebook finally confessed that mobile phone numbers users had provided for the specific purpose of enabling two-factor authentication (2FA) to increase the security of their accounts were also used by Facebook for ad targeting.

A company spokesperson told us that if a user wanted to opt out of the ad-based repurposing of their mobile phone data they could use non-phone number based 2FA — though Facebook only added the ability to use an app for 2FA in May last year.

What Facebook is doing on the security front is especially disingenuous BS in that it risks undermining security practice by bundling a respected tool (2FA) with ads that creep on people.

And there’s plenty more of this kind of disingenuous nonsense in Zuckerberg’s WSJ post — where he repeats a claim we first heard him utter last May, at a conference in Paris, when he suggested that following changes made to Facebook’s consent flow, ahead of updated privacy rules coming into force in Europe, the fact European users had (mostly) swallowed the new terms, rather than deleting their accounts en masse, was a sign people were majority approving of “more relevant” (i.e more creepy) Facebook ads.

Au contraire, it shows nothing of the sort. It simply underlines the fact Facebook still does not offer users a free and fair choice when it comes to consenting to their personal data being processed for behaviorally targeted ads — despite free choice being a requirement under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

If Facebook users are forced to ‘choose’ between being creeped on or deleting their account on the dominant social service where all their friends are it’s hardly a free choice. (And GDPR complaints have been filed over this exact issue of ‘forced consent‘.)

Add to that, as we said at the time, Facebook’s GDPR tweaks were lousy with manipulative, dark pattern design. So again the company is leaning on users to get the outcomes it wants.

It’s not a fair fight, any which way you look at it. But here we have Zuckerberg, the BS salesman, trying to claim his platform’s ongoing manipulation of people already enmeshed in the network is evidence for people wanting creepy ads.

The truth is that most Facebook users remain unaware of how extensively the company creeps on them (per this recent Pew research). And fiddly controls are of course even harder to get a handle on if you’re sitting in the dark.

Zuckerberg appears to concede a little ground on the transparency and control point when he writes that: “Ultimately, I believe the most important principles around data are transparency, choice and control.” But all the privacy-hostile choices he’s made; and the faux controls he’s offered; and the data mountain he simply won’t ‘fess up to sitting on shows, beyond reasonable doubt, the company cannot and will not self-regulate.

If Facebook is allowed to continue setting its own parameters and choosing its own definitions (for “transparency, choice and control”) users won’t have even one of the three principles, let alone the full house, as well they should. Facebook will just keep moving the goalposts and marking its own homework.

You can see this in the way Zuckerberg fuzzes and elides what his company really does with people’s data; and how he muddies and muddles uses for the data — such as by saying he doesn’t know what shadow profiles are; or claiming users can download ‘all their data’; or that ad profiles are somehow essential for security; or by repurposing 2FA digits to personalize ads too.

How do you try to prevent the purpose limitation principle being applied to regulate your surveillance-reliant big data ad business? Why by mixing the data streams of course! And then trying to sew confusion among regulators and policymakers by forcing them to unpick your mess.

Much like Facebook is forcing civic society to clean up its messy antisocial impacts.

Europe’s GDPR is focusing the conversation, though, and targeted complaints filed under the bloc’s new privacy regime have shown they can have teeth and so bite back against rights incursions.

But before we put another self-serving Zuckerberg screed to rest, let’s take a final look at his description of how Facebook’s ad business works. Because this is also seriously misleading. And cuts to the very heart of the “transparency, choice and control” issue he’s quite right is central to the personal data debate. (He just wants to get to define what each of those words means.)

In the article, Zuckerberg claims “people consistently tell us that if they’re going to see ads, they want them to be relevant”. But who are these “people” of which he speaks? If he’s referring to the aforementioned European Facebook users, who accepted updated terms with the same horribly creepy ads because he didn’t offer them any alternative, we would suggest that’s not a very affirmative signal.

Now if it were true that a generic group of ‘Internet people’ were consistently saying anything about online ads the loudest message would most likely be that they don’t like them. Click through rates are fantastically small. And hence also lots of people using ad blocking tools. (Growth in usage of ad blockers has also occurred in parallel with the increasing incursions of the adtech industrial surveillance complex.)

So Zuckerberg’s logical leap to claim users of free services want to be shown only the most creepy ads is really a very odd one.

Let’s now turn to Zuckerberg’s use of the word “relevant”. As we noted above, this is a euphemism. It conflates many concepts but principally it’s used by Facebook as a cloak to shield and obscure the reality of what it’s actually doing (i.e. privacy-hostile people profiling to power intrusive, behaviourally microtargeted ads) in order to avoid scrutiny of exactly those creepy and intrusive Facebook practices.

Yet the real sleight of hand is how Zuckerberg glosses over the fact that ads can be relevant without being creepy. Because ads can be contextual. They don’t have to be behaviorally targeted.

Ads can be based on — for example — a real-time search/action plus a user’s general location. Without needing to operate a vast, all-pervasive privacy-busting tracking infrastructure to feed open-ended surveillance dossiers on what everyone does online, as Facebook chooses to.

And here Zuckerberg gets really disingenuous because he uses a benign-sounding example of a contextual ad (the example he chooses contains an interest and a general location) to gloss over a detail-light explanation of how Facebook’s people tracking and profiling apparatus works.

“Based on what pages people like, what they click on, and other signals, we create categories — for example, people who like pages about gardening and live in Spain — and then charge advertisers to show ads to that category,” he writes, with that slipped in reference to “other signals” doing some careful shielding work there.

Other categories that Facebook’s algorithms have been found ready and willing to accept payment to run ads against in recent years include “jew-hater”, “How to burn Jews” and “Hitler did nothing wrong”.

Funnily enough Zuckerberg doesn’t mention those actual Facebook microtargeting categories in his glossy explainer of how its “relevant” ads business works. But they offer a far truer glimpse of the kinds of labels Facebook’s business sticks on people.

As we wrote last week, the case against behavioral ads is stacking up. Zuckerberg’s attempt to spin the same self-serving lines should really fool no one at this point.

Nor should regulators be derailed by the lie that Facebook’s creepy business model is the only version of adtech possible. It’s not even the only version of profitable adtech currently available. (Contextual ads have made Google alternative search engine DuckDuckGo profitable since 2014, for example.)

Simply put, adtech doesn’t have to be creepy to work. And ads that don’t creep on people would give publishers greater ammunition to sell ad block using readers on whitelisting their websites. A new generation of people-sensitive startups are also busy working on new forms of ad targeting that bake in privacy by design.

And with legal and regulatory risk rising, intrusive and creepy adtech that demands the equivalent of ongoing strip searches of every Internet user on the planet really look to be on borrowed time.

Facebook’s problem is it scrambled for big data and, finding it easy to suck up tonnes of the personal stuff on the unregulated Internet, built an antisocial surveillance business that needs to capture both sides of its market — eyeballs and advertisers — and keep them buying to an exploitative and even abusive relationship for its business to keep minting money.

Pivoting that tanker would certainly be tough, and in any case who’d trust a Zuckerberg who suddenly proclaimed himself the privacy messiah?

But it sure is a long way from ‘move fast and break things’ to trying to claim there’s only one business model to rule them all.

Via Natasha Lomas https://techcrunch.com

[king-shrug]

What's So Trendy About SEO 2019 That Everyone Went Crazy Over It?

Magento will be an outstanding e-Commerce platform along with inbuilt SEO. Off-page SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION concentrates on increasing the authority associated with your domain through the act associated with getting links from all some other websites. Regarding: Search Engine Journal's flagship meeting, SEJ Summit, is dedicated to providing SEO pros the actual require, with an agenda of unique, first-run presentations covering the most recent SEO and PPC tactics through renowned experts, plus excellent social networking opportunities. SEO combines official lookup engine guidelines, empirical knowledge, plus theoretical knowledge from science documents or patents. This is definitely a half-day workshop at LeadsCon that will be designed to be able to give attendees an end-to-end look at of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), how it works, and real things they can do nowadays to improve their SEO overall performance. After the Search engines Panda algorithm appeared, SEO professionals realized just how much key word frequency and density matters. SEO means optimizing your content so it shows up a great deal more often in search results. 33. With social media systems like Facebook diminishing visibility associated with companies and brands, SEO (as well as paid promotion) is definitely becoming critically important for generating traffic to your social stations. 2019 dates TBD. ). Why go to: One-track conference full of forward-thinking, tactical sessions in SEO, development marketing, the mobile landscape, analytics, content marketing and more. ” Don't miss the LeadsCon Meeting in Vegas, March 4-6, 2019. The traditional method to SEO has been devoted to creating excellent content that will is easily searchable via research engine bots. To realize SEO, you'll also need in order to know how Google search functions. 2019 can still use many of these types of newly implemented tactics, but look for engine optimization experts are in addition suggesting there will be even more. Currently more than half associated with searches account for mobile gadgets, and the number will surely move up in 2019. Within the remaining 2018 quarter, a person need to invest in mobile-first content that will rank a person higher in mobile search within 2019. The vast majority of your SEO learning ought to come from online resources, yet there are a few publications that will help you conceptually understand the history of lookup, search engines, and how SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION has changed through the many years. There are numerous methods that webmasters use within order to entice potential clients to their site—one of the particular most important and effective associated with those being Seo (SEO). SEO is important for plenty of companies because if individuals find you using a web research and find what they're searching for, you can receive a lot of new web visitors that will can help you earn even more money. Good SEO follows guidelines that Search engines determines are best practices in order to have your articles ranked upon top. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION services do thorough keyword analysis for the specific website, and after that optimize the information on the particular basis of these keywords plus theme of website. Content written simply by customers gives sites legitimacy plus it earns SEO juice each from manual and automatic ranking systems. Inside 2018, this trend is upon the rise and if an individual invest in making your web site mobile friendly you will delight in higher ratings in 2019 as well. When making a site for Google in 2018, a person need to understand that Search engines has a long list associated with things it will mark websites down for, and that's generally old-school SEO tactics which are usually now classed as ‘webspam‘. Besides getting social plus having a good time, your own social media profiles can favorably affect your SEO efforts. Since so many people trust in voice search being the tendency in 2019, I, Nicole Bermack (this article's author), am coining the word Blog9T VSO - voice research optimization. Clever brands and agencies are changing new SEO, social and content material marketing strategies to join their own customer conversations. Search engine marketing (SEO) is the art plus science of getting pages in order to rank higher in search motors such as Google. A person can audit your page's SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION health, compare SEO metrics with regard to a number of pages, plus analyze both external and inner links on any given internet page. Content companies that will offer SEO content creation solutions are experts in creating content material that are not only improved for search engine rankings yet also add value for your own business in terms of brand name awareness, customer engagement and enhanced sales. Keep in mind that will links, content, and user knowledge are all major SEO position factors. Could holistic approach will ultimately eliminate a lot of the particular issues created by some SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION practitioners over the years, We suspect that search engines' technical engineers will initially overestimate the accuracy of their AI, resulting within Penguin-level collateral damage. SEO (Search Motor Optimization) is the process associated with making a website more noticeable in search results, also called improving search rankings. Siteimprove SEO furthermore provides in-tool tips on where to start and the way to get the most out associated with your keyword research and supervising. We've already been operating in the SEO plus content marketing industry since last year and know how search motors work. Presently there are a great number associated with resources out there surrounding competing link analysis (and a great deal that have been authored simply by me! ) but whenever We speak with people that are usually working on SEO projects, really always one of those "yeah, I understand I should do this more" tasks. Amy Kilvington, Marketing Executive at Custom Drapes, believes that SEOs are heading to have to optimize social media marketing more as Google indexes this and prioritizes it over their particular sites' pages. Social media is definitely the easiest and most efficient way to push the SEO-based content. However, right now there are some easy adjustments that will you can make to the particular search engine optimization (SEO) component of it, which will ideally provide you with fantastic results. To get a better SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, helps your website can obtain on the top among well-known search engines like Bing plus Google. On the various other side, you can ensure a good effective content marketing campaign just when you apply the SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION techniques properly. SEO -- Search engine optimization: the procedure of making your blog better with regard to search engines. The purpose of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION writing is to make your own company more visual, more attractive in website search engines. SEO will be the practice of increasing typically the quantity and quality of site visitors to your website through natural and organic search engine results. 31. SEO data can notify a smart social media technique. Solid keyword & marketplace research assist SEO strategy plus allow us to supply 15 Things You Should Do In SEO 2019 realistic projections and forecasts of opportunity inside your market. Nevertheless, when this comes to developing and performing an audio SEO strategy intended for your business, just creating content material for the keywords your clients are looking for is each arduous and, well, wrong. In this situation, in, the article ranks correct after the official Google suggestions (and it makes sense that will Google should be number one on their own branded query) but Smashing magazine is demonstrated as a position 0” little of text on the question Google pop up guidelines” within. Search Engine Land, a top quality SEO blog this is the pillar of the community will be ranking after Smashing (which occurs to be associated with a style blog than an SEO one). If you work in lookup marketing, you'll know that SMX is one of the greatest search engine marketing conferences associated with the year, covering topics which includes SEO and PPC. SEO is conducted each on-site and off-site via various resources that are the existence of your web identity associated with different social media platform plus prominent display of your cyberspace link on other well-reputed internet sites. Our unique data science-driven SEO & content marketing platform can help your eCommerce business discover millions of dollars' worth of earlier untapped organic search marketing possibilities. On the other hands, if the website doesn't make use of any digital marketing strategies or even SEO services, no one troubles to search for pages plus pages on Google just in order to find your website and go to it. Some dentists, who have got tried applying SEO, have not really been very successful in moving their website to the best of Google search engine. Prior to we do, let's check out there a couple essential areas with regard to SEO: social media and cellular. SEO can price between $100 and $500 for each month if you do this yourself with a keyword analysis tool. This SEO guideline explains acquiring links from exterior domains. Let's review the basic principles of SEO (search engine optimization). SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is conducted on the knowning that webpages rank because associated with how relevant a webpage is definitely to a search query plus how many links point in order to that webpage. Business professionals try to rely on these SEO techniques intended for optimization wishing for a larger profit. Siteimprove SEO incorporates sixty six unique SEO checks, including tests for missing meta descriptions, punctuational mistakes, broken links, outdated data files, poor readability, and links in order to unsafe domains. But in case we're looking for a larger trend it's that SEO plus what we call real marketing” will continue to blur the particular lines between them as the particular job of the SEO turns into that of a traditional internet marketer - having to understand the particular user, the competitors, the market place and also the implementation aspect. Thanks for going to the world of Search Motor Optimization (SEO). For example, we regularly produce content on the topic associated with "SEO, " but it's nevertheless very hard to rank properly on Google for such the popular topic on this acronym alone. What can this industry shifts show about the particular future of SEO and content material marketing? Search engine marketing (SEO) is on a move. Whether a person are an SEO Professional, Electronic Marketing Agency, SMB or Brand name, looking to increase your visitors or to monitor your website's evolution, this SEO software will certainly provide you with best within class digital marketing strategy evaluation and insights for your company. Their expertise is definitely incredibly valuable because there is usually plenty of science to SEO, plus it is constantly changing because search engines like Google keep on to update their algorithms. From a content viewpoint, I'd say one of the particular best ways to get SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION value out of video is usually to focus your efforts upon addressing your customer's pain factors. Therefore, cheer up and apparel up to policy for SEO- the particular organic top-ranking practice. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (search engine optimization) places your own website within the natural outcomes section of search engines. SEO is specifically important for businesses because it guarantees they're answering their audience's greatest questions on search engines, whilst driving traffic to their items and services. Regarding marketers who were brought upward in the ‘traditional SEO marketplace, ' 2018 is really the time to adapt or expire. White hat SEO includes just about all the SEO practices we've discussed about so far which have got a long term approach in order to site optimization and focus upon the user experience and exactly what people need. Cost effectiveness - SEO is definitely one of the most cost effective marketing strategies because it focuses on users who are actively searching for your products and solutions online. The reality is that you can obtain top Search engine ranking roles spending a little bit associated with money and working on the particular project yourself or paying the professional Seo services thousands associated with dollars to get your Web site on the first page. Although black hat SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION methods may boost a cyberspace search engine page rank within the short term, these strategies could also get the web site banned from the search motors altogether. According in order to research and advisory firm Forrester, programmatic marketing is expected in order to account for 50% of almost all advertising by 2019. User-generated content racks up serious SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION points by providing sites along with fresh content, bundles of back links, and sources for organically framing natural attributes. You'll find it right here Also really worth checking away is Moz's Beginner's Facts SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, ” which you'll find right here, and the SEO Success Pyramid from Small Business Search Marketing and advertising. Off-page SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION strategy refers to the impact of a change in some other websites in your search position. Bruce Clay-based set the standard for honest internet marketing by authoring the particular " SEO Code of Integrity, " now translated into eighteen languages, and it has already been a respected leader within the particular ever-changing lookup engine marketing industry since mil novecentos e noventa e seis. Website SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (including, content optimisation, meta marketing, the significance of links). A good SEO Specialist is someone that is an expert on the particular topic of search engine marketing. Just since a proper On-page and Off-page SEO optimization work will provide a better Ranking to your own website in Search Engine Outcome Page (SERP). The greatest SEO change and craze I realize already happening within 2018 is Google's switch in order to a mobile-first index, so when a site is not however mobile-friendly and optimized for this, it's critical to prioritize this particular as it is now basic for its SEO success. With good on-page SEO, research engines can easily index your own web pages, understand what your own site is about, and effortlessly navigate the structure and articles of your website, thus rank your site accordingly. You discuss core SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION strategies and tactics used in order to drive more organic search network marketing leads to a specific website or even set of websites, as properly as tactics to avoid in order to prevent penalization from search motors. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION Smart links allows you in order to specify a word, like 'SEO' and then link it in order to a post on your web site. It's great for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION to feed the search motors a good amount of keyword-rich links. Sites making use of organic SEO in the strict sense is going to end up being much like organisms, meaning these people will grow, expand and adjust over time according to readers' desires. No matter the market, the age of business, or even status of competitors, every company should at least implement fundamental SEO strategies to help their particular offerings get found on Yahoo and google. So your SEO if your own thinking mobile, needs to end up being either responsive or app-store technique with the right dimensions, style, user-friendly, UX experience. Dark hat SEO methods, such since the use of keyword filling and link farming, can furthermore boost organic SEO. SEO is definitely important in every area associated with advertising, marketing, design, optimization, movie, content, mobile and e-commerce, intended for without SEO all is untuned in need of synchronization, such as an orchestra of musicians without a good experienced conductor. Unfortunately, 95% of links through SEO link building never provide a single new visitor in order to your website. There is usually no magic wand in your own hands to regulate or manage your competitors' strategies or administration, Google analytics update, or user's behavior communicate business but a person can manage your SEO. In this particular new environment, the digital online marketer who views SEO in the broader context will surely come out there ahead of the competition within 2018 and beyond. Good SEO textbooks explain in detail how greatest to use keywords and just how to structure your entire internet site to attract the attention associated with search engine spiders and associated with human visitors, and a posting such as this cannot perform the topic justice. While businesses begin on an SEO advertising marketing campaign, they should realize that a good entire marketing campaign can drop flat on its face in case a business is unable in order to reach the masses, that will be, their target audience. If your own pages were designed to obtain the most out of Search engines, with commonly known and right now outdated SEO techniques chances are usually Google has identified this plus is throttling your rankings within some way. Numerous business people find keeping upward with the "moving target" associated with SEO distracts them from everyday priorities more than they actually imagined, so it's good in order to appear closely at what can make sense for every business. The program process for the SocialSEO Electronic Marketing and SEO Scholarship will be done 100% electronically and needs these list of materials. Businesses with multiple websites and SEO-agencies can set up report themes. Its search engine marketing group provides expertise in Pay-per-click marketing services, organic SEO and interpersonal media optimisation. The particular ads that you often observe on various web pages proven and those that also show up on the rightmost side associated with search engine results are inorganic SEO examples. While I nevertheless see this trend in have fun with with many enterprises still within the midst of their electronic transformation, the convergence in the particular MarTech space is creating a lot of synergies and opportunities and this particular should be seen as the welcome development for brands plus agencies who are looking with regard to an edge in regards in order to their SEO driven content marketing and advertising or outreach strategies. Along with the only complete certainty that SEO's, Website owners may have numerous adjustments to make to sites under their care in the particular mobile and voice search panorama. The basics of GOOD SEO hasn't changed for years - although effectiveness of particular elements provides certainly narrowed or changed within type of usefulness - a person should still be focusing upon building a simple site making use of VERY simple SEO best practices - don't perspiration the small stuff, while all-the-time paying attention to the essential stuff - add plenty of unique PAGE TITLES and lots associated with new ORIGINAL CONTENT. Keyword research is definitely THE first step of any kind of SEO campaign. SEO specialists started in order to abuse PageRank in order in order to raise the rankings. Now could be a great time to take a nearer take a look at SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION marketing information because search is getting even worse for those types of B2B plus B2C businesses. SEO marketers plus writers typically come up along with different kinds of content in order to place the necessary keywords within. These are some of the particular most used types, and every one helps to lead to the level of variety in conditions of website content. Certain black hat SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION techniques, such as keyword filling, are believed to be the SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION equivalent of spamming, and lookup engines will penalize them. Internet marketing is exclusively driven by SEO or lookup engine optimization. Others are usually simply traditional PR firms which have learned SEO as nicely as the value of hyperlinks. Here's a cliche among electronic marketers: Search engine optimization (SEO) isn't what used to end up being. Google announced that will they released several minor enhancements over the period of the particular time of about a 7 days and after analysis, experts inside the SEO industry concluded that will the updates were the outcome of keyword permutations and web site using doorway pages. SEO, or Search Motor Optimization, means setting up your own website and content to show up through online search results. People that want to take their company to some new height plus generally and mostly believe within the way of SEO marketing and advertising. With internet customers who use their mobiles in order to search on the increase, because an SEO consultant it can make sense to get a look at the particular effects SEO marketing is putting on search engine optimization. The sole purpose of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION Services is to improve your own search engine ranking. Assure redirected domains redirect through the canonical redirect and this too provides any chains minimised, although Help to make sure to audit the backlink user profile for any redirects you stage at a page just such as reward comes punishment if all those backlinks are toxic (another kind of Google opening up the particular war which is technical seo on a front it's not really, and in fact is speak, to building backlinks to your own site). In order to smoothen out the software system interface problem, the web developing team as well as the particular SEO specialist work together in order to build the major search motors friendly programs and code which can be easily integrated into the user's website. They will possess to find SEO expert sites, who will help the company owner's site have many clients in internet marketing. This is due to the fact they are not SEO pleasant and can affect your standing significantly. These SEO crawler programs are similar to Google's own crawlers and will provide you an overview showing just how your page will perform within SEO rankings. Google is making certain it takes longer to notice results from black and white hat SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, and intent on ensuring the flux in its SERPs centered largely on where the searcher is in the world during the particular time of the search, plus where the business is situated near to that searcher. When a person think of a white head wear you may think of the particular Kentucky Derby or even a Royal Wedding ceremony but in SEO speak this means the group of strategies involving the best practice, the particular ones that earn you just about all of the gold stars plus brownie points, the ones that will don't use bad manipulations to achieve traction or ranking, but individuals who do what they perform to the best of their own abilities, create wonderful content plus follow all the rules. Also, really worth bearing in mind is the fact that Google pay attention to styles and what their customers desire, if you want to remain ahead of the game and even make sure your SEO will be fit for the 2019 audience, the idea is worth ensuring you in addition include SEO techniques that follow newer trends such as tone of voice searching. The search engine optimisation (SEO) solutions are designed to increase presence inside the algorithmic (natural”, organic”, or free”) search results in order to deliver high quality, targeted visitors aimed at your website. We might suggest them as an agency for any range of digital marketing providers from content marketing and on-page SEO. In short, we think that SEO in 2019 will certainly have to shift focus actually more towards answering people's queries and solving people's problems. With this SEO article creating guidelines formula it pleases the particular search engines and the visitors reading the content. Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide — This guideline was written by Google and possesses many SEO best practices regarding webmasters.

[jeroldlockettus]

Evolution, Accelerated (Rebroadcast)

(Photo: Jack Dykinga / U.S. Department of Agriculture)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “Evolution, Accelerated.” (You can subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)

A breakthrough in genetic technology has given humans more power than ever to change nature. It could help eliminate hunger and disease; it could also lead to the sort of dystopia we used to only read about in sci-fi novels. So what happens next?

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post. 

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Today we’re bringing you an episode from our archives called “Evolution, Accelerated.” The story is a fascinating one, and, like most good stories, it has continued to develop. You can find our updates at the bottom of this post.

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Jennifer DOUDNA: I remember standing in my kitchen cooking dinner for my son and I suddenly just burst out laughing. It was this joyful thought of, “Isn’t it crazy that nature has come up with this incredible little machine?”

The history of science is full of accidental discoveries. Penicillin, perhaps most famously, but also gunpowder and nuclear fission. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Because you don’t know what you don’t know; you don’t always know what you’re looking for, or at. Sometimes you’ve just got a curious mind.

DOUDNA: The research project that led to this technology was really a curiosity-driven project.

Jennifer Doudna is a professor of chemistry and biology at the University of California, Berkeley.

DOUDNA: And I’ve had a longtime interest in understanding fundamental biology. In particular, aspects of genetic control and the way that evolution has come up with creative ways to regulate the expression of information in cells.

Stephen J. DUBNER: When you first heard the phrase CRISPR — just describe that moment, what your understanding of it was and what you initially envisioned it facilitating.

DOUDNA: When I first heard the acronym CRISPR, this was from a conversation with Jill Banfield, I had no idea what that was.  

This was in 2006. Banfield, also a Berkeley scientist, had been studying bacteria that grow in toxic environments.

DOUDNA: She was looking at bugs that grow in old mine shafts — and these pools of water that build up in in old mines that are often very acidic or they have various kinds of metallic contaminants — to figure out what bugs are growing there and how are they surviving.

The key to their survival was called CRISPR: “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.”

DOUDNA: Say that five times fast.

Banfield thought the bacteria had developed a sort of pattern-based immune system to protect themselves. But exactly how it worked was a puzzle. To help solve it, she recruited Doudna.

DOUDNA: We ended up spending several afternoons where Jill was showing me her D.N.A. sequencing data from bacteria and explaining what these sequences were.

What began as a casual conversation about an obscure subject grew to consume Doudna for years. Finally, she had a breakthrough.

DOUDNA: And I suddenly just burst out laughing.

Today on Freakonomics Radio: the mind-blowing discovery that’s already changing medicine, and more; the implications of that boundless change; and: if you think the genetic revolution is still years away — you should think again.

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DUBNER: So, congratulations on your future Nobel Prize.

DOUDNA: [Laughs]

Jennifer Doudna hasn’t won the Nobel Prize yet, but it’s hard to imagine she won’t. We’ll go back to when she started working with Jill Banfield. Doudna learned that CRIPSRs were D.N.A. sequences stored in the cells of bacteria.

DOUDNA: You can think about it like a genetic vaccination card. It’s a way that cells store information in the form of D.N.A. from viruses to use in the future to protect cells if that virus should show up again in the cell.

But how did it work? And what might it mean if scientists could figure it out? In 2011, having already studied CRISPR for a few years, Doudna attended a microbiology conference in Puerto Rico. There, she met Emmanuelle Charpentier, then a researcher at Umeå University in Sweden. Charpentier was researching a “mystery protein” that she felt was the key to CRISPR. She and Doudna began a long-running collaboration.

DOUDNA: We were working together to understand the molecular basis. In other words, “What are the molecules that allow bacteria to find and destroy viral D.N.A.?” That was the question that we set out to address.

And in the course of that research …

DOUDNA: And in the course of that research we figured out that a particular protein — it has a name, Cas9 — is programmable by the cell.

A protein that can be programmed to fight viruses? You can start to see where this is going.

DOUDNA: The amazing thing that this Cas9 protein does is it works like a pair of scissors. It literally grabs onto the D.N.A. and cuts it at that place, at that precise place.

They thought: if nature could program this Cas9 protein to precisely edit D.N.A., why couldn’t they?

DOUDNA: It turns out that when this is transplanted into animal or plant cells — or human cells — it’s possible to introduce changes to the D.N.A. very precisely, and that’s how the technology fundamentally works.

Then came the night at home, cooking dinner for her son, when she burst out in joyful laughter at the sheer wonder — and the massive possibilities.

DOUDNA: “Isn’t it crazy that nature has come up with this incredible little machine?” So there was that moment, and then that morphed into a growing recognition that this technology was going to be very impactful in many different areas of science.

Doudna, together with Charpentier, and several other colleagues, wrote up their research and, on June 8, 2012, formally submitted it to the journal Science. It was published 20 days later. Suddenly, the world knew that the CRISPR-Cas9 system could be harnessed as a new gene-editing tool.

Linda WERTHEIMER in a clip from Weekend Edition Saturday: A new kind of genetic engineering is revolutionizing scientific research.

Melissa BLOCK in a clip from All Things Considered: Scientists think CRISPR could launch a new era in biology and medicine.  

Norah O’DONNELL in a clip from C.B.S. This Morning: CRISPR could help us rid us of diseases like cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy — and even H.I.V. and cancer.

Jennifer Doudna had spent her career largely cloistered in laboratories. She didn’t have a high-profile background.

DOUDNA: I grew up in a small town in Hawaii.

Suddenly she was a scientific super-hero.

Gwen IFILL in a clip from P.B.S. News Hour: We explore those questions with Jennifer Doudna.

C.B.S.: Jennifer Doudna.

N.P.R.: Jennifer Doudna.

FOX: Jennifer Doudna.

Cameron DIAZ in a clip from the Breakthrough Prize: For harnessing an ancient bacterial immune system as a powerful gene-editing technology …

Dick COSTOLO in a clip from the Breakthrough Prize: … the breakthrough prize is awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna.

Doudna’s spent the past few years racing forward while also trying to slow things down. She wrestles with all this in a book she co-wrote with another CRISPR researcher, Samuel Sternberg. It’s called A Crack in Creation.

DUBNER: Why the title? It refers to what?

DOUDNA: At its core, the CRISPR gene-editing technology is now giving human beings the opportunity to change the course of evolution. And human beings have been affecting evolution for a long time, right? But now there’s a technology that allows very specific changes to be made to D.N.A. that gives us a new level of control. And so it’s opening a crack. I see it as analogous to opening a door to the future that is a change in the way that we think about our world.

DUBNER: As opposed to a crack in the dimension that we will fall through and all disappear. Not that kind of crack?

DOUDNA: We hope the former, not the latter.

DUBNER:You write in the book, “We uncovered the workings of an incredible molecular machine that could slice apart viral D.N.A. with exquisite precision.” So when you call it an “incredible molecular machine” — your breakthrough, of you and your colleagues — is it essentially an external, human-guided replica of what already exists? Or are you taking over the controls of what inherently exists?

DOUDNA: This is important. We’re really taking over the controls of what already exists. We’re doing it by using this bacterial system, the Cas9 protein, to find and make a cut in D.N.A. in, let’s say, human cells at a particular place where the cells’ natural repair machinery can then take over and do the actual editing.

DUBNER: What’s amazing to me is the natural repair machinery obviously exists, and maybe it works really well a lot of the time. It’s just in the most drastic circumstances, like a cancer or a debilitating disease, it doesn’t. The healing mechanism, from reading what you’ve written, it sounds as though it’s quite stochastic — it’s random, unpredictable. Some things it catches, some things it doesn’t, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Can you talk about big picture of this repair mechanism and how well or poorly it does?

DOUDNA: D.N.A. repair happens all the time in cells and, as you alluded to, it has to work right most of the time or we would probably not be here or we would all have a lot more cancer than we have. So we know that cells experience double-stranded breaks to their D.N.A. routinely and that they have ways of fixing those breaks. I would say that what this CRISPR technology does is it really taps into that natural repair pathway.

Since the announcement of the CRISPR-Cas9 technology, scientists around the world have been exploring its possibilities in many different arenas. Let’s start with plants.

DOUDNA: I think it’s important for people to appreciate that, first of all, that humans have been modifying plants for a long time genetically.

DUBNER: Thank goodness.

DOUDNA: For literally thousands of years. Exactly. Thank goodness. And you realize, “Wow, I’m glad there’s plant breeding.” But the way that that’s been done traditionally is to use chemicals or even radiation to introduce genetic changes into seeds and then plant breeders will select for plants that have traits that they want. Of course, you can imagine, when you do something like that, you drag along a lot of traits that you probably don’t want and changes to the D.N.A. that you don’t even control for. So you don’t even know where they are or what they might be doing.

The opportunity here with gene editing in plants is to be able to make changes precisely. Not to drag along traits that you don’t want; to be able to make changes that will be beneficial to plants but to do that very precisely. Then we have the opportunity to do things like give plants the ability to grow with much less water or to defend themselves against various kinds of infections and pests that are moving in due to climate change. From the perspective of the world food supply, that’s going to be extremely important going forward and will potentially allow us to have access to plants that are going to be much better adapted for particular environments and to grow, we hope, without chemical interventions of different types.

DUBNER: Now, given how nervous some portion of the population is about the phrase “genetically modified organisms” — even though, as you’ve pointed out, almost every organism on earth has been genetically modified for hundreds if not thousands of years — this feels like a next-level step that will raise all kinds of questions — even in the plant world, forget about humans or animals — of governance and autonomy and so on. What are your thoughts on that in the plant/agricultural world?

DOUDNA: It’s really going to come down to people having access to information about where our food is coming from so that people in different countries can evaluate these plants and the technologies used to create them and make their own decisions about what they want to do. Having a precision tool that allows us to generate plants that are better adapted to particular environments or maybe have even better nutritional value — I really believe that, going forward, we can’t afford to reject this. We really have to understand it and regulate it appropriately. But we do have to have this tool in our toolbox.

CRISPR gene-editing is also being put to use on animals.

Scott PELLEY in a clip from C.B.S. Evening News: Scientists in China are engaged in controversial research, genetically modifying beagles to be more muscular.

Isobel YEUNG in a clip from VICE: These mosquitoes have been genetically modified to breed with and eliminate their own species in an urgent attempt to wipe out carriers of Dengue fever.

Ameera DAVID in a clip from R.T. AMERICA: Researchers believe that they can recreate a woolly mammoth by combining its D.N.A. with that of a modern elephant.

DOUDNA: There’s at least one — and maybe more than one company now — that are using the gene-editing technology in animals like in pigs to create pigs that would be better organ donors for humans.

DUBNER: I like the micropig too. Sean DOWLING in a clip from Buzz60: Chinese genomics institute BGI began breeding micropigs to study diseases — but now they’re going to sell them as pets for $1,600 and give into the micropig craze. Miley Cyrus has one. DOUDNA: Yes, pets. Right, the idea of sort of a fanciful use in a way of getting you know making animals that we think are cute.

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The gene editing revolution prompted by the work of scientists like Jennifer Doudna isn’t the only gene-related revolution these days.

DUBNER: Hey, Dalton. Stephen Dubner. How’s it going?

CONLEY: Hi, Stephen. How are you?

There’s also social genomics.

Dalton CONLEY: The social genomics revolution is really just getting started, I would say.

Dalton Conley teaches sociology and population studies at Princeton…

CONLEY: …and I’m the co-author of The Genome Factor.

You may remember Conley from an old Freakonomics Radio episode called, “How Much Does Your Name Matter?” He has two kids. A daughter:

E JEREMIJENKO-CONLEY: I’m E, like the letter.

And a son.

Yo JEREMIJENKO-CONLEY: I’m Yo, like the slang.

But those are just their first names. Full names?

E JEREMIJENKO-CONLEY: E Harper Nora Jeremijenko-Conley.

Yo JEREMIJENKO-CONLEY: Yo Xing Heyno Augustus Eisner Alexander Weiser Knuckles Jeremijenko-Conley.

DUBNER: So Yo, your first name, Yo, comes from where?

YO: I think it comes from the Y chromosome.

So Dalton Conley, the sociologist dad — he’s always had a crafty way of thinking about genetic identity.

DUBNER: So Dalton, the subtitle of your book is, “What the Social Genomics Revolution Reveals About Ourselves, Our History, and the Future.” Just begin by telling me, what do you mean by the social genomics revolution? What’s revolutionary about it? And describe the arc of the revolution and where we are in that.

CONLEY: The social genomics revolution is really just getting started, I would say. When Bill Clinton stood up in the year 2000 and announced that the book of life had been decoded…

President Bill CLINTON in a clip from the National Human Genome Research Institute: We are here to celebrate the completion of the first survey of the entire human genome. Without a doubt, this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind.  

CONLEY: …everyone thought everything was going to change suddenly. We’re going to have personalized medicine, we were going to — I don’t know what.

CLINTON: It will revolutionize the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of most, if not all, human diseases.

CONLEY: But actually not much happened for the first decade or so.

The great scientific hope was to find single, easily identifiable genes that controlled cancer or depression or intelligence or even just height.

Jason FLETCHER: So that turns out to be an exception rather than a rule.

That’s Jason Fletcher. He’s an economist at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, and he Conley’s co-author on The Genome Factor.

FLETCHER: Most of what we care about, most of life’s important outcomes, are not one gene and one disease. They’re more like hundreds or thousands of genes all with really tiny effects, if you can even find them.

Having a map of the genome was one thing. But, in the Bill Clinton era, there was a lack of good data. That has changed.

CONLEY: And now we have this: what I call the revolution is this surfeit of cheap genetic data.

FLETCHER: Just two decades ago, it cost a billion dollars to sequence a single genome. Now you and I could spit in a cup, send it to one of the popular sequencing outfits, and for $100 or for $150 we can get millions of answers to the question, “What does our D.N.A. look like?”

CONLEY: Anyone who sends their saliva into 23andMe —

Clip from a 23andMe advertisement: With just a small saliva sample, you’ll learn about your ancestry through your 23 pairs of chromosomes that make you who you are.

CONLEY: — to get their ancestry or their supposed health risks has now basically agreed to be part of their database that will be studied and that has well over a million samples of mostly U.S. citizens.

FLETCHER: And all that data is being pulled together in both genetic analysis and social science analysis to try to understand the vast array of outcomes we’re all interested in. That’s anything from Alzheimer’s and dementia on the health side to measures of educational attainment and socioeconomic position on the social science side.

CONLEY: And so we finally have big data sets with lots of genetic markers across the entire set of chromosomes. We’re now actually making robust discoveries that are withstanding replication and seem pretty solid. That’s the start of the revolution.

But, warning: it’s still early days.

FLETCHER: That’s right. So humans are very complicated, and the amount of data we’re talking about is in the millions or tens of millions of locations on our genome.

So what does this mean for a technology like CRISPR gene-editing?

CONLEY: That’s going to be very exciting for a limited number of single-gene diseases.

Diseases like cystic fibrosis, and sickle-cell disease, and Huntington’s disease.

CONLEY: But most things we care about in today’s world — heart disease, Alzheimer’s, I.Q., height, body mass index, diabetes risk — all of those things are highly polygenic. That means that they’re the sum total of many little effects all across the chromosomes, and that probably means we’re not going to be doing gene-editing in a thousand different locations in the genome.

At least not anytime soon. But, with all the genomic data that are being accumulated, scientists have been devising a system to make sense of it all.

CONLEY: We have a tool that’s emerged called the polygenic score.

FLETCHER: You take all the small effect sizes that you’re finding across many, many, many genes. You add them all up, and then you created a summary scale of your predicted likelihood of doing X, where X could be smoking or getting dementia or going to college.

CONLEY: But those scores aren’t predicting very well right now. So before anything drastic happens socially, those scores would need to get a lot better. Once they really start explaining a lot of the variation in society, then I would start worrying.

Worrying because why?

CONLEY: The use by external authorities and companies of this information, that’s definitely scary. The other dimension is going to be in the marriage market, where people just take it upon themselves to want to know genetic information about their potential mates. If you knew that your potential mate was of high likelihood of developing early dementia, you might think twice before getting married. Phenotypes are for hookups but genotype is forever. So the technology for that is here now. It could be used in fertility clinics. It could be used on dating apps, where people could put their genetic profile linked from 23andme to OKCupid.

Selection, of course, is something we all do every day. It’s how we choose our friends; our allies and enemies; our political leaders. Some traits are observable; others, less so. Some are heritable; others, not. If the selection potential afforded by these new technologies is frightening to you, keep in mind the thing that’s new about this is the technology. Remember the eugenics movement? That was justified by a preference for …

FLETCHER: … a preference for people of certain European ancestry — and not all European ancestry, but certain favored groups — to have more children and to be given resources to the exclusion of all other people. Of course, it led pretty directly to Nazism and the extermination of millions of people. It was also used as the pseudoscience behind at least decades of racial injustice in the United States and many other countries.

That is the nightmare that has given Jennifer Doudna actual nightmares.

DOUDNA: That really was one of the defining moments for me in terms of thinking about getting involved in the ethical conversation. I had a dream in which I was working away — I think I was in my office actually — and a colleague of mine came in and said, “I’d like to introduce you to someone, and I’d like you to explain the CRISPR technology to him.” And he led me into a room. There was a light in the room and there was someone sitting in silhouette in a chair with his back to me. He turned around, and I realized with this horror — and I can feel it right now as I’m telling you the story, I feel this chill in my body — I realized that it was Adolf Hitler. And he was looking at me with very intent look on his face, an eager look. He wanted to know about this technology.

I felt this incredible sense of fear; both personal fear, but also a profound existential fear that if someone like that were to get a hold of a powerful technology like this, how would they deploy it? And when I woke up from that dream — and thinking about it subsequently — it was really scary to think about. I thought, “We have to proceed responsibly here.” We cannot just — or at least for myself — I can’t just carry on with my next experiment at my lab. I really have to get involved in a broader discussion about this. It’s just too important a subject.

DUBNER: I don’t mean to at all diminish your argument, but I hear a lot of scientists make a similar argument, which is, “Look, we’re doing our best on our end, and we really want to have this conversation in public, especially with people who have the leverage,” mostly politicians, “to make smart choices.” Does a good mechanism or forum for that conversation really exist?

DOUDNA: Well, we’re building it as we’re going, at some level. I’ve been involved in organizing a number of meetings. Right now, they’re fairly small in focus. But the idea is to really answer, we hope, that question that you just posed: how do you do that? How do you bring people from these different walks of life together so they can have a meaningful discussion? I don’t have the answer yet, but I do think that it has to involve formats that are accessible to people. It can’t just be a bunch of academics.

DUBNER: Talking in the silo to each other.

DOUDNA: Right, exactly. It cannot be that. It has to be using various ways. The media are going to be very important. People that write science fiction are going to be important. Movie makers are going to be important. Musicians and various kinds of visual artists are going to be important. All of those people are very skillful at communication, communicating ideas, and they can do it in some ways much more effectively than a lot of technical jargon would ever achieve.

DUBNER: Probably the most enticing and certainly the most controversial aspect of CRISPR is the power to reshape human beings, whether an individual with an illness, a generation of a family, or maybe an entire population. Obviously, it’s a gigantic area and something that probably brings a lot of strong priors to the table with already. But can you just talk about this issue, your thinking about the issue and where you’ve landed?

DOUDNA: I’ve seen an evolution in my own thinking, quite frankly. I have gone from feeling very uncomfortable with the idea of making changes to human embryos, especially for anything that would be considered not medically essential, to thinking that there may come a time — I don’t think we’re there now and I don’t think it’s right around the corner — but I think there may come a time when that application is embraced and it’s going to be deployed. For me, the important thing is not to reject it. It’s actually to understand it and really think through the implications.

DUBNER: Let me ask you to just to take a step back and talk about actual therapeutic treatment and the difference between germline and somatic editing.

DOUDNA: Ah, yes. That’s very important, to understand the difference. Most of the applications that we’ve been talking about, especially in medicine right now, involve what we call somatic-cell editing. That means making changes to the D.N.A. in cells of a particular tissue in a person that’s already fully developed. But those changes do not become heritable. They can’t be passed on to the next generation. But the contrast to that is changes to the germline. That means making changes to the D.N.A. of embryos or eggs or sperm, changes that are inherited by future generations and become effectively permanent in the human genome.

There’s a profound difference between those two uses. If you’re doing something that affects one person, it has to be regulated, of course, and you have to make sure that it’s safe and effective, but it affects just that one person. Whereas, if you make a change that affects somebody’s children and all of their children’s children, etc. — that is really profound and it really does affect, ultimately, human evolution.

DUBNER: Let’s say I cared about some strain of heritability enough to do it on a fairly wide scale. Then presumably, it would increase my incentive to maybe diminish the supply of non-germline treated people, right? So you could imagine —

DOUDNA: Now you’re getting into Gattaca territory here.

DUBNER: Well, it doesn’t take long, even for a mind as flabby as mine, to get there pretty quickly, right? The potential for this reminds me a bit of the potential for geoengineering, intentionally altering the planet’s atmosphere to change the temperature in case global warming gets really destructive. One of the key questions there is governance. Who gets to control the thermostat? And I know that you’ve been outspoken and you’ve really flung yourself into the ethical and practical elements of this technology, but I’m curious where you stand on the biggest — I don’t want to say scariest, because I hate when we’re knee-jerk scared of new technologies that are prima facie wonderful — but I do wonder your thinking on that.  

DOUDNA: You alluded to this, but I think it’s very important to emphasize that this technology is going to, overall, have a very positive benefit to human beings in many ways. I’d really like to make sure that people get that message. Because I think it’s easy to try to make things sound exciting by making them sound really scary.

DUBNER: Sure.

DOUDNA: This is a technology where we’re already seeing incredibly exciting advances: opportunities to cure genetic diseases that have had no treatments in the past, to advance the pace of clinical and other types of research, to make it possible to understand the genetic basis for disease and then be able to do something about it when you have that information. What needs to happen is that scientists need to really engage with government regulators and, frankly, also with religious leaders and other kinds of thought leaders to make sure, first and foremost, that there’s a very clear understanding of the science behind this as much as possible.

DUBNER: Let’s pretend that this technology within a couple of generations works so beautifully that it extends lifespan by 20 percent or 50 percent or 200 percent. Do you think about what happens in terms of obvious things like global resources if people are living twice as long? But also, how we as animals would respond to that scenario in which scarcity diminishes so much, the scarcity being a short lifespan? It seems that humans are relatively slow to adapt to the diminishment of scarcity over time. It seems we still eat, for instance, in the 21st century, as though the next meal may or may not appear on the horizon. I’m curious, if all of a sudden there are all these extra years — in terms of everything, labor markets and retirement and existential issues — like, “What do I do now for those next 80 or 100 years that Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues helped facilitate?” Do you think about those things?

DOUDNA: There’s lots of interest in that topic right now as you know, especially here in Silicon Valley. For me, it really would come down to, are those extra years high-quality years? Are they years where people could be contributing importantly to society? And if the answer is yes then that is very interesting to think about. If the answer is no, then I certainly don’t think that sounds very appealing at all. I’d rather take short and healthy than the long and miserable. But the prospect of enhancing human health — if that goes hand-in-hand with longevity — I certainly would like to see it be something that was available to communities around the world, not just to a few people.

As much uncertainty as there is around the future of CRISPR-Cas9, and the genetic revolution generally, you probably won’t be surprised to learn there’s also uncertainty about where the proceeds from these discoveries will flow. As you can imagine, they are potentially huge. Jennifer Doudna’s team filed patent rights early on to use the CRISPR system on virtually any living thing. But not long after, a researcher named Feng Zhang from the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard filed CRISPR patents on an important subset of living things. The conflict went to the federal Patent Trial and Appeal Board, which ruled in Zhang’s favor; but the final outcome is far from settled.

A few updates since we first released this episode last year. The research journal Nature Methods published a paper suggesting that CRISPR wasn’t as precise as people like Doudna say it is. The authors claimed it caused 2,000 unexpected mutations. But that paper was recently retracted. In other news: the U.S.D.A. recently approved a broad range of gene-edited foods. CRISPR even featured as a major plot point in the Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson movie Rampage. And on the intellectual property front: Doudna’s team at UC Berkeley is appealing the Patent Office’s decision; the European Patent Office, meanwhile, revoked the Broad Institute’s CRISPR patent there.

*      *      *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Greg Rosalsky. Our staff also includes Alison Hockenberry, Merritt Jacob, Stephanie Tam, Max Miller, Harry Huggins, and Andy Meisenheimer. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Jennifer Doudna, professor of chemistry and of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Dalton Conley, Henry Putnam University professor of sociology at Princeton University.

Jason Fletcher, professor of public affairs, sociology, agriculture and applied economics, and population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

RESOURCES

A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution by Jennifer Doudna and Samuel Sternberg (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017).

“CRISPR: A Game-Changing Genetic Engineering Technique,” Ekaterina Pak, Science in the News, (July 31, 2014).

The Genome Factor: What the Social Genomics Revolution Reveals About Ourselves, Our History, and the Future by Dalton Conley and Jason Fletcher (Princeton University Press, 2017).

“Programmable D.N.A. Scissors Found for Bacterial Immune System,” Martin Jinek, Krzysztof Chylinski, Ines Fonfara, Michael Hauer, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier (2012).

“Questions And Answers About CRISPR,” Dom Smith and Matthew Orr, STAT News (2015).

“Welcome to the CRISPR Zoo,” Sara Reardon, Nature (March 9, 2016).

EXTRA

23andMe.

Gattaca (dir. Andrew Niccol, 1997).

“How Much Does Your Name Matter?” Freakonomics Radio (2013).

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