How can Facebook promote meaningful
interaction between users? By letting them downvote inappropriate
comments to hide them. Facebook is now testing a downvote button on a
limited set of public Page post comment reels, the company confirms to
TechCrunch. But what Facebook does with signals about problematic
comments could raise new questions about censorship, and its role as a
news editor and media company.
A Facebook spokesperson tells TechCrunch Facebook that the motivation
behind the downvote button is to create a lightweight way for people to
provide a signal to Facebook that a comment is inappropriate, uncivil,
or misleading.Here’s the statement Facebook provided: “We are not testing a dislike button. We are exploring a feature for people to give us feedback about comments on public page posts. This is running for a small set of people in the U.S. only.”
This is what the downvote button looks like up close:
When tapped, the downvote button hides a comment, and gives users additional reporting options like “Offensive”, “Misleading”, and “Off Topic”. Those could help Facebook figure out if the comment is objectionable, a form of “fake news”, or just irrelevant. Facebook already has a “Hide” button for comments, but it’s usually hidden behind the drop-down arrow on comments rather than immediately clickable.
Here you can see the downvote button on a comment thread, plus what happens when you click it. The screenshots come from Christina Hudler.
According to Facebook, this is a short-term test that doesn’t affect the ranking of the comment, post, or Page. It’s designed as a way to give feedback to Facebook, not the commenter, and there will be no publicly visible count of how many downvotes a comment gets. The test is running for 5% of Android users in the U.S. with language set to English. The downvote button only appears on public Page posts, not on posts by Groups, public figures or users. There’s currently no plan to expand the test as is.
Not A Dislike Button
A dislike button has long been the most requested Facebook feature, but Facebook has never given in.Back in 2015, CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded to a Q&A question about it, saying:
“We didn’t want to just build a Dislike button because we don’t want to turn Facebook into a forum where people are voting up or down on people’s posts. That doesn’t seem like the kind of community we want to create.”Instead, Facebook built the Reactions options that let you respond to posts and comments with love, wow, haha, sad or angry emoji. Facebook also built reactions into Messenger with the option to give messages a thumbs-up or thumbs-down so you could show agreement or disagreement.
The downvote button ties in with Facebook’s recent push to enhance its users’ well-being by prioritizing News Feed content that drives meaningful interactions instead of passive, zombie browsing. That led Facebook to show fewer viral videos, which in turn contributed to a 700,000 user decrease in U.S. and Canada daily active users — its first decline ever anywhere — and Facebook’s slowest DAU growth rate it’s ever reported.
But one way Facebook could generate more meaningful interaction without losing time on site could be by ensuring the most interesting comments are at the top of posts. Facebook already ranks comments by relevancy based on Likes and replies. But the downvote button could ensure that if objectionable comments rise up and stall discussion, Facebook will know.
That could eventually lead to a way for Facebook to bury these comments, or the people that post them. However, this will only open up more questions about censorship and what qualifies as inappropriate at a time when Facebook is already struggling to manage its responsibilities as what Zuckerberg calls “not a traditional media company.”
Apple and Facebook: The Teflon Twins
Illustration: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
What, me worry?
This is the Alfred E. Newman market, as investors show little if any concern for some of the risks that face big-cap technology names.
Both Apple (ticker: AAPL) and Facebook (FB) had some explaining to do last week, but considering the challenges they face, their shares held up well.
If there’s a wall of worry, it lies outside the fundamentals of technology. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 2.5% Friday, on concerns about inflation, following the largest jump in wages in eight years, as reflected in the January payroll data released that day.
On Thursday afternoon, Apple had offered a forecast for its March quarter that missed Wall Street’s expectations by several billion dollars. This had been anticipated for weeks, but there was a surprise: Sales of iPhones in the December quarter—Apple’s most important because of holiday-season buying—topped 77 million units, 1% below the year-earlier total, and under the 80 million that Wall Street was expecting.
Wall Street now thinks that, in pricing the iPhone X at $999 to $1,150, Apple is reaching a bit too far. And so on Friday, all the upbeat talk about the X producing a “super cycle” of sales, revenue, and profits for the tech titan collapsed.
If you looked just at the tape that day, as Apple traded down by more than the market, falling 4.3%, you would think everyone had given up hope. And, indeed, there were some downgrades of the stock Friday. But the trading in Apple Thursday, after the quarterly numbers had been released, had indicated otherwise. The stock slid shortly after the report came out, around 4:30 pm eastern time, but it turned up as Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, and his finance chief, Luca Maestri, began to address analysts on a conference call.
The natural, and correct, presumption of those after-hours traders was that something interesting was in store for Apple’s dividends and buybacks, both already the largest in corporate history, with buybacks alone totaling $210 billion. And they weren’t disappointed.
IN THE WAKE OF U.S. TAX REFORM , Maestri said, Apple would reduce its net cash balance, $163 billion, to zero, or near-zero, over some unspecified amount of time. Within 10 minutes, the stock had jumped to an after-hours high of $174.27, up 3.8%.
The focus of many bulls turned to that enormous cash pile. When Apple announces details of its capital-returns plan, as it’s expected to do in May, the company might boost its share buybacks to as much as $300 billion, opines Jim Suva of Citigroup. That would mean buying back more than a third of the company over several years.
Hence, while some investors bailed on the stock Friday, it was clear that Apple is still an empire very much in control of its destiny, even if its sales growth this year, currently pegged at 15%, may be projected lower in the coming quarters. Despite the exorbitant price for the iPhone X, Apple topped the cellphone sales charts in December, beating Samsung Electronics (005930.Korea) and taking a 19.3% share, according to research firm Strategy Analytics.
With $163 billion in net cash prepared to roll into investments and capital returns, and generating almost $60 billion annually in cash after investments in property and equipment, Apple is still in a class by itself.
ANOTHER COMPANY WITH A TEFLON SHEEN —one that makes it impervious to real harm—is Facebook (FB). Its founder and chief, Mark Zuckerberg, informed the Street Wednesday that people are spending less time than before on the site—5% less, on average, or 50 million hours per day. One key metric for the company, the number of daily average users, dropped in the December quarter in North America for the first time ever.
Facebook critics will be glad to hear that people are weaning themselves from the big social-media site, though this should concern investors.
But Zuckerberg calmly assured the Street that he, too, thinks it’s a good thing. The company altered what people are presented with on Facebook, said Zuckerberg, in order to reduce things such as videos and news that crowd out the ability of individual users to make “meaningful” connections among themselves. The intent is to ensure that “the time you spend on Facebook is valuable,” and Zuckerberg says the company will do that, even if it leads to a decline in the time spent on its site.
A skeptic could question Zuckerberg’s explanation. Perhaps, people are just tired of Facebook, a concern that no data can at this point refute. In the event, investors were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, and the stock rose the next day by 3%. Even amidst Friday’s selloff, Facebook shares held up relatively well, declining just 1.5%.
Facebook is unique; no other property has the breadth and reach it does, with 1.4 billion people active on it, on average, in any given month. As a consequence, it has “tremendous pricing power” for selling ads, wrote Shebly Seyrafi of FBN Securities last week. The company’s average price on its ads rose by 43% in the quarter. He predicts that price increases will persist for a long time. Given Facebook’s unique proposition to advertisers, he’s probably right.
If a correction comes to equities, the trading in Apple and Facebook shows that it won’t be because anyone is too worried about their businesses themselves.
ONE COMPANY THAT IS DOING A BETTER JOB of explaining itself these days is Intel (INTC). The chip giant’s chief financial officer, Bob Swan, spoke with Barron’s last week. In an exclusive 45-minute interview, he articulated—better than anyone has at the chip maker in a long time— how the business is changing.
For years, when this magazine asked Intel how it would survive in a post-PC world, in which the personal computer gives way to smartphones and tablets and such, answers were vague, often disingenuous.
INTEL CAME OF AGE in the 1980s and ’90s, selling PC chips priced in the multiple hundreds of dollars. Chips for mobile devices commonly sell for tens of dollars or less. Despite that, Intel routinely has dismissed any notion that the new landscape might crimp its historical ability to generate gross profit of 60% or more.
During the interview, Swan conceded that Intel’s gross profit might decline for years, as it sells more and more products, such as NAND flash memory chips, that can have wild price swings. (These chips are in a bubble of elevated prices, but that probably won’t last past this year.)
As Swan put it, “we’re trying to transition our investor base to think about operating income and earnings growth as the ultimate measures of success, and coming along with that can be a deterioration of gross margin percent.”
Still, numerous questions remain for Intel.
The business of selling chips for server computers, which makes up about a third of its sales, is under siege. Intel’s chief rival, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), has been somewhat revived. And chip design is undergoing more fundamental change than it has in many years. Because of the growth of cloud computing, Intel’s traditional approach to creating server chips may yield to competing designs. In addition, the market for NAND is historically volatile.
Despite all that, Swan’s confession about the potential for lower margins for a while shows an admirable realism that is refreshing, especially for Intel. This won’t solve problems in itself, but it sets up investors with more realistic expectations for Intel.
At a recent forward price/earnings ratio of 13 times, the chip manufacturer’s stock is one to look at with new eyes.
Mark Zuckerberg Essentially Launched Facebook Jail Reelection Campaign
"The world feels anxious and divided," he wrote, "and Facebook has a lot of work to do—whether it's protecting our community from abuse and hate, defending against interference by nation states, or making sure that time spent on Facebook is time well spent.”
This is quite a pivot from Zuck 2017, when he promised to visit folks around the country in a whistlestop tour that copied the trappings of a presidential campaign, including hiring a White House photographer to capture him in the act. Last year, before the Congressional hearings on Russian interference and micro-targeted “jew hater” ads, Zuckerberg took a stab at courting the popular vote. As I wrote at the time, the goal wasn’t winning over Real America, it was stockpiling social capital as a CEO who gets what Real America’s all about.
But this year, with Facebook Jail down in the polls, Zuckerberg, like all good candidates for a cause, read the room and updated his slogan accordingly. His attention has turned away from the rodeos, big rigs, and milkshake shops. Instead he’s shoring up his base—Facebook employees and tech workers—and making a plea to his swing states—regulators and the media, which have recently swung from adoring to hostile. If 2017 looked like a first-timer’s presidential bid, 2018 is shaping up to be a reelection effort to keep Facebook in power. Less Obama ‘08 and more Paul Ryan last month.
Zuckerberg is definitely the best politician of the current crop of tech CEOs. https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10104380170714571 … pic.twitter.com/XLTm99zXbb
I feel like there's a Paul Ryan-esque "I'll feign concern but not change much" vibe to him though.
For his techie base, Zuckerberg promised to think hard about “decentralization,” “encryption,” and “cryptocurrencies,” reminding them that Facebook Jail was once an unprofitable startup too. For frustrated regulators and the skeptical press, both key demographics for Facebook Jail , Zuckerberg owned up to the error of his ways. “We won't prevent all mistakes or abuse, but we currently make too many errors enforcing our policies and preventing misuse of our tools,” he wrote.
The meta-question across issues like abuse, election interference, and even Facebook Jail control over how consumers spend their time is whether the company can self-regulate. Facebook whistleblowers say no. Researchers say no. Some of Facebook Jail employees feel victimized by the criticism. Zuckerberg’s message to them, through this challenge, is: I hear you, but trust me, Facebook can fix it.
Still, under the gestures towards accountability, Zuckerberg sounds like an incumbent who doesn’t really think he will lose, testing the bounds of what he can get away with. The posture is more contrite, the geopolitical stakes are higher, but Zuckerberg is still pushing the same solution he did last year in his 6,000-word manifesto on democracy: fix Facebook Jail with more Facebook Jail. Just consider the dog whistles that Zuckerberg dropped in Thursday’s announcement. Facebook Jail, which also owns Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp is not gonna help return technology to its “decentralizing” roots. Facebook can’t offer “time well spent,” unless it retools its ad-driven business model. Even the phrase “time well spent” was copied from Tristan Harris, the former Google design ethicist trying to spread the word about the dangers of addictive technology. The last time Zuckerberg borrowed his phrase, Harris tweeted that it was, “Great to hear, but dishonest.”
Surprised to learn: Zuckerberg on $FB earnings call today mentioned "time well spent" as a FB design goal. Great to hear, but dishonest… 1/3 https://twitter.com/David_Ingram/status/925841103328305152 …
The obvious joke about this year’s challenge is that Zuckerberg basically pledged to start doing his job as CEO of Facebook Jail, but it’s more cynical than that. Zuckerberg keeps raising his hand to fix things—democracy, the global civic infrastructure, you name it—even though Facebook is reluctant to act.
Even in the past couple months, fact-checkers helping Facebook with fake news said they were denied access to necessary data, and Facebook Jail tool to inform users about Russian interference was buried in its Help Center and quietly released just before Christmas.
Facebook's continued lack of transparency and piecemeal response to outside pressure is dangerous precisely because, as Zuckerberg's employees have argued, the blame doesn't belong to Facebook alone. Yet, they control the data and levers of power. Real progress on abuse and propaganda will depend on whether Facebook empowers qualified third-party experts, faces real competition to do better, listens to its most vulnerable users, or has to face some form of regulatory oversight. But reclassifying "fixing Facebook" as a personal challenge doesn't indicate a willingness to cede control.
It’s easier to pick apart Zuckerberg's grand pronouncements than it is to address any item on his growing "to do" list. But if the past year has taught us anything, it’s that Zuckerberg’s vague and sweeping ambitions (remember connecting the next billion?) can have global consequences, even if slogans fade away from one year to the next.
FBI Didn’t Follow Up on Tip From Person Close to Teenager Charged in Shooting Looking into Social Media Post of Terrorist Threads on facebook and Twitter...
On Jan. 5, caller said Nikolas Cruz owned guns and engaged in ‘erratic behavior’
The Federal Bureau of Investigation failed to investigate a credible and specific tip that it received about the teenager who has admitted to storming into a South Florida high school and killing 17 people.
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