1. Good Monday Morning

It’s October 4th. After a blockbuster 60 Minutes profile last night, the Wall Street Journal’s main source for The Facebook Files was identified as former project manager Frances Haugen. While at Facebook, Haugen led a team on the company’s election protection efforts. She is working with the Securities and Exchange Commission under its whistleblower protections and will appear before a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday. 

Today’s Spotlight is 1,245 words — about a 4.5 minute read.

2. News To Know Now

Quoted:“For years, we’ve known many of these issues — via journalists and researchers — but Facebook has been able to claim that they have an ax to grind and so we shouldn’t trust what they say. This time, the documents speak for themselves.” — Yaël Eisenstat, Facebook’s former global head of elections integrity operations to Recode. 

a) Attorneys for Donald Trump have filed a motion asking a federal judge to order Twitter to reinstate his account. Trump used his personal account while communicating as president. Twitter permanently suspended that account soon after the president tweeted about the domestic terror attack on the Capitol.

b) New Amazon products announced last week include a “robot” that is more of a single floor Amazon Echo on wheels, home monitoring and elder care services, and new devices including their first smart thermostat and Fitbit competitor. (CNBC overview)

c) Global consulting giant PwC will allow 40,000 U.S. employees to remotely work from anywhere in perpetuity and without a change in compensation. Reuters broke the story.

3. Search Engine News & Spotlight Explainer Combine For Google Search News (Here Comes MUM)

Google’s Search On product event was home to enough announcements last week for an extra big search feature this week.

There was a lot of Google-style talk about how search democratizes information and allows people to learn formerly specialized knowledge. Neither your physician nor your attorney likely agree, but it’s great for finding data.

Google’s launch of MUM (Multitask Unified Model) is the big news. This is the name of the software Google developed that will allow people to use text, images, or video combinations to find something.

People today are trained to ask a number of simple questions as they research a topic. MUM allows those steps to be combined.

One Google example: You like the pattern you see on a shirt, but would like it on socks. You can take a picture of the shirt and have Google use MUM to search for socks with that pattern. You can also click a button to see if those socks are in stock at a local store, which seems to be quite an incentive to constantly update Google with the stock status of all your items. After all, if you don’t, the next person will. 

You are going to hear a lot about Google MUM for the next few months. You can start playing with Google Lens now, which has some of its early functionality. For example, point Google Lens at text in a foreign language, click the “Translate” icon, and the image of the text is instantly rendered in your language.

Maps and location services are also Google priorities. In addition to checking in stock availability of items, Google Maps will now include layers that show wildfire data, tree coverage, and the ability to create new Google Plus Address codes. Those last are important for places without street addresses. 

A Google Plus Address Code example: The local high school has three baseball fields. Home plate at one of them is 1,200 feet from the school’s front door. The Google Plus code (87C4VHGR+RX) narrows down the area from the large school with thousands of people to the area around home plate. That baseball field has about a dozen plus codes. Delivery robots, drones and other automated services will need that level of precision.

Google will also expand information about the source of search results in addition to using MUM to improve how searches occur. The company says that there will be more fact checks, warnings to searchers when topical news results are changing fast, and an expanded “About the Source” information box to include what third parties have said about a source.

Video is the final place where Google says it will create more search context. That includes pre-populated links under videos that list the topics covered so that searchers can easily click a button to learn more about that or a related topic. The best part of this feature is that Google says it can identify a topic in a video even when the video is about a different topic.

MUM (and don’t forget its nifty near real-time universal translator to 75 human languages) is definitely coming after its announcement last spring and its star turn at Search On last week.  Google Lens, voice search, and maps will all present new search challenges and opportunities in 2022.

5. Did That Really Happen? — YouTube Bans Vaccine Misinformation

It took a global pandemic during which tens of millions of Americans refused to get vaccinated, but YouTube is removing all content with vaccine misinformation. Axios confirmed with YouTube that more than one million videos have been removed.

Full stop. People posted one million inaccurate videos about COVID-19 just to YouTube. Bad people remain a problem, but YouTube is at least done with the “both sides” argument when medical and public health experts have reached an overwhelming global consensus.

6. Following Up — NYC Protecting Delivery Workers

We’ve written a lot about the delivery workers whose efforts in dangerous circumstances allowed so many people to work remotely during the early stages of the pandemic. New York’s City Council has passed a group of six bills to protect restaurants and those workers. The laws include disclosure of how much of the tip workers receive, requiring restaurants to allow bathroom access to drivers, and caps on fees charged to restaurants. Gizmodo has great coverage.

7. Protip — Adding Alexa to iPhones

Amazon released a new widget that allows iPhone users to easily access Alexa. You still can’t call her by name, but one tap is better than open app.

Screening Room — Katy, Perry, Behr Paint & Spotify Colored Together

9. Science Fiction World — Drone Docking

A Swiss hospital is the home of the first Matternet Station. That’s a drone docking, repair, and cargo depot since you probably shouldn’t drop medical stuff on the front lawn for anyone. The hospital is the first deployment. Forty more are due to be added in Abu Dhabi.

10. Coffee Break — 2021’s Best First Pitch

Back in July when baseball season was going strong, this woman threw the most athletic first pitch I’ve ever seen. Baseball’s playoffs start tomorrow night.

11. Sign of the Times

1. Good Monday Morning

It’s Sept. 20th. Canada’s national elections are today, a mere 36 days after they were called by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.  You are not alone if you think that a five week election campaign season sounds heavenly.

Today’s Spotlight is 1,339 words — about a 5 minute read.

2. News To Know Now

Quoted:”Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression. This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.” — an internal Facebook presentation quoted by The Wall Street Journal in The Facebook Files.

a) By uploading a photograph and clicking one button, users of an unnamed application can create deepfake porn videos featuring that person. MIT Technology Review wrote about the horrific program this week and wisely concealed the company’s name. Calling the service “incredibly easy to use,” the publication later said that the program is no longer available from its creators.

b) MIT Tech also confirmed last week that an American company called Acuvant developed and sold an iPhone hacking tool in 2016. That tool was purchased by American mercenaries and sold by them to the United Arab Emirates for $1.3 million. The Americans then reportedly directed hacking campaigns on behalf of the UAE government.

c) As the COVID-19 pandemic surges for the fourth time in the U.S., Amazon announced that it will open an additional 100 locations after opening more than 250 this year. Amazon plans to hire an additional 125,000 employees, which will bring its total to nearly 1.5 million. The company recently announced that it will pay employee education costs for GED certificates, English language training, or college tuition.

3. Search Engine News — Don’t Share Content With Other Sites If You Want Traffic

There are plenty of ways to appropriately share content between websites, but Google emphatically posted that “If your goal is to reach a broader audience, go for it. If your goal is that only your site ranks for those queries, then syndicating / republishing is a bad idea. Pick your goals & select the work that helps you reach them.” 

And if you’re republishing, please make sure you understand how to have all the sites inform Google that your website is the originator.

We also learned last week that Mozilla is testing Microsoft’s Bing as the default search engine for 1% of its users. Google pays Mozilla more than $400 million annually to be the default search engine. 

Search Pro Corner: Moz’s Peter Meyers analyzed search results and found 9 different ways that Google is rewriting title tags. Separately, SEOWL has published a free tool that compares title tags to SERPs.

4. Spotlight Explainer — The Facebook Files

You will hear about The Facebook Files from now through the company’s future Congressional testimony and long into the antitrust actions it is facing.

What are The Facebook Files?

The Facebook Files are a five-part expose that The Wall Street Journal published every business day last week. 

What was exposed that was so bad?

The worst for many tech watchers was a March 2020 internal presentation about Instagram that read, “We make body issues worse for one in three teen girls.” This was the company’s acknowledgment that it had heard its critics and independently verified their complaints.

The horrific detail was that one Facebook presentation showed that amongteens reporting suicidal thoughts that 13% of British users and 6% of U.S. teens traced those thoughts back to Instagram. 

But that’s not their fault, is it? They don’t control how people feel.

True. But Facebook’s leaders are documented multiple times rejecting their own employee suggestions on ways to make Facebook’s environment less toxic for everyone, not just teenagers. Facebook is under pressure for knowing this issue existed and not implementing recommendations, asking for help, or alerting parents.

Facebook was singled out?

This series is all about Facebook. Their own data shows that the same negative effects are somewhat mitigated by the different forms of content posted on TikTok and Snapchat.

What else was found?

Each day was a new barrage of information. The series kicked off with a statement from a damning Facebook document: “We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly.” The Facebook Files revealed that millions of high profile accounts were shielded from repercussions when they violated the company’s terms and conditions. 

With a focus on reshared material, the company was trying to build higher levels of engagement and refused to stop even when its own employees noted that “misinformation, toxicity, and violent content are inordinately prevalent among reshares.”

Among that information was content posting misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines. Facebook’s data showed users saw negative information about vaccines on 41% of comments.

So, it sounds bad, but not criminal except …

Well, it did except that employees also flagged human traffickers in the Middle East, armed groups in Ethiopia, and Mexican drug cartels using Facebook. Remember that most Facebook users are not in the U.S. and have nothing to do with America, but America often protests the loudest.

Facebook’s data shows that last year the company spent 3.2 million hours labeling or removing that sort of information on the site, but 87% of that time was spent on U.S. content. In one case, Apple threatened to remove the Facebook app from its store, and Facebook’s documentation showed that the company was already aware of the issue.

Read the whole series here.

5. Did That Really Happen? — Refugees Receiving Ivermectin

Reports flooded social media that the CDC recommended that arriving refugees receive the human form of ivermectin to treat parasitic infections. Some conservative commentators and anti-vaccine proponents have twisted that to say that the government is secretly treating refugees instead of Americans for COVID-19, despite the FDA warning that ivermectin should not be used to treat COVID-19. You can read the full fact check at The Annenberg Public Policy Center.

6. Following Up — Amazon Bans Hundreds of Companies

We’ve been writing a lot about companies allegedly paying to post fake positive reviews on Amazon. Sean Hollister at The Verge has been covering this for a long time and has been a significant force in exposing the practice. 

Now he has posted news that Amazon has permanently banned 600 Chinese brands and 3,000 seller accounts, including well known names like RavPower and Aukey.

7. Protip — How to Sell Your iPhone

If Apple’s latest product launch day last week excited you, trading in your iPhone can be much easier with this checklist from PC magazine.

8. Screening Room — Daniel Craig & Heineken

9. Science Fiction World — Robot Border Patrols

Remember in that movie (OK, all the movies) where the one person tells the others that there are armed robots guarding the outside of the place? State-owned Israel Aerospace Industries is making that a reality with remote-controlled armed robots that can patrol, track bad guys, and shoot.

Days after that story broke, The New York Times published images and details of an Israeli operation that assassinated Iran’s top nuclear scientist using a remote controlled rifle fired by its operator one thousand miles away.

10. Coffee Break — Animals at the Castle

Baron of Dunsany Randal Plunkett looks as if he wandered off the Game of Thrones set in contemporary clothes. Plunkett says he has offered 1,600 acres of land surrounding his castle to Ireland’s only wildlife hospital to reacclimatize recovering and rescued animals. Already there: otters, fox cubs, and buzzards, oh my.

11. Sign of the Times