Good Monday morning. It’s December 21st.  This is the last issue of Spotlight this year. We will see you back here after all the celebrating. Wear a mask if you’re out and about. Get the vaccine if you can. I want you around for a very long time.

Today’s Spotlight is 1,368 words — about a 5 minute read.

1. News to Know Now

a. Facebook restarted some political advertising, but they are limited to the U.S. Senate elections in Georgia. This is a continuing problem for non profit organizations during their biggest fundraising season. Facebook defines organizations working in civil rights, the environment, health care, security, gun violence prevention, and education as political advertisers. They have not been able to advertise — even for fundraising purposes — since the polls closed on Election Day. 

b. Adult website Pornhub removed all content from its website that was not uploaded by one of its partners or models. The company scrambled fast after New York Times columnist Nick Kristof published an essay on December 4 about nonconsensual content that might be on the site. The company denied the charge, but quickly instituted a policy change when Mastercard and Visa began investigating whether they would continue to accept payments on the site. Pornhub and its competitors have some of the largest volume of web traffic in the world. They get more monthly visitors than PayPal, Spotify, Wikipedia, and every major bank and media enterprise. The website logged 42 billion visits last year, a daily rate of 115 million. 

c. Amazon’s Alexa assistant is now a real-time translator for people speaking English and one of these languages: Spanish, French, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, and  Hindi. A user can ask Alexa to begin translating, and the device (including the phone app) will translate both sides of the conversation. 

2. COVID-19 Online Resources and News

Great Trackers
Johns Hopkins Dashboard or Animations
COVID-19 Forecast Hub
Google County Level Mobility Reports
Long-Term Care COVID Tracker
NPR’s County-Level Hospital Tracker

COVID-19 Tech News

Clever Strategy: Distribute Covid Aid With Satellite Data – Wired
Debunked Covid Myths Survive Online Despite Facts – The Associated Press
SimpliSafe Offers Social Distancing Sweater – MediaPost
Social Media Already Losing Vaccine Misinfo Fight – Recode

3. Search Engine News

Data Google Provided

• Google confirmed last Wednesday that its Core Update rollout finished. That’s a big update that Google makes several times a year. You should annotate your search reports now to indicate that Google rolled out a major update between December 3 and December 16.
  
• Search Engine Land reported that Google is now testing a website results section on Google Maps. That’s big news for all and huge for retail.
  
• Google announced that its Augmented Reality features in search now allow you to project Baby Yoda into images of your room or to test different cosmetics on your face. Not one to wear makeup, I was more interested in Baby Yoda, but Google is regularly updating its AR capabilities so be thinking about how your organization can leverage that.

What Google Debunked

• Responding to a user question on Twitter, Googler John Mueller said that Google does not prioritize any particular publishing platform for indexing. He continued, “It’s not uncommon to see some pages from new sites get crawled quickly, and old sites to get crawled slowly (say if we haven’t seen useful changes there in a long time). It’s not the rule, but it can happen.” (h/t SEO Roundtable)

4. In the Spotlight — Google Advertising Lawsuit Filed

If you’re playing the home version of the “Let’s Break Up The World’s Largest Search Engine Game,” regulators sued Google twice last week, including filing a highly anticipated Google advertising lawsuit.

Here’s what’s going on:

The first suit: Distribution and Access — October.

The Department of Justice joined with multiple states in alleging that Google pays billions of dollars each year to ensure that it functions as the internet’s gatekeeper. Google was accused of behaving in an anticompetitive manner because it acted in a way that denied competitors access to mobile devices and other online placements.

The second suit: Advertising — December 2020

This Google advertising lawsuit was filed by nine Republican state attorneys general with Texas’ Ken Paxton in the lead. The suit in Texas alleges that Google’s advertising reach harms consumers by raising costs for companies promoting their goods and services. The advertising suit also claims that Google and Facebook colluded to control the digital advertising market.

The third suit: Preferential Search Results — December 2020

Thirty-eight states and territories filed a complaint alleging that Google’s search results unfairly show the company’s products that compete with advertisers. The suit accuses the company of creating entry barriers that require companies providing similar services to pay Google for advertising to be shown higher in the search results.

Everyone Else — Now & 2021

The FTC notified nine Big Tech companies that it wants specific information regarding collection and use of user data, advertising targeting, algorithms that determine what content is shown, market and analytics research regarding user engagement, and business practices related to children and teens. The nine companies that must furnish the data within 45 days are Amazon, TikTok, Discord, Facebook, Reddit, Snap, Twitter, WhatsApp, and YouTube. 

Our Take: The Google advertising lawsuit is the big one because advertising generates the revenue that pays for nearly everything else. This is also the suit alleging Google and Facebook collusion. That explosive revelation defines the narrative for all actions against either company. The FTC is also conducting a pretty broad fishing expedition. Remember that the FTC is independent and bipartisan. Their activity will not change much if at all in a new Biden administration.

5. Debunked — Surgeon General on Vaccines

Outgoing Surgeon General Jerome Adams was interviewed by Yahoo Finance on Wednesday and did a good job acknowledging concerns about the vaccine with this statement:

“I keep saying it’s OK to have questions. Because there are some real harms that have been done to people of color in the past in the name of science by the government, by medical officials, the Tuskegee experiment, Henrietta Lacks who got her cells taken without her permission. And so people rightly have some distrust based on what’s happened historically.”

Read the short but worthwhile interview here.

6. Following Up — Walmart Tests Driverless Trucks

We’ve been telling you about Walmart’s aggressive plans to keep up with Amazon on delivery. Last week the company announced that it is using a multi-temperature truck to move items between a fulfillment center and store two miles apart. The trucks have been operating with a supervising human driver and logged 70,000 miles. Now they’ll be testing the route without a driver.

Walmart’s Announcement

7. Protip — Easiest Video Chat Services for Families

Yeah, sure, you’re a Zoom expert, but you’ll undoubtedly be talking with people who aren’t as well versed at video conferencing.

Review Geek breaks down Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft options.

Screening Room – Beerman

9. Coffee Break — The Tops in 2020

You apparently love our animal-themed coffee breaks more than any others. After crunching the data, it was our furry friends (along with one slimy one) that you clicked on the most. Here are the most popular 2020 Coffee Breaks:

1. We looked into moose licking road salt from cars, and it’s true. This great Canadian segment shows one of the very large creatures in action. It’s on YouTube.

2. Brod, the adorable Bernese Mountain Dog who lives with Irish President Michael D. Higgins, crashed an early March International Women’s Day event and looked for his human. Once he found him, he plopped down and demanded belly rubs. Of course there is video.

3. Back to Canada we go for a recent CBC documentary showing an octopus interacting with a human handler. See a one minute long clip on Twitter here.

4. Sometimes you just have to let loose and do what you love. That’s the lesson from Leny the Golden Retriever as he runs up a hill to slide down and then dashes up again. Watch Leny here on a short loop.

I’ll let myself out. Enjoy. 

Good Monday morning. It’s December 14th.  Electors gather today in state capitals to cast the final votes for president, the FDA meets on Thursday to authorize the Moderna vaccine, and the federal government runs out of money on Friday night. Hanukkah started last week, and Christmas is next week.  

Breathe.

Today’s Spotlight is 1,305 words — about a 5 minute read.

1. News to Know Now

What to know about the Facebook antitrust lawsuits:

1. The Federal Trade Commission filed suit.
2  Nearly all state governments also filed a parallel suit.
3. They accuse the company of being a monopolist. 
4. They want Facebook to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp.
5. They also want Facebook to seek approval for any future acquisitions valued at more than $10 million (which is a pretty tiny acquisition).
6. One big complaint is that Facebook acquires or buries competition.
7. Another is that Facebook user privacy has been eroded.

Facebook’s defense: We haven’t done anything wrong, and these acquisitions were already approved.  You don’t get to challenge them later.  Facebook is free to use and no one has to use the service, so where is the harm to consumers?   

Facebook also says that its competition remains Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple. They also cite services like Netflix that compete with Facebook Watch and smaller but still huge social media companies like Pinterest, Snap, Twitter, and TikTok.

Our take:  This surprised no one. Facebook has been publicly maneuvering for more than a year to shield Instagram and WhatsApp. Whatever happens will take years to occur. Large monopoly cases have been brought against AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft when they controlled the industry. Facebook has an argument to make, but nothing will change for a very long time.  

There also needs to be a reckoning on consumer privacy, but a big part of that starts with education. Most people still don’t understand internet privacy.

2. COVID-19 Online Resources and News

Great Trackers
Johns Hopkins Dashboard or Animations
COVID-19 Forecast Hub
Google County Level Mobility Reports
Long-Term Care COVID Tracker

NEW: NPR’s County-Level Hospital Tracker

COVID-19 Tech News

Anti-Vaxxer Books Top Search at Amazon, B&N – Bloomberg
CA: 10% Have Opted In To Covid Exposure Alerts – CNBC
Contact Tracing Apps Promised Big & Didn’t Deliver – The Verge
COVID-19: Has technology killed snow days? – Cincinnati Enquirer
Facebook Won’t Require Employees to Get Vaccine – The Verge
Google Search Results Tackle Vaccine Misinfo – CNBC
Vaccinated? Show Us Your App – The New York Times

3. Search Engine News

Data Google Provided

• Mobile website load times were 19 seconds in 2015. That’s why Google collaborated with companies including Yahoo, Microsoft  on the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) initiative. And all content heavy websites should be using or testing AMP.
  
• “Near Me” searches by consumers more than doubled again last year, reveals Googler Reena Nadkarni in this good interview with Greg Sterling.
  
• Google Maps is rolling out a “Community News Feed” for consumers that will display recent updates business have made in that area. Twenty million daily updates are done in Google Maps.

What Google Debunked

• Using an alternative to a dot com domain like dot blog or dot dentist conveys no ratings boost. That matches past guidance regarding dot edu or dot mil domains. One but: geographic domains (CA in Canada or MX in Mexico) will likely get preference on local searches.
  
• Keeping your domain registration information private has no effect on how Google ranks the website’s pages. That privacy was frowned upon twenty years ago, but it’s nearly 2021. 

Tweet of the Week from Google’s John Mueller: “If we know a text used to be on a page, we might continue to show the page even if the text has been removed. For example, if a company changes its name, you’d still want to find the website if you searched for the old name.”

4. In the Spotlight — Ransomware Surges

Baltimore’s network was hammered with ransomware eighteen months ago in a widely covered event. We wrote about it for a couple of weeks running. 

Baltimore County public schools were also struck with ransomware right before Thanksgiving, leading to arguments between the school system and County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr.  On Friday, the county accused the school system executives of refusing to cooperate with them.

The City of Texarkana also disclosed that its water utility was also attacked.

Ransomware cases are rapidly growing. Recent attacks include the Vancouver transit system, Independence, KS (pop. 10,000), Rand McNally, and U.S. Fertility, a chain of 55 clinics in 10 states.  Some organizations, like Danish news agency Ritzau, refuse to pay and rely on workarounds.

A security expert told The New York Times that he was aware of more than 100 organizations fighting ransomware attacks during September. Last week, CISA and the FBI issued a joint security alert about ransomware for K-12 schools. 

This is an issue that your organization needs to understand and plan for in a clear-eyed manner.

Ransomware Smart Links

Baltimore County executive says school officials… – Baltimore Sun 
Baltimore students must trade in device – CBS Baltimore
CISA, FBI warn of ransomware in K-12 Schools – ZD Net
How did ransomware get so bad? – The New York Times
KC suburb spent millions on protection, but… – Kansas City Star
Rand McNally hit by cyber attack – Bleeping Computer
Ransomware attack causing system outages – KTAL / KSHV
Ritzau did not pay ransom – Security Affairs
Vancouver’s transit system hit by ransomware – Bleeping Computer

5. Debunked — Bill Gates and Vaccines

A video of Bill Gates claiming that the vaccine will “change our DNA forever”  circulating on social media is misleading and inaccurate.

Read Reuters debunking it here.

6. Following Up — Google Fires Ethicist

We told you last week about Google firing AI ethicist Timnit Gebru. More of the story came to light last week, and we’ve rarely seen technology company employees react so viscerally to personnel moves. This one has them angry.

Dr. Gebru was the lead researcher on a conference paper her team submitted regarding the bias in very large machine learning algorithmsbased on language. Google demanded she remove her affiliation and the names of colleagues from the paper. She refused and was later fired.

Remember that Dr. Gebru is an ethicist. Firing an ethicist over ethical issues is never a good look. Also not a good look is the Google BERT algorithm we told you about before that uses very large machine learning algorithms based on language to provide search results.

Before this even happened, I was avidly (albeit slowly) reading “Algorithms of Oppression” in part to understand the SEO implications. And it’s a significant problem. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has apologized for Gebru’s dismissal and promised to review the matter.

Catch up: fantastic Venture Beat interview with Gebru.

7. Protip — Export Your Google Drive Files

For those of you moving on after Google announced limits on its file storage, you can easily take all your stuff with you. 

Here’s the step-by-step for Google Takeout.

8. Screening Room – Take Care of Yourself

9. Coffee Break — New Google Animals… in your home

We’ve told you before about Google’s augmented reality search results that superimpose video of animals near you.  Google added 50 animals on Friday. 

Learn how to do it here, and no, a giraffe does not fit in my office, so it needs to be scaled down. 

Good Monday morning. It’s December 7th. Hanukkah begins Thursday night.

Today’s Spotlight is 1,205 words — about a 4 minute read.

1. News to Know Now

a. Facebook will be sued for antitrust violations by nearly all states this week according to Reuters. Separately, the Department of Justice sued Facebook Thursday claiming that it discriminated against Americans by giving preference to foreign workers through the H-1B visa program. ArsTechnica has coverage of this counterintuitive claim.

b. Facebook’s Oversight Board announced that it will hear its first six cases. The group is sponsored by but operates independently of Facebook. Its membership includes Nobel Prize laureates, former heads of state, legal scholars, and human rights experts. As the board reviews specific cases among the more than 200,000 that were filed, they hope to establish precedents that Facebook and its moderators can use as guidance. (Official announcement)

c. Reddit averaged 52 million daily active users in October, according to The Wall Street Journal. That’s a fraction of the traffic internet giants get, but is also 52 million people every day on a network where users self-segment themselves into interest groups.

2. COVID-19 Online Resources and News

Great Trackers
Johns Hopkins Dashboard or Animations
COVID-19 Forecast Hub
Google County Level Mobility Reports
Long-Term Care COVID Tracker

COVID-19 Tech News

Covid & Cybsersecurity Catastrophic Attack on Ed Tech — Ed Week
Delta first U.S. airline to launch contact tracing — Axios
Facebook will remove vaccine misinformation — The New York Times
More than 1 million enabled WA COVID exposure tech — KXLY Spokane
New Test Uses Smartphone Camera & CRISPR — SciTechDaily
Study examines mobile health tech for Covid-19 — MIT
Wickliffe students, faculty wear COVID tracking tech — CBS Cleveland 19

3. Search Engine News

Google’s new page experience metrics for websites will only count as a ranking signal based on how they render on mobile.

The company’s announcement late last week bears repeating. Only. Mobile. Metrics. Matter.

Refresher on the three “Core Web Vitals” metrics and their funny names:

1. Largest Contentful Paint — how quickly users see content.
2. First Input Delay — how responsive a site is when something is clicked.
3. Cumulative Layout Shift — how the page moves on-screen during interaction.

Remember when Google first said that your website’s pages had to be mobile friendly? Then they said the pages had to be fast. These are the next three items.

Separately Google announced on Thursday that it launched a core update. While Google constantly updates these days, core updates are much broader and take a week or two to update throughout Google. Websites will see rankings and traffic fluctuate, but we won’t know for at least several more days which industries and types of sites were affected the most. The last core update was in May so it’s not a regular occurrence.

4. In the Spotlight — Election Misinformation Continues

No one is happy with the way that big technology platforms are manipulated by bad people to spread misinformation. We’ve told you before how videos depicting suicide or even murder show up online, are quickly removed, and then changed by others to evade detection. What a world, but it’s ours, this part is broken, and we need to be clear-eyed about this.

The co-founder of a civil rights coalition is raising awareness that election misinformation targeting Spanish speakers in the U.S. is often not as well policed as posts in English. Her concerns were echoed by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) when he questioned Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during hearings last month.

Avaaz analyzed 10 posts from President Donald Trump’s attorneys and found that 5 of them were flagged for election misinformation, but that only one of the Spanish translations were flagged.

Video content is also hard to police and categorize. Transparency Tube is addressing the categorization and analysis part by creating an easy-to-use library of political YouTube content organized by date, time, category, and even whether it is conservative or progressive. Think QAnon isn’t a problem? There were 7.9 million views of QAnon channels on English language YouTube in the last 7 days.

This problem won’t go away with a new president. In fact, it may get worse. Facebook said that it attached fact check warnings to 180 million pieces of content between March 1 and Election Day. Granted, that’s a long time, but let’s consider the number: 180,000,000 pieces of content. Another 265,000 were entirely removed from the site for voter interference.

More recently Avaaz looked at the Georgia Senate races and reported that Facebook missed as much as 60% of the election misinformation targeting those voters.

Professors at the University of California’s Culture Analytics Group say they’ve developed an automated approach to determine when social media conversations reflect conspiracy theory distribution. They are using a combination of entity analysis and network effects to compare past conspiracy theories to current ones like QAnon.

Our take: That is a great idea, but it’s not ready for prime time yet and wouldn’t be the sole solution. Stay vigilant and use credible fact-checking sites.

Election Misinformation Smartlinks

An AI tool to identify conspiracy theories — Nieman Lab
Election misinformation often evaded YouTube — The New York Times
Facebook failed to flag Georgia election misinformation — Daily Dot
Facebook labeled 180 million debunked posts — The Washington Post
Tech firms fall short on Spanish language — The Hill
Transparency Tube

5. Debunked — “Thugshot Christmas tree”

The Mobile County (AL) Sheriff’s Office posted an image of a Christmas tree decorated with images of people it said had been arrested or were wanted for crimes.

The people in those images were not necessarily found guilty of those crimes. And the office didn’t actually display the tree, but doctored a photo.

Read the truth from the AP via Snopes.

6. Following Up — Amazon Fresh, Google Fires Ethicist

We’ve written about Amazon’s march to grocery dominance. They take another step this week by opening an Amazon Fresh store in Chicago suburb Naperville, their first location not on the west coast. (Chicago Tribune)

We’ve also told you before about work done by Google AI ethicist Dr. Timnit Gebru in showing how facial recognition software often misidentified darker skinned women. After she recently refused Google’s request to retract a research paper on a different topic, her employment was terminated. The industry press is livid over the matter. A second Google ethicist, Tristan Harris, is now one of Big Tech’s most outspoken critics and was recently featured in “The Social Dilemma.”

7. Protip — Android Live Wallpaper & Google Photos

If your Android phone supports Live Wallpaper, you can now let Google Photos use rotating images from your gallery as your wallpaper.

Here’s how.

Screening Room— Belonging

9. Coffee Break — From Gingerbread House to Gingerbread Höme

Ikea nailed a feel good moment with free, downloadable stencils to make gingerbread furniture for gingerbread houses.

How do you connect them? Well, with warm sugar or icing. Duh.