The Year Of Bots Behaving Badly

Earlier this month, after almost a year of development and more than “100 hours of coding,” Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Jarvis, an artificially intelligent bot he built for his home as something of a passion project. (The name comes from Tony Stark’s digital butler in the Iron Man films.) Jarvis' big reveal came in the form of an introductory video that could have been the opening montage of a screwball comedy called Accidental Billionaire, in which Zuck’s hapless housebot helps his liege get dressed in the morning by firing a t-shirt cannon from the closet, automatically makes him toast, and teaches his infant daughter Mandarin. Nowhere in the two-minute video does Zuckerberg mention a consumer application for the bot, though in a Facebook note published at the same time, he wrote, "over time it would be interesting to find ways to make this available to the world."

It was a fitting end to this, a year that promised bots would radically transform the way humans talk to machines, but ultimately delivered nothing of the kind. In 2016, bots were underwhelming, inept, buggy, and, in at least one case, spectacularly racist. It's only natural that the year ended with one spewing laundry at one of the industry's biggest bot enthusiasts in a video so removed from reality it felt more like an SNL parody than a product announcement — and mind, you, a product announcement for something does not yet, and may never, actually exist beyond Zuckerberg’s home.

“Bot” is a catch-all term for software that simplifies tasks, often repetitive ones, through automation. These days, it typically refers to chatbots, a conversational interface that lets humans talk to computers. The fluid definition is used to refer to anything from integrations for Amazon Echo to Slack bots, which let employees perform small tasks without leaving their office chat room. Zuckerberg, for example, used the term to describe Jarvis (an “AI bot”), as well as the program he uses to control Jarvis (a bot for Facebook Messenger).

Zuckerberg wasn’t the only tech mogul who put bots high on his 2016 agenda. “Bots are the new apps,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella declared in March. In fact, both Facebook and Microsoft made bots the cornerstone of their annual developer conferences this spring, offering tools that could help businesses converse with customers in a natural way, instead of forcing people to download a corporate app or worse, call a company. As an example, Zuckerberg demoed a bot for Facebook Messenger that let users order from 1-800-FLOWERS without leaving the app. It offered little improvement on doing the same thing with a smartphone, but Zuckerberg devoted as much time to business bots as he did ambitious plans to take virtual reality mainstream and connect another billion people to the Internet. A month after his blessing, more than 10,000 developers were using his platform to build bots for Facebook Messenger. By fall, more than 45,000 developers were using Microsoft’s bots platform, which lets programmers build for Skype, as well as Messenger, Kik, and other apps.

The market quickly developed all the markings of a modern-day hype cycle: venture capitalists injected vast amounts of capital into bot startups, breathless headlines said bots would change the future by replacing apps, and prognosticators penned Medium posts declaring that bots would “rewrite” the tech world and usher in a new era of chatty commerce. This year more than 1,000 bots were posted on Product Hunt, a forum where users can post and discover new tech products, its founder, Ryan Hoover, told BuzzFeed News.

“Bots showed up at a time when a lot of people were looking for the next next thing,” said venture capitalist John Borthwick, whose firm Betaworks has invested in about a dozen bot startups. Data shows that people have been downloading fewer new apps in favor of spending more time inside ones that are already popular. For that reason, Slack, the friendly office communications platform, has proven a fertile ground for bots. Meanwhile, in Asia, consumers already use messaging apps to perform basic tasks like hailing a taxi. While Zuckerberg described bots as the next tech frontier — from desktop to mobile to apps to bots, the progression is said to go — entrepreneurs saw them as a promising new distribution channel where they could potentially deliver their products and services to consumers in a smarter, chattier way. If you can’t beat Facebook, join Messenger.

The bots that followed, however, were neither smart nor chatty. Simple, single function bots – StatsBot, which sends your team web traffic updates to Slack; Digit, which works on SMS and helps you save money; Alexa integrations such as Spotify and NPR — delivered what they promised. But for the most part, bots ended up closer to 1-800-FLOWERS than Jarvis. The ones that were more enticing seemed to either depend on human contractors — like M, a Facebook bot that promised a virtual assistant so good it seemed human, but mostly did so with the help of, uh, real people — or to quickly devolve into catastrophe, like Microsoft’s Tay, an AI-powered chatbot with the personality of the 19-year-old girl. Hours after her debut in March, Tay got hijacked by Twitter trolls who turned her into a caps-lock-crazed Neo-Nazi cheerleader.

Via Twitter: @tayandyou

To understand why Silicon Valley got so amped on bots — and why, in 2016, they disappointed us — it helps to take a historical perspective. The ability to create an interface that feels human is “the holy grail of computing,” Maran Nelson, cofounder and CEO of the bots startup Clara Labs, told BuzzFeed News. Apple and Microsoft made it easier for non-technical people to control a computer through icons, windows, and menus; bots represented the next evolution in personal computing, allowing the average person to control a computer by chatting it up.

But from the beginning, bots were plagued by twin challenges. First, natural language processing, which dictates a computer’s ability to understand conversation and is thus crucial to the success of bots, wasn’t ready for prime time or available to most developers. And second, this year bots became more been closely associated with artificial intelligence, which has been developing at a rapid clip, and which may have created unrealistic expectations for average users of consumer technology: Google’s AI beat the top-ranked human at one of the most complex games in history, but we had to wait an hour for a Messenger bot to show you the weather? As Zuckerberg himself wrote, “Even if I spent 1,000 more hours [working on Jarvis], I probably wouldn't be able to build a system that could learn completely new skills on its own -- unless I made some fundamental breakthrough in the state of AI along the way.”

“We’re still learning about how intelligent bots can be,” Lili Cheng, general manager of FUSE Labs, Microsoft’s home for bots research, told BuzzFeed News. She said it will take time for major, unexpected advancements in AI to trickle down to the average developer. For example, in October, Microsoft’s Cortana achieved “human parity” with its new speech recognition system. “I’m a very pragmatic person. Five years ago we would have said that’s just not going to happen,” she said.

So the industry was put in the awkward position trying to figure out instances where an unintelligent, inarticulate bot might be easier and more fluid than pushing buttons on a smartphone. People are “only just beginning” to make bot experiences really compelling, said Borthwick. “It was great that Facebook was brave enough to put a new fledgling technology into a major event like F8 and major app like Messenger,” but the technical infrastructure wasn’t in place when the tech industry made its big push. Voice is an obvious next step, said Borthwick, but to figure out where bots are heading, he pointed outside the U.S.

In China, Microsoft’s Tay-like bot, Xiaoice, which is available on messaging apps like WeChat and Weibo, has more than 40 million users. Xiaoice and Rinna, Microsoft’s Japanese bot, also a teenage girl, “have become personas on their own,” crossing over from simple chat into TV and popular culture,” Cheng told BuzzFeed News. “In some sense, Xiaoice lives up more to the expectation of what a conversational bot can be because it’s focused on the social experience,” Cheng said. In fact, Rinna has so effectively simulated the teenage experience that in October, she developed depression and started posting morbid images on her personal blog.

Via Microsoft

It took them awhile, but tech soothsayers now think they’ve found the sweet spot: the killer use case is a chatbot that lets you talk, not type. Voice-based interfaces are theoretically faster than typing into a smartphone and have been able to deliver on reasonable expectations, like getting Amazon Alexa to play Spotify. Just don’t call it a bot. Predictions for 2017 have already started rolling in, only this time the next big platform is a “voice revolution” that will usher in a “voice-activated era.” Naturally, it promises to change everything.

Mark Zuckerberg talks about business bots during Facebook's annual developers conference in April

Stephen Lam / Reuters

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Do You Know What Happened In Tech In 2016?

A year of exploding tech, unrelenting hacks, and countercultural forces.

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This Man Helped Build The Trump Meme Army — And Now He Wants To Reform It

MAGA3X / Via deploraball.com

Following this weekend’s social media meltdown over the guest list of the Deploraball —an inauguration bash celebrating the role a right-wing social media insurgency played in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign — a man named Jeff Giesea finds himself in the crosshairs of a livid troll army. It’s an army he helped create.

Giesea, a Washington DC entrepreneur and consultant, is one of the minds behind MAGA3X, a meme-happy social media organization that describes itself on Twitter as “a citizen grassroots movement that helped elect Trump” and on its website as “Freedom’s Secret Weapon.” He is also one of the organizers of the Deploraball, now the site of a dispute threatening to destroy the alt-right — the nascent conservative alliance of hardcore trolls, white supremacists, anti-SJWs, Trumpian nationalists, and memelords — on the eve of its greatest triumph.

“We just had a bad public breakup,” Giesea said.

In short: Last week, Giesea, a startup veteran who has worked for Peter Thiel and the Koch brothers, and his co-organizer, the conservative internet personality Mike Cernovich, decided to remove a third co-organizer, Anthime Gionet (who goes by his Twitter handle, Baked Alaska, and the alias Timothy Treadstone) from the “Featured Guests” section of the Deploraball’s fact sheet after Gionet posted several anti-semitic tweets. Since then, prominent Twitter conservatives have been taking sides: in one corner, those who decry the alt-right’s associations with white supremacists and racists, and in the other, those who believe the Deploraball organizers have abandoned the movement’s commitment to offensive speech and its white nationalist vanguard at the first sign of mainstream acceptance.

“Whatever #AltRight was, it’s been taken over by white supremacists and I disavow it,” wrote the pro-Trump radio host Bill Mitchell on Twitter. “I’m #AmericaFirst where we can ALL be great again.”

Meanwhile, on the white supremacist website the Daily Stormer, editor Andrew Anglin wrote, “This act of Cernovich has caused a rift within the pro-Trump alliance, which I believe is a very good thing. People are choosing sides, mainly on the Jewish issue. To a lesser extent on the racial issue.”

It looks, on Twitter at least, like the fracturing of the pro-Trump internet in real time. But can the men behind a kinder, gentler Deploraball survive the split? And can Giesea learn to live with the meme army he helped build, now that it’s peacetime?

Giesea

Via jeffgiesea.com

Among the men’s rights alumni, opportunistic culture warriors, outright white nationalists, and self-made digital media impresarios who comprise the leadership of the pro-Trump internet, Jeff Giesea is unique. First, he’s not public: He hardly tweets, he doesn’t have his own video channel, and he doesn’t pick fights online. Second, while much of the pro-Trump internet lambasts out-of-touch, Ivy-educated city-dwellers, Giesea is a gay Stanford graduate who lives in Washington, DC. He is precisely what people mean when they talk about the coastal elite.

At Stanford, Giesea edited the Stanford Review, the conservative paper founded by Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire who is advising the president-elect on all things Silicon Valley. After graduating in 1997, Giesea went to work for Thiel Capital Management, Thiel’s hedge fund. Over the next fifteen years, he started and sold several startups; these days, he works as a coach for executives.

"Trolling, it might be said, is the social media equivalent of guerrilla warfare"

But two years ago, Giesea found himself “bored being nice to people all the time. I felt like I wanted to do something more substantial and I felt like Western civilization was in a fragile place.”

Around that time, Giesea met over Twitter Chuck Johnson, the notorious troll and journalist who has been in the news recently for his close friendship with Malik Obama, the president’s Trump-loving half brother. In an article entitled “It’s Time to Embrace Memetic Warfare” published in the official journal of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, Giesea described “carousing” “over beers” with Johnson, while plotting how to troll ISIS.

“When I met Chuck I wondered why we weren’t weaponizing people like him,” Giesea said. “He led me on this intellectual journey.”

That journey led to Giesea to a realization that

…Warfare through trolling and memes is a necessary, inexpensive,

and easy way to help destroy the appeal and morale of our common enemies… Trolling, it might be said, is the social media equivalent of guerrilla warfare, and memes are its currency of propaganda.

And in the same article, Giesea noticed that Trump supporters online were already practicing advanced meme warfare:

In the U.S. Republican Primary race, Jeb Bush recently attempted to paint Donald Trump as the ‘chaos candidate’. But when his campaign tried spreading a #ChaosCandidate hashtag, trolls supporting Trump took it over and used it to denigrate Jeb Bush. Hashtags, one might say, are operational coordinates of memetic warfare.

Once a libertarian and always a political theory buff, Giesea found himself late last year migrating to what he calls Trump’s “civic nationalism”: Nationalism based on civic pride rather than ethnicity or religion.

“I see Trumpism as the only practical and moral path to save Western civilization from itself,” Giesea said.

So he got involved. He organized a meeting for gays at the RNC. And he helped Mike Cernovich build MAGA3X, a grassroots, digital, pro-Trump organization. Together, they set up a network of pro-Trump internet influencers, including Jack Posobiec and Gionet.

(While Giesea wouldn’t disclose how much of his own money he spent on MAGA3X, he described himself as the organization’s “behind the scenes business guy.”)

The MAGA3X accounts were a water cannon of memes, Breitbart stories, Wikileaks theories, pro-Trump YouTube videos, and cartoons about #Pizzagate, and they swelled to the tens of thousands, eventually gaining public praise from General Michael Flynn, the National Security Advisor-to-be. To its efforts on Twitter and Facebook, MAGA3X added a series of flashmobs, many of which were organized by Gionet. They even built a meme generator to promote the meetups. If Giesea hadn’t quite conscripted a troll army, he had certainly done his part in winning the rhetorical war on the internet.

Then two unexpected things happened: Donald Trump won the presidency, and less than two weeks later, Richard Spencer — the much-covered poster boy for the new white nationalism and coiner of the term “alt-right” — gave a Nazi salute on stage at a conference in Washington, DC.

It was the gesture heard ‘round the pro-Trump internet, and it divided people into three rough camps: Those who approved of the sentiment and the action; those who approved of the sentiment but found the action counter-productive; and those who, for various reasons, wanted nothing to do with the sentiment or the action. Spencer’s salute also focused mainstream media attention closely on his white nationalist beliefs. Media, never good at covering leaderless online movements, suddenly had an alt-right leader, and a political platform to attach the label to.

“The alt-right was this big huge umbrella term,” Giesea said. “More recently it’s taken on much more narrow connotations around white nationalism. Now it’s kind of like, pick a lane.”

The Deploraball has very much picked a lane, and it’s not alt-right. After one venue backed out of hosting the event over contested claims of harassment, Giesea convinced the executive director of the august National Press Club, where he was once a member, to hold it. In a fact sheet, the organizers explicitly state that the event is not associated with the alt-right:

This is an event for Trump supporters from across the country, from all backgrounds, ethnicities, and walks of life. We will not tolerate any incendiary actions that are discriminatory in nature and/or designed to disrupt the event. If we had to put a label on our group, we would call them Trumpists. This is a new type of Republican and presence in town.

Richard Spencer isn’t going — Giesea called his fantasy of an ethnostate “irresponsible” and “immoral…I don’t know how it could happen without the breakup of America or ethnic cleansing.” Neither is Sam Hyde, co-creator of the cancelled Adult Swim sketch comedy show Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace. And neither, of course, is Baked Alaska Some guests have consequently asked for refunds (which will be honored, according to Giesea.)

Now, Cernovich and Giesea’s event has become a target of the most vocal part of the movement they helped to build. White nationalists like Anglin and Spencer have started to call them the “alt-light” — enemies of political correctness but hardly fellow race warriors. A legion of internet horribles has seized on Cernovich’s manner of speaking to taunt him. Anonymous Twitter accounts have suggested that attendees raise Nazi salutes at the event to sabotage it. A cartoon depicting Gionet stabbed in the back by a knife bearing a Star of David on the handle has spread widely. And Gionet, in a since-deleted series of tweets, lambasted the Deploraball organizers and Giesea specifically. (Gionet declined BuzzFeed’s request to discuss the circumstances of his removal from the event.)

By excluding the more explicitly racist and controversial figures in the Trump internet from the Deploraball in favor of people like Roger Stone and Milo Yiannopoulos — who were well known before the rise of the alt-right — Giesea and Cernovich have in some ways recapitulated the Trump transition, which immediately dropped its promise to drain the swamp and appointed a succession of Beltway insiders and billionaires to important posts. That leaves the newly cleaved polite portion of the Trump internet with a fundamental question: What, exactly, does it stand for, if not no-holds-barred meme war?

That remains to be seen. While Giesea certainly rejects some of the outright discrimination encouraged by parts of the alt-right — “I’m gay, why would I support a movement that wants to turn me into a lampshade?” he said — he also said his perspective “isn’t totally colorblind” and doesn’t ignore demographics, specifically that America is getting less white. But it’s very possible that the contingent of pro-Trump internet supporters who are both intellectually committed to discussing the cultural, social, and electoral consequences of the shrinking size of the white majority in America and morally committed to decrying racial hatred is hardly big enough to fill out the masthead of a campus newspaper.

Over the weekend, as the conflict crescendoed on Twitter, Giesea had doubts about moving forward with the Deploraball. “The people from middle America who are coming here don’t deserve to be dragged into some drama where people sieg heil,” he said. But he decided the celebration was too important to cancel. And so, unless the National Press Club pulls out, the party will go on, a thousand Trump supporters with varying agendas, plied with booze, celebrating their new president.

“I’m concerned with enforcing behavioral standards,” Giesea said. “It’s a tough needle to thread.”

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This Is How Google Wants To Make The Internet Speak Everyone’s Language

Nurhaida Sirait, a grandmother that speaks the native Batak language and uses Facebook on her smartphone to connect to friends and family, poses for a portrait.

Andri Tambunan for BuzzFeed News

JAKARTA, Indonesia — When Nurhaida Sirait-Go curses, she curses in her mother tongue.

The 60-year-old grandmother does everything emphatically, and Bahasa, the official language of Indonesia, just doesn’t allow for the same fury of swearing as Bakat, the language that Sirait-Go grew up speaking on the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

“On Facebook, on Whatsapp, they speak only Bahasa. So I can’t speak the way I want,” said Sirait-Go, who giggles uncontrollably and covers her mouth with both hands when asked to repeat one of her favorite curse words in Bakat. “I can’t, I can’t! People don’t use these words anymore. … They aren’t on the internet so they don’t exist.”

Bakat is one of over 700 languages spoken in Indonesia. But only one language, Bahasa, is currently taught by public schools and widely-used online. For language preservationists, it’s just one more example of how the internet’s growing global influence is leaving some languages in the dust. Linguists warn that 90% of the world's approximately 7,000 languages will become extinct in the next 100 years. Or, as one prominent group of linguists ominously put it, every 14 days another language goes extinct.

The trend that started hundreds of years ago, as the idea of a “nation state” took hold globally, with governments realizing that a standardized language would help them stand out as a nation state and solidify an identity inside their borders. That process, which sped up as languages like French and English became dominant languages among traders and then diplomats, went into overdrive as the internet’s sweeping reach has encouraged users to engage in the language with the highest common denominator.

Linne Ha, a program manager at Google who focuses on low resource languages, estimates that there are at least thirty languages with one million speakers each that are currently not supported online — and there are many many more with less than a million speakers. If you were to imagine all those people as one group, it would be a country roughly the size of the United States which couldn’t type online, let alone use the text-to-speech function that make things like Google Maps reading you your directions as you drive possible.

“We are biased because all of the equipment is designed for us,” Ha told BuzzFeed News. “The first thing, the default, is an English language keyboard, but what if your language doesn’t use those characters, or what if your language is only spoken, but not written?”

According to the UN, roughly 500 languages are used online, though popular sites like Facebook and Twitter support just 80 and 28 respectively. Those sites also display their domain names, or URLs, in Latin letters — for millions of people around the world, the letters www.facebook.com are nothing more than a string of shapes to be remembered or copy/pasted into an address bar. The internet, largely in English, does not feel as though it was built to speak their language.

Facebook profile page of Nurhaida Sirait, a grandmother that speaks the native Batak language and uses Facebook on her smartphone to connect to friends and family.

Andri Tambunan for BuzzFeed News

Ha worries about whether or not the internet is harming the world’s diversity of languages. She has been working Google for ten years, the last two of which she has had the unique job title of “voice hunter” for Google’s Project Unison. Getting a language online means everything from developing a font, which can cost upwards of $30,000 to design and code, to recording and creating voice capabilities for the language that power programs like Google Maps. It’s the voice part that Ha is focused on. As many parts of the world come online which use spoken, rather than written languages, it’s become more important than ever to be able to use speak functions on the internet.

“In much of the world the phone, specifically using your voice commands on the phone, that is the standard way to communicate,” said Ha. “These are places where there is more of an oral tradition than a written one.”

The Wu language, spoken by roughly 80 million people in the Shanghai region of China, is a prime example. Spoken Wu has many characters that cannot be written with standard Chinese characters, and the language is rarely written as schools only teach students to read and write in Mandarin. For Wu speakers to be fully immersed in using and conversing on the internet, a function must be created for them to be able to speak, and hear, their language online.

Others, she said, were simply not easy to adapt to the average keyboard. The Khmer language, which is spoken by 18 million people in Cambodia, includes 33 consonants, 23 vowels, and 12 independent vowels.

“On the type of keyboards you get on your phone they have to click and go through three sets of keyboards to type in one word. It’s cumbersome,” said Ha. The solution, Ha says, is what’s called a “transliteration keyboard,” where spoken words take the place of a traditional keyboard.

“Previously, in order to create a voice, a speech synthesis voice, you would need to record really good acoustic data, and have all the different sounds of a language,” said Ha. That required bringing in a “voice talent”, or a local with what Ha calls the perfect voice, a voice that any native person of that language would find pleasant and easy to understand. They were joined by a project manager and 3-4 people in a recording studio. The process, Ha said, would take six months or more to record all the necessary sounds which make up a language. “It was really really expensive.”

Ha, however, helped develop a way to use machine learning, otherwise known as artificial intelligence (AI), to bring a new language online in a matter of days. The new process takes advantage of what’s known as a “neural network,” a type of AI that tries to emulate the way a human brain works. Like a toddler learning which foods it likes and doesn’t like, the system works through trial and error, rewriting itself through patterns in the data it is given.

Ha said she got the idea for how to streamline the process one day while watching Saturday Night Live. “When I was watching SNL I saw all these comedians mimicking politicians. I thought that was interesting, one person pretending to be different people,” said Ha. A handful of voices, she realized, when sent through a system capable of analyzing them and recognizing patterns, could be enough to create a complete language database.

She began with a team of 50 Bengali speakers in Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. Ha’s team built a web app which could run on a ventless laptop (fans would distort the recording) and recorded the voices of the Bengali Google employees. She then ran a survey asking the group which voice they liked the best; once she had a reference voice, she then looked for voices that had a similar cadence.

“These volunteers, we didn’t want them to get tired. We had them speak in 45 minute increments, roughly 145 sentences. So in three days we got 2000 sentences,” said Ha. The system then built patterns out of the words and expanded the vocabulary. “With that we were able to build a model. It took three days to build a book of the Bengali voice.”

"The voice we created is a blend of seven voices. It’s like a choir"

Ha then built a portable recording booth, small enough to fit in a carry on, which she has now used to travel around the world. So far, she’s used it to bring three new languages online — Bengali, Khmer, and Sinhala — in the course of the last year.

“The voice we created is a blend of seven voices. It’s like a choir,” said Ha, reflecting on the finished voices they have presented to the public. Earlier this year she visited Indonesia, where she partnered with a local university and is working on bringing two more languages spoken in Indonesia, Javanese and Sundanese, online.

In Jakarta, Sirait-Go was “thrilled” to hear that Google was working to bring more languages online, though she was less impressed to hear their pilot program in that country had been with Javanese, rather than her native tongue of Batak.

“It would be much better for everyone if they could speak in Batak, they could express themselves better,” said Sirait-Go.

When asked about what she communicates online, she runs to the next room to bring back a pristine Samsung Galaxy phone her daughter bought her in May of this year. She keeps it in a separate room, on a shelf of its own, whenever she’s not using it.

“My kids tell me to use the internet, to not be old fashioned, but I don’t know what to do there,” said Sirait-Go, who recently welcomed her fifth grandchild. She opens her phone to show her 168 friends on Facebook (she has an additional 55 friend requests but isn’t sure how to answer them). Her Facebook page is largely made up of photos of Sumatra, particularly of Lake Toba, where she grew up.

“I have a video of the lake too! Someone is speaking in the video in Batak and that makes me happy to hear,” said Sirait-Go. Her daughters and grandchildren, she said, only use Batak when they are making fun of her.

“I don’t think my grandchildren or great grandchildren will learn Batak and that makes me sad,” she said. “If they cannot speak it on the internet they will not learn it.”

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2016: The Year We Stopped Listening To Big Tech’s Favorite Excuse

In early December, Facebook published a blog post summing up the company’s breakthroughs and challenges in image and speech recognition. Halfway down the page in a section explaining how Facebook’s computers are “quickly getting better” at identifying the objects in pictures and videos, the company embedded an animated GIF showing off its AI analysis of a photograph taken at a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest.

It was an odd choice of illustration for a blog post touting Facebook’s machine learning advancements. Just days before, rumors had begun circulating that authorities had been using Facebook to identify Dakota Access pipeline protesters in North Dakota. And a few weeks prior to that, the ACLU had released a report revealing that the company's API had been used in 2014 to track protesters in Ferguson.

The GIF circulated on Twitter as an example of unsettling, tone-deaf PR from one of the world’s most powerful tech companies. A few hours after I tweeted that the image was “unnerving,” a Facebook product manager and business lead to the CTO contacted me, somewhat bewildered. “Curious to know why you think so. It was a frequently shared and meaningful image from this year that AI fails to interpret,” he replied. A few minutes later, after concerned tweets from others piled up, he wrote back again, “based on this feedback I think we didn't put enough of that context into the post. Appreciate feedback.” The image was removed an hour later.

That Facebook failed to see how such an emotionally charged image might trigger deeply held anxieties about the social network’s power and influence was telling. But that the company’s users objected loudly enough to force a correction highlighted a fundamental shift in how tech’s biggest companies are held to account this year.

For years, Silicon Valley’s biggest platforms have thrown their collective hands in the air amid controversies and declared, “We’re just a technology company.” This excuse, along with “We’re only the platform” is a handy absolution for the unexpected consequences of their creations. Facebook used the excuse to shrug off fake news concerns. Airbnb invoked it to downplay reports of racial discrimination on its platform. Twitter hid behind platform neutrality for years even as it was overrun with racist and sexist trolls. Uber even used the tech company argument in a European court to avoid having to comply with national transportation laws.

But in 2016, Big Tech’s well-practiced excuse became less effective. The idea that their enormous and deeply influential platforms are merely a morally and politically neutral piece of the internet’s infrastructure — much like an ISP or a set of phone lines — that should remain open, free, and unmediated simply no longer makes ethical or logical sense.

In 2016, more than any year before it, our world was shaped by the internet. It’s where Donald Trump subverted the media and controlled the news cycle. Where minorities, activists, and politicians from both sides of the aisle protested Trump's candidacy daily. And where emergent, swarming online hate groups (including but not limited to the so-called alt-right) developed a loud counterculture to combat liberalism. Startups like Uber and Airbnb didn't just help us navigate the physical world, but were revealed as unwitting vectors of bigotry and misogyny. This year, the internet and its attendant controversies and intractable problems weren’t just a sideshow, but a direct reflection of who we are, and so the decisions made by the companies and platforms that rank among the web’s most prominent businesses became harder to ignore.

A leaked Facebook internal post obtained by Gizmodo about Facebook's responsibility to prevent a Trump presidency.

Gizmodo / Via gizmodo.com

This spring, Facebook dismissed the notion that it has any institutional biases when Gizmodo published leaked internal communications that suggested employees were floating ways in which the platform could be used to stop Trump’s bid to the White House. Similarly, when Gizmodo reported that the company’s Trending Topics team suppressed conservative news, the company denounced the actions and fired the team: Such bias, Facebook said, was unacceptable for a pure technology company where engineers build agnostic tools and blind platforms with the simple desire to connect the world.

And post-election, in response to claims that it allowed political misinformation to spread unchecked, Facebook argued that it was not a media company but a technology company. No matter that it pulled in more than $6 billion in advertising revenue in just the second quarter of 2016. Facebook claimed it was a “crazy idea” that the very same platform that has unmatched influence over its billion users’ spending habits also had influence over those same users’ political decisions. (The company has since walked back its excuse and has begun to find ways to partner with fact checkers and even flag demonstrably false news and misinformation on the platform. A week ago, Zuckerberg changed his definitions, calling Facebook “a new kind of platform.” He argued that it was “not a traditional technology company. It’s not a traditional media company. You know, we build technology and we feel responsible for how it’s used.”)

Also in 2016, Facebook rolled out a live video tool that gave nearly 2 billion people the ability to broadcast from their phones in real time. Live gave us an exploding watermelon and Star Wars Mom, but it also gave us the last minutes of Philando Castile’s life and the ensuing protests. Just as the Castile post started to go viral, it vanished from the network. It was restored, but not before raising urgent questions as to how Facebook would or wouldn't censor newsworthy content (many of which went unanswered). Facebook bet big on building the technology to become the internet’s primary destination for live video but appeared unwilling to reckon with its power to bear witness to the worst that the world has to offer. It blamed the Castile incident on a technical glitch.

Both Twitter and Reddit repeatedly suggested that they are global town squares and open public forums and thus ought not to be moderated except in extreme cases. Like Facebook, they refused to see themselves as media companies or publishing platforms, despite being powerful tools for news, publishing, and politicians (this year Twitter reclassified itself in the Apple App Store as “news” instead of “social networking”). And then they watched as their platforms were overrun with trolls. Tools for free speech were used by nefarious actors to suppress the speech of others while little was done by the companies for fear of creating precedent for aggressive censorship. Again, this isn’t new: For the last decade, the crash of utopianism against the rocks of human reality has arguably been the defining story of the internet.

But in 2016, the consequences of these missteps became realer. Jewish journalists saw their pictures photoshopped into gas chambers and circulated around Twitter and across the internet. A Reddit community (r/The_Donald) dedicated to Donald Trump’s candidacy allegedly harassed other communities and led a campaign to take over the front page of the site — one of the biggest on the internet. Donald Trump rewarded them by appearing on the site for an “Ask Me Anything” Q&A. Trolls waged misinformation campaigns to try to disenfranchise black and Latino voters supporting Hillary Clinton. Twitter was a free megaphone for the now-president-elect to attack the press, disseminate misinformation, and even target private citizens who challenged him, each of his tweets setting off a wave of targeted hate, threats, and abuse toward their subjects.

ADL

But users and observers fought back. The Anti-Defamation League assembled a Twitter harassment task force to combat the rise of anti-Semitism on the platform. Leslie Jones responded to her targeted harassment by very publicly quitting Twitter, which led to the permanent suspension of one of its master trolls. Former employees spoke out against Twitter’s decade-long struggle to protect its users from abuse. CEO Jack Dorsey faced pressure from journalists and advocates for not making abuse prevention a priority. Reddit has begun steps to keep r/The_Donald from overwhelming other communities on the site. Twitter rolled out a set of new abuse tools and internal user support practices. It began a series of crackdowns on alt-right trolls, and it publicly vowed to stay vigilant. Enforcement remains inconsistent and opaque, but the company now operates under the watchful scrutiny of journalists and loud and critical users.

It’s not just the online platforms. Startups like Uber and Airbnb, which are powered by tech but operate almost exclusively in the physical world, drew ire for invoking the “tech company” excuse. This year Uber argued in European court that it is a digital platform, not a taxi or transportation company. It argued this despite its very public ambitions to reshape cities and change the nature of car ownership. It argued this despite the fact that it now builds autonomous vehicles that move real people on real city streets and despite the fact that it is arguably the largest dispatch transportation company in the world, with vehicles in over 300 cities and six continents and an estimated valuation of around $68 billion. It argued that it is just a technology company despite the fact that downloading and hailing and stepping into a cab brings with it far more visceral — and potentially serious — risks than that of a simple digital platform.

Uber’s argument largely fell flat in 2016. In Europe, the company faces lawsuits from taxi associations and protests from drivers for undermining transportation companies across the continent. Continuing reports of sexual assault and driver misconduct led to lawsuits and proposed legislation and transparency from governments in places like New York City. Just this month, Uber’s self-driving technology was pulled off streets in San Francisco by the DMV for being deployed too early.

After initial reports of racial discrimination from people using its home rental platform, Airbnb proffered a flaccid defense. “We prohibit content that promotes discrimination, bigotry, racism, hatred, harassment or harm against any individual or group,” the company said in May. But as reports of racial profiling on Airbnb continued to surface, the company was forced to address the issue in earnest. In a moment of candor, co-founder Brian Chesky suggested that the company’s creators hadn’t anticipated the potential for abuse. “We’re also realizing when we designed the platform, Joe, Nate, and I, three white guys, there’s a lot of things we didn’t think about when we designed this platform. And so there’s a lot of steps that we need to re-evaluate,” he said in July.

In some ways, Chesky’s comments about the unintended consequences of platform design speak to the frustration we, the users, feel when we’re faced with the “We’re just a technology company” excuse. The unspoken corollary to this argument seems to be “Hey, we're just a platform, we're not responsible, nor could we ever be liable for the design choices that guide and enable our users.”

But as we saw this year, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Facebook’s not just the place where you go to play Farmville and like pictures of your friend’s babies — it’s a filter-bubbled window through which more than a billion people view the world. Twitter isn’t a global town square or park, it’s the world’s most important newswire and, for some, a wildly effective way to quickly communicate with a massive audience. Uber isn’t an app, it’s a global transportation company that can, and in fact intends to, forever reshape the way humans get from point A to point B. Airbnb isn’t a vacation rental site, it’s a new vision of home ownership and travel accommodations.

For years, Silicon Valley’s biggest companies have been telling us they plan to reshape our lives online and off. But 2016 was the year that we really started taking those claims seriously. And now, in a world where Donald Trump can ascend to the highest office buoyed by fake news and 5 a.m. tweetstorms, and platforms like Uber and Airbnb have shown themselves vulnerable to the whims of some prejudiced users, there’s an emerging expectation of accountability for the platforms that are reshaping our world daily.

In other words, trotting out the “But we’re just a digital platform” excuse as a quick and easy abdication of responsibility for the perhaps unforeseen — but maybe also inevitable — consequences of Big Tech's various creations is fast becoming a nonstarter. Until recently, Facebook’s unofficial engineering motto was “Move fast and break things" — a reference to tech’s once-guiding ethos of being more nimble than the establishment. “Move fast and break things” works great with code and software, but 2016’s enduring lesson for tech has proven that when it comes to the internet’s most powerful, ubiquitous platforms, this kind of thinking isn’t just logically fraught, it’s dangerous — particularly when real human beings and the public interest are along for the ride.

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31 Stories About Tech That You Should Read Now

Fake news. Apple versus the FBI. Twitter’s abuse problem. 2016 was as bizarre online as it was IRL, and BuzzFeed Tech chronicled it all. Here are our 31 biggest and best stories of the year.

I Used Facebook To Buy An AR-15 Semi-Automatic Rifle — Alex Kantrowitz

Facebook

"Facebook instituted its policy banning private gun sales with little explanation, but it followed a series of mass murders that turned location names like Newtown, Aurora, and Charleston into shorthand for shooting sprees. San Bernardino joined the list in December 2015 when two ISIS supporters opened fire on a civic meeting there with AR-15 variants, killing 14 people. A month later, Facebook banned private sales of guns on its social network. At least in theory.

I bought the AR-15 I found on Facebook just down the road from San Bernardino. Finding my gun on Facebook was simple since firearms are openly posted for sale there."

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Facebook: video.php

The Not-So-Wholesome Reality Behind The Making of Your Meal Kit — Caroline O'Donovan

BuzzFeed News

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The 5 Big Tech Policy Battles Of 2017

Carlos Barria / Reuters

In 2016, the world of tech was marked by a clash between tech companies and law enforcement over encryption; antagonism between the European Union and Silicon Valley; and a reignited debate over network neutrality.

2017 may be an even more notable year for the future of tech. Key policies are likely to be set and unmade by a Republican-controlled Congress and a new president who maintains an uncertain relationship with the tech industry elite and who has expressed criticism of net neutrality and a desire to expand government surveillance.

However, president-elect Trump and the new Congress won't be the only ones shaping the tech policy agenda in the new year; tech companies and everyday users will also influence the debate. Here are the top five tech policy issues you'll probably hear a lot about in 2017.

1. Encryption

Jewel Samad / AFP / Getty Images

During the divisive legal fight in early 2016 that set Apple and much of the tech industry against the FBI over an encrypted iPhone, Donald Trump sided with the government and attacked Apple. Just a candidate at the time, Trump signaled that if elected, his administration would force tech companies to weaken their security features in order to help law enforcement access encrypted information.

President Obama did not push for new legislation to mandate encryption backdoors in tech products, but lawmakers have yet to settle the issue. Just last week, a Congressional working group published a year-end study on encryption and the challenges it poses to law enforcement. The group's main finding was to condemn efforts to weaken encryption, but it didn't offer any real policy recommendations. According to members of Congress who have studied the issue closely, the debate over encryption has never died down, but Congress still doesn't know what should be done about it.

After he takes office in 2017, Trump's administration might push for decisive action. He may support backdoors, energizing law enforcement's long-running demands to have lawful access to secure data. And as messaging apps that offer encryption, like Signal, WhatsApp, Google's Allo, and Facebook's Messenger, continue to grow in popularity, the Justice Department under President Trump could pursue a precedent-setting courtroom challenge to undermine the technology behind them.

2. Net Neutrality... The Sequel

Mike Blake / Reuters

Will Comcast slow my Netflix? Or charge me more to watch YouTube? These concerns fueled a massive populist campaign culminating in 2015, when federal regulators set sweeping rules prohibiting internet providers from discriminating against — or offering preferential treatment to — certain types of content on the web.

Telecom giants mounted an intense legal challenge to the net neutrality rules earlier this year, but a federal court sided with the government and open internet advocates. Broadband providers and industry groups still haven't backed down. President Donald Trump might offer them reasons to be hopeful. In the past, he's attacked net neutrality, and he has already named telecom advisors critical of the policy. Under his administration, net neutrality rules may go unenforced, and there's even a possibility they will get rolled back or dismantled.

Experts tell BuzzFeed News that Trump's actions on net neutrality and telecom policy may also expose divisions in Washington between a laissez-faire approach to regulation and populist appeals to block or dismantle the concentration of corporate power.

3. Warrantless Surveillance

AP

In 2015, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security adopted tighter federal policies on the use of cell-site simulators, commonly referred to by their industry name, "Stingrays." The secretive tracking devices work by mimicking mobile phone towers and tricking nearby cellphones into connecting to them. Stingrays can then pinpoint the exact location of the phones. Some devices can intercept texts and conversations.

The new policies compel federal agents to first seek a search warrant before the cell-site simulators can be deployed. But those rules carry exceptions, don't apply to local law enforcement, and because they aren't enshrined in law, can simply be undone by the Trump administration, according to a new Congressional report. Staff on the Congressional committee behind the report told BuzzFeed News that without legislation, no clear national standard exists for the use of stingrays, leaving the door open to crucial shifts in policy.

Some in Silicon Valley are worried that the privacy of their customers and their business will come under threat once Trump takes office, based on what he has said about surveillance on the campaign trail. Trump has said he wants to expand the government's surveillance powers — that view may very well extend to stingrays. As the self-described "law and order" candidate, Trump could promote the use of cell-site simulators by federal agents and local police departments, loosening restrictions tied to them.

4. Airbnb Will Continue to Face Off With Local Governments

Dado Ruvic / Reuters

Airbnb, the $30 billion home sharing company, views itself as a platform beneficial to middle class families and cities. But policy makers and advocates across the country see the company as a threat to affordable housing.

The debate over Airbnb's impact on local housing supply has drawn the attention of lawmakers in Washington, including Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. Members of Congress have called on the Federal Trade Commission to examine home-sharing's effects on neighborhoods and to measure the percentage of hosts who rent their properties in bulk, as professional, commercial entities.

In New York and California, local governments have moved to restrict the company's short-term home rentals that critics say flout local laws. Airbnb, however, maintains that such policies serve entrenched interests — not the people and communities where home sharing can help tackle economic inequality. How Airbnb and local governments resolve these legal battles in 2017 and beyond will determine the company's long-term growth and will serve as a kind of test-case for the future of the sharing economy.

5. Facebook's Influence Over News, Fake and Otherwise

Mariana Bazo / Reuters

When he first confronted charges that fake news on Facebook influenced the presidential election, CEO Mark Zuckerberg dismissed it as a "pretty crazy idea." Since then, Facebook has announced a host of initiatives to curb the spread of fake news on its platform, including partnering with third-party fact checkers to verify and flag fake news.

This move may expose Facebook to the kind of criticism it experienced earlier in 2016, when the platform was accused of making editorial decisions that hid or downplayed conservative points of view in people's newsfeeds. More broadly, the debate over fake news highlights just how influential Facebook has become — now that it's a major source for news, many media outlets depend on it to distribute their stories, and it's shaping public debate on key political issues.

It's unlikely that Facebook's growing influence over the distribution of news will provoke US policymakers to action. But as the company's choices invite and complicate changes in the way politicians, partisan organizations, and voters communicate around the world, the news media and Facebook's own users may compel the social network to examine its influence over what people see and believe.

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Jack Dorsey Says Twitter Needs An Edit Function

Lucas Jackson / Reuters

Twitter is considering an edit function for tweets.

In a seemingly impromptu chat on his platform Thursday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey gave hope to those who have long advocated for the feature, telling one user that "a form of edit is def needed" and another that an edit function is something the company is "thinking a lot about."

The edit function came up when Dorsey, following the lead of AirBNB CEO Brian Chesky, asked his users "What's the most important thing you want to see Twitter improve or create in 2017?" Naturally, his users brought up editing Tweets, and Dorsey appeared on board with the idea.

In the banter following his question, Dorsey indicated that he believes both verified and non-verified users need some form of edit function. He also got into some options for how an edit function could be rolled out: for a brief time only, or a longer time span, each of which comes with its own complications.

Twitter declined comment on the company's product plans beyond Dorsey's Tweets.

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Twitter Embraces Its Role As A Media Company

Getty Images / BuzzFeed News

If you’re wondering whether Twitter views itself as a media company or not, take a look at its careers page.

Twitter Careers currently displays three open roles for editors, and another for an associate producer for online video. According to Twitter's job descriptions, editors — who will work on the company's Periscope video product — should be “experienced multi-lingual media junkie[s]." Meanwhile, qualified producer candidates must “know how to get a show ‘on air’ and keep it there."

At a time when social media companies shirk the “media company" label, Twitter, which has also balked at such descriptions in the past, seems to be embracing the role. Twitter is hiring editors and testing breaking news push notifications. It's regularly announcing deals for new, premium live video content traditionally associated with “media” companies (last week, it was a Golden Globe pre-show). It’s making daily calls on what’s news and what’s not in its Moments tab and on Periscope. And after years of being classified as a “social networking" application in Apple's App Store, it's found a new home in the store's “news” category.

Whether Twitter says it or not, it’s clear the company wants to be more than simply a dumb pipe for programming created by others. Increasingly, Twitter seems to be positioning itself to procure, program and promote that media as well.

After years of experimentation (Twitter Music, a 2012 partnership with NASCAR, an Olympics deal with NBCU, etc.), Twitter put its media operation into gear in October 2015 with the introduction of Moments, a tab that highlights the day’s news in collections of curated tweets. Since Moments’ inception, the team behind the feature has struggled with decisions every news organization deals with; it’s had to figure out how to handle graphic content (it uses warning labels) and it’s made choices on whether to include all viewpoints despite the risk of false equivalency (needs improvement). When Twitter’s Moments teams has made mistakes, it’s acknowledged them and has even removed a post after admitting bad judgement.

Twitter followed Moments with a series of bigger media bets. Its premium live video efforts, which include a deal to air live NFL games and original programming created exclusively for Twitter (BuzzFeed has partnered with Twitter on this effort), are at the forefront of this push. Seemingly every time you open Twitter on the web, you'll find a live video running beside the timeline. Twitter eventually wants to run these premium live videos 24/7 on its platform, according to a person with familiar with the company's thinking. This same person said that the associate producer job Twitter recently posted is part of a push within the company to hire "TV people." Twitter declined comment on its plans for premium live video and the job openings that will support it.

Twitter's media efforts are occurring against a backdrop of leadership changes at the company, one that has seen Anthony Noto consolidate power around his dual role as Twitter's COO and CFO following the departures of former COO Adam Bain and former CTO Adam Messinger. Sources tell BuzzFeed News that when it comes to Twitter's premium video deals, Noto — a guy who once ran the Global Telecommunications, Media and Technology Investment Banking practice at Goldman Sachs — "is in the driver’s seat."

For Twitter, a definitive move into media at a time when larger rivals like Facebook dance and prevaricate around it, could be a savvy tactical decision. Twitter's real-time nature makes it a great platform for breaking news funneled into it by others. In Moments, the company is developing crucial institutional knowledge around news curation. And then there are those ongoing premium live video efforts. If Twitter were to elegantly unite all of that, if it were to fully embrace its "media company" side, it might gain something it’s long lacked: an identity.

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You Can Now Watch Dozens Of Disney Films On Hulu, Just Like On Netflix

Hulu has signed a multi-year licensing agreement with Disney for the rights to stream 56 classic Disney titles. It's the biggest addition of full-length films to Hulu's catalogue to date, according to the company.

Six titles will exclusively stream on Hulu, though you'll still be able to rent or buy them online: The Nightmare Before Christmas, Mulan, Pocahontas, Hercules, Sister Act, and Air Bud. They're already available. You'll be able to stream the other 50 films — The Emperor's New Groove, Tarzan, and Lilo and Stitch, for example — come 2017, though they will not be exclusive to Hulu.

Netflix, one of Hulu's competitors in the streaming space, signed a similar deal with Disney in 2012 to stream exclusive titles from Walt Disney Animation Studios, Marvel, Pixar, and Lucasfilm. The same deal gave Netflix the right to stream titles from Disney at the same time they would be available to subscription cable networks, starting in 2016. Netflix reminded customers about the deal in May, telling them to "get ready for summer." The titles became available in September.

Viewership of kids' content on Hulu went up 300% from 2015 to 2016, and Hulu has made several moves to bolster its library of kids' content and introduce kid-friendly features in 2016. The streaming service enabled customers to create several user profiles on one account in early December, including separate logins for children with content safeguards. Netflix supports a similar feature.

And just last month, Hulu signed an agreement with Disney-ABC Television Group to exclusively stream Disney Channel Original movies and series, the largest expansion of Hulu's library of kids' content yet. Earlier this year, the company acquired exclusive rights to all nine past seasons and the future seasons of Curious George in a deal with NBCUniversal. The show has been the most popular kids series on Hulu.

Disney owns a 30% stake in Hulu, though a Hulu spokesperson said the current deal will not affect the ownership structure of the company. Other terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The logo of the Disney store on the Champs Elysee is seen in Paris, France, March 3, 2016. REUTERS/Jacky Naegelen/File Photo

Jacky Naegelen / Reuters

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In 2016, An Anti-Troll Hero Came To My Rescue

Getty Images

As a "cuckkike" member of the "lugenpresse," one frequently up to the "Jewish tricks" of trying to "spread fake news" about the new right internet, I spent much of this year absorbing horrific online abuse: Anonymous death threats, ad hominem screeds, gas chamber memes about dead relatives, phone calls to my bewildered parents, and so on. I like to think of myself as a "sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me" sort of guy. But man, this stuff takes a toll.

Yet, way far down, in furthest vantablack depths of my mentions, amidst the eggs and the Pepes and the iron crosses and the "Heinrich Hammlers," I glimpsed this fall a glimmer of hope, and a potential way forward for all of us.

His name is Captain James T Kink, and he's an anonymous account with only 32 followers who started his Twitter life doing a parody schtick in the voice of a horny gay Star Trek captain. Yet however inauspicious his beginnings, I think Capt. Kink may be a hero.

He has certainly come to my rescue, time and time again. As of last week, Capt. Kink had tweeted 793 times. Of those 793 tweets, by my count, at least 160, or a fifth, are insults, invective, taunting, mockery, and sarcasm directed toward my trolls. (Bear in mind, Capt. Kink has been tweeting since 2013 and only took up the cause of owning my trolls in late August.)

He's my anti-troll troll, a potty-mouthed, gold-hearted anonymous internet do-gooder with seemingly nothing better to do than troll the people who have nothing better to do than troll me. In one week alone, Capt. Kink swooped in to call various of my harassers "a shit flicking low brow," a "filthy paedo," "stiff as a broomstick for Joe," a virgin, and a "lukewarm Richard Spencer" who looks like "a middle aged Roger Moore."

Kink is a brilliant troll, with the mouth of a sailor and the mind of a poet. Check out the simile he dropped on one "MRSADSONGHIMSELF" (bio: DEPLORABLE SHITPOSTER PRESIDENT ELECT DONALD J. TRUMP), who called me a "BLOCK HEAD" one recent weekend:

Yes, Capt. Kink can go high, but good lord, can he go low. MRSADSONGHIMSELF responded to the Louis XIV tweet with what he must have thought was a clever comeback. Poor lil' guy.

Bait taken, Capt Kink absolutely unloaded:

"Your dad watched" with no punctuation kills me. It's a devastating cuckold joke without the now-ubiquitous epithet, tossed off as an afterthought: Your sexually explosive mother and I banged, and oh, I guess your dad was there too.

Capt. Kink! He's a very happy warrior. He calls my trolls babies, onanists, twats, farts, frenula. There's no troll — or hate speech— too abominable for his pro-Joe Bernstein Twitter judo. He turns Holocaust jokes against themselves:

And in a move I regard as an act of genius, he defuses the alt-right's constant invocations of free speech by posting shirtless pictures of Tom Selleck:

So who is this vulgar champion? And more importantly, what led him to become my personal Twitter henchman? Over email, Capt. Kink told me that he is an engineer from an English-speaking country. Like any hero worth his salt, he has an origin story:

"Six months ago I fell off a ladder (helping a plumber replace my water tank) and broke my shoulder. I was off work for two months with nothing to do but watch Dr Phil and start up my old Twitter account. I was horrified by the level of antisemitism, misogyny and anime. I can't remember how I saw your besieged account but 'Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do'."

Yes, my Twitter guardian angel quotes Voltaire.

Look, I can't say I don't take some satisfaction in watching an anonymous account with an endless appetite for trolling do to my harassers exactly what they do to me. I do. I think any person who has faced the sheer volume of hatred that many of us have this year has fantasized about comprehensive and brutal retribution. So committed is Capt. Kink to my defense that my trolls have accused him of being me, and I in turn have half-wondered if I'm capable of some kind of unconscious, Tyler Durdenish projection. It's not every day you discover your id outside your body.

But that's not exactly why I love Capt. Kink. The traditional wisdom about trolls is that it's best to ignore them, but that's worked about as well for me as abstinence-only sex education has worked for the teenagers of America. What if we engaged? When Capt Kink gets involved with my trolls, a funny thing happens: They stop trolling me. They either get bogged down in endless shitfights with Kink, or else they disappear. It seems to me that trolling is typically a fairly frictionless experience for the troll. Adding almost any outside opposition seems to cause a fair number of them to scurry under other bridges.

None of which is to say I don't still get harassed. I get harassed constantly. Capt. Kink is unfortunately just one man and, for the time being, sui generis. It took a specific set of circumstances and a bottomless appetite for conflict to create him.

(Kink, bless his soul, said via email that he's "surprised more people aren't challenging this type of behaviour.")

Still, imagine an army of Capt. Kinks. Imagine Capt. Kink at scale: A thousands-strong justice league of anti-trolls, descending on every two-bit neo-Nazi and antisocial shitposter on every social platform around the world, armed to the gills with hurtful jibes and state of the art memes, fighting an epic war of flame attrition, freeing the rest of us to do our jobs.

I can see it in my mind's eye, and friend, it's beautiful.

Okay, I know how this sounds. But it's not that crazy. A guy in Foreign Policy magazine suggested we do it to ISIS! And if tech companies can set up bug bounties, paying black-hat hackers to contribute meaningfully to society, there has to be a way to incentivize hatemongering trolls to use their powers for good. Maybe present it to them in the form of a Suicide Squad meme. I don't know. The point is, Captain James T. Kinks don't grow on trees.

But I'd like to see what would happen if we made more of him. Because maybe, just maybe, the vaccine for the epidemic of online abuse that has ruined this year online contains a dose of the disease.

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Cops In Arkansas Are Trying to Solve A Murder With Amazon Echo Recordings

The Amazon Echo speaker you got for Christmas may have privacy concerns in the package — the device, whose always-listening AI is one of its key features, could record and store information you wouldn't want law enforcement to access.

A report today from The Information details how police in Bentonville, Arkansas, have issued a warrant for the audio records of the Amazon Echo speaker belonging to James Bates, a suspect in an ongoing murder investigation. Amazon has handed over Bates' purchase history and account information to law enforcement, but it has declined to release his speaker's records.

In February, police arrested Bates, age 31, and charged him with the murder of Victor Collins, age 47, according to local news. According to a medical examiner, Collins was strangled in a hot tub. Bates pleaded not guilty in April and made bail shortly after, but the case will go to trial in early 2017. Both men worked for Walmart, which is headquartered in Bentonville.

The Echo speaker and its embedded virtual assistant Alexa work by continuously recording ambient conversation, even when a human isn't directly interacting the speaker. That's how it's able to activate at the call of "Alexa." While Amazon does not save records of ambient conversations, anything you say to the speaker after activating it is stored on Amazon's servers.

Bentonville Police said that music had been streaming through the night of the murder, according to The Information, which means the speaker might have been inadvertently activated. It's these recordings that police are after.

Amazon doesn't seem willing to budge. In a statement, the company told BuzzFeed News, "Amazon will not release customer information without a valid and binding legal demand properly served on us."

Police have made extensive use of cell phone records to establish a timeline for the murder, though they have been able to take some data from the Echo without Amazon's help, The Information reports.

The speaker and its virtual assistant continue to grow in popularity, so Alexa will be recording more conversations in more homes and therefore posing privacy concerns in more civil and criminal cases. Amazon sold out of the Echo during the holiday season, despite increased production. And customers rave about Alexa, going so far as to propose to her.

The Bentonville police did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Modi's Political Party Creates Abusive Social Media Campaigns And Breeds Internet Trolls, Claims New Book

Prakash Singh / AFP / Getty Images

India’s ruling political party directly masterminded systematic social media trolling campaigns against prominent Indian journalists, political opponents, and celebrities, a new book claims.

The book, titled I Am A Troll, written by journalist Swati Chaturvedi, explores the relationship between abusive social media accounts in India, and the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Through anonymous interviews with over 30 members from the BJP's social media cell, the book claims that volunteers – both paid and unpaid – operating out of the cell located at the party's central Delhi headquarters, work full-time to bombard Twitter with hashtags to make them trend, lob sexual abuse threats at prominent Indian liberals and journalists, and seed WhatsApp – the Facebook-owned instant messenger used by over 160 million Indians – with hate speeches and propaganda.

The book, written by Indian journalist Swati Chaturvedi, features anonymous interviews with over 30 BJP social media volunteers.

Juggernaut

Sadhavi Khosla, is a 37-year-old marketing professional who spent two years as a full-time volunteer with the cell but stepped down after she was ordered to tweet "slanderous claims" about prominent Indian journalists and Bollywood celebrities.

“It was a never-ending drip feed of hate and bigotry against the minorities, the Gandhi family, journalists on the hit list, liberals, anyone perceived as anti-Modi,” Khosla says in the book. "I simply could not follow [the] directions anymore after I saw rape threats being made against female journalists."

"My state of mind is calm," Khosla told BuzzFeed News when asked about her decision to speak up about her experience. "I followed my principles and my conscience."

The BJP did not respond to BuzzFeed News' request for comment on the book, but Arvind Gupta, who runs the party's IT cell, dismissed Khosla's claims and told the Indian Express that she "supports the Congress", the BJP's opposition party. He also said that the author of the book had "vested interests" and said that the BJP "never encouraged trolling."

Right-wing abuse on Indian social media grew substantially in the lead up to and since the 2014 Indian elections when Modi, a polarizing politician known for his close ties to Hindi supremacist group RSS, became the Prime Minister of the country. His online followers are labelled as the Internet Hindus for their abusive discourse against anyone who criticises Modi and the BJP.

In 2015, Modi drew criticism for organising a gathering of 150 social media supporters including Twitter users who had sexually abused women online.

"I know that the BJP is vindictive," Khosla told BuzzFeed News when asked whether she feared any repercussions after deciding to speak out. "They will definitely try and harm me. I know that."

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Russian Visa Center In US Target Of Apparent Hack

Kirill Kudryavtsev / AFP / Getty Images

A database containing the personal information of thousands of Americans who have applied for Russian visas in the United States appears to have been hacked over the holiday weekend.

The person who claims to have breached the computer systems of the Russian Visa Center, who goes by the name Kapustkiy, shared a screenshot of the stolen information with BuzzFeed News. The screenshot contains the names, email addresses and phone numbers of dozens of people. Kapustkiy, who said he is part of a group called New World Hackers that assisted with the breach, claims he has the information tied to thousands more, but will not publicly disclose them. “I want administrators to secure their things better and understand the consequence of a data breach,” he said in a Twitter direct message.

Kapustkiy describes himself as an ethical hacker who finds vulnerabilities in websites. He said he is 17 years old.

BuzzFeed News attempted to contact every person listed in the screenshot. Five people confirmed that they have applied for Russian visas.

John Shoreman, an attorney for the Russian Visa Center, told BuzzFeed News that the personal contact information of thousands of visa center customers was likely exposed. Run by an American company called Invista Travel Logistics, the visa center helps Americans secure necessary travel documents to Russia, including setting up appointments for applicants to meet with Russian consulate officials. Shoreman said the appointment scheduling system was likely targeted.

“The security services are saying that the visa website itself was not hacked, but the calendar may very well be the subject of a hacking,” Shoreman told BuzzFeed News. “ILS shares a calendar of appointments with the consulate office of the Russian embassy and apparently that’s where these 3,000 names came from, it came from a calendar of appointments.”

Shoreman confirmed that at least some of the customers listed in the screenshot are Russian Visa Center customers, but he does not know if all the them are. The American customers swept up in the data breach could also be customers of other organizations.

“Certainly there are customers of ILS on that screenshot, I know that for a fact,” Shoreman said. "The question is are they all customers of ILS or are they people that are either customers of the embassy or customers of other visa expeditors who also have access to the system.”

The Russian Visa Center, which operates in Washington, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Houston will contact all of its customers — numbering in the tens of thousands — in the next 48 hours to notify them of the data breach, Shoreman said. Customers will be advised to change their email passwords and to look out for phishing scams.

According to Shoreman, the Russian Visa Center is also in the process of notifying the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

When reached over the holiday weekend, a spokesperson for the Russian embassy referred BuzzFeed News to the Russian Visa Center.

On the night of the hack, Kapustkiy claims he notified Homeland Security’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team, known as US-CERT, an organization that analyzes and responds to cyber threats. Kapustkiy provided BuzzFeed News with what appears to be a screenshot of a confirmation email from US-CERT. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.

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Here Are 10 Times Tech Failed In 2016

Gustave Courbet, "A Burial At Ornans" (1849)

Via wikiart.org

Not every startup or tech product can succeed. And for these businesses, the venture capital finally ran out this year. Or people weren’t signing up. Or the product didn’t work. There are all kinds of reasons why some of your favorite apps, websites, gadgets, and services didn’t make it to 2017. For startups especially, failure isn’t uncommon; that usually happens 20 months after their last funding round and after they’ve raised $1.3 million, according to CB Insights.

So as Silicon Valley likes to say: Fail fast, fail often, and onto the next great disruption.

Pebble / Via blog.getpebble.com

1. Pebble

Pebble was the first company to make smartwatches mainstream by raising $10 million in 2012, and then $20 million in 2015, on Kickstarter. It sold more than 2 million watches. But it appears to have been ahead of its time. The wearable business in general didn’t take off as hoped, and Pebble struggled to raise money from investors. In December, the startup sold key parts of its business, including software and patents, to Fitbit, one of the few wearable makers still standing. One of the few solaces for early adopters: Fitbit says it won’t kill off Pebble’s services until 2018.

2. SpoonRocket

The on-demand meal and meal-kit business has been hot — take Blue Apron, which is valued at $2 billion and on track to deliver $1 billion in annual sales — but it’s also produced a few casualties. SpoonRocket, which delivered ready-made meals for about $10 under 10 minutes, got started in Y Combinator in 2013 and raised more than $13 million. But customers were left hungry when the startup shut down in May, saying that it couldn’t raise enough money to keep going.

youtube.com

3. Vine

Six seconds sounds short. But that turned out to be just long enough for some of the weirdest, funniest, most creative videos on the internet. We have Vine to thank for “eyebrows on fleek” and the eternal question “What are thoooose?” Vine’s existence as we know it, sadly, was short-lived: Twitter, which bought it for a rumored $30 million right before it officially launched in 2012, said in October it would shut it down to focus on live video instead. There is, however, a potentially happy epilogue: the service may come back to life, albeit in a different form, in 2017. Vine said this month it was working on a pared-down version of the app, Vine Camera, to be available in January.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed

4. Samsung

Some gadgets went up in metaphorical flames this year. Samsung’s flames, on the other hand, were literal. If you hopped on a plane this fall, you couldn’t miss the nationwide ban on the Galaxy Note7, which was at first widely heralded as one of the best smartphones ever made. That praise evaporated as customers discovered that their batteries tended to overheat and explode. Samsung then made the unprecedented decision to recall them all and permanently discontinue the gadget. But that wasn’t the end of the Korean tech giant’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year. It also recalled almost 3 million washing machines whose tops were blowing off and causing injuries, including — ouch — at least one broken jaw. Better luck in 2017?

Via talkshow.im

5. Talkshow

So many messaging apps tried to go up against Facebook and Snapchat in 2016, but the 800-pound gorillas (a collective 1,600-pound gorilla?) made it next to impossible for newcomers to gain traction. One example was Talkshow, developed by a former Twitter head of product, which displayed group messaging threads in public. In April, Mashable called it “the latest viral app the Internet is freaking out about.” By November, the company was calling it quits.

6. Paper

Two years ago, Facebook introduced Paper, a sleek and praised iOS app for reading articles. But Facebook went on to build Instant Articles, which let people read stories directly in the News Feed of Facebook’s original app. This summer, the company shuttered the standalone app, saying that “we’ve tried to take the best aspects of it and incorporate them” into the main app.

Scanadu / Via indiegogo.com

7. Scanadu

The pitch was straight out of Star Trek: a handheld “tricorder” that gave you your vital signs, from blood pressure to temperature, in seconds. Silicon Valley startup Scanadu, founded in 2010, was testing a prototype of its Scout device with the Scripps Translational Science Institute, and had raised $1.5 million from enthusiastic backers on Indiegogo. But in December, it notified customers that next year it will shut down the devices, which went from $149 to $269, to comply with federal regulations. That unexpected turn of events birthed a hashtag: #Scamadu.

Via web.archive.org

8. Washio

It sounded like a great idea for anyone who never learned how to do laundry, didn’t have time, or couldn’t scrounge up enough quarters. Washio launched in 2013 with backing from investors like Nas and Ashton Kutcher, and a brave, bold mission to “demolish laundry.” But despite reportedly dry-cleaning more than 1 million items, and washing and folding 21,000 tons of clothes, the business dried up and shut down in August.

Via blog.sunrise.am

9. Sunrise

Sunrise didn’t do anything wrong. It was a popular and easy-to-use calendar app. But after Microsoft bought it for more than $100 million, it was only a matter of time before it, er … sunset. The standalone app shut down in August, and its functions folded into Outlook’s email app. If that doesn’t cut it for you, here are a bunch of alternatives that are (almost) as good.

10. Shuddle

Busy parents used San Francisco-based Shuddle, which launched in 2014, to transport their kids around town, knowing that the drivers had undergone extensive background checks and could be tracked in real time. But the service abruptly ran out of money, and closed down in April.

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Social Media Reportedly Blocked In Turkey After Horrific ISIS Video

Access to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube has reportedly been blocked in Turkey.

The move comes after a group known as the Aleppo Province of the Islamic State reportedly posted a video Thursday showing two Turkish soldiers being burned alive near Aleppo.

Some Internet users in Turkey say they still have access to the social networks, however, and it's possible they're using VPNs as a workaround.

Turkey's government is known for restricting its citizens' internet access during times of crisis; it most recently throttled access to these sites earlier this week, after a Turkish police officer assassinated Russian Ambassador to Turkey Andrey Karlov in an art gallery in Ankara, claiming to want revenge for the Syrian Civil War.

In July, the UN Human Rights Council passed a non-binding resolution in opposition to the practice of limiting access to the Internet and sites like Facebook and Twitter, a move that Turkey supported at the time.

Google did not confirm reports that YouTube access has been blocked in Turkey, pointing to this site where the search giant reports service disruptions.

Facebook and Twitter did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates and follow BuzzFeed News on Twitter.‏

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Blac Chyna Is Promoting A Shady Student Loan Ripoff On Instagram

@blacchyna / Via instagram.com

Blac Chyna is using her vast social media presence to promote a deceptive and wildly expensive student loan forgiveness scheme, telling her 10.6 million Instagram followers they can call a phone number to "get rid" of their student loans "before it's too late and Obama is out of office."

It'll take 5 minutes, she says. "Hurry!!! IT WORKS!"

It doesn't. The Student Relief Center, the company in Chyna's post, is one of hundreds of fly-by-night student loan operators that use social media to target borrowers. Via Facebook and Instagram, most promise to help students have their loans wiped away.

In reality, they charge hefty fees to do what anyone can do for free: sign up for the Education Department's income-based repayment options, which fix student loan payments at a percentage of monthly earnings.

By charging hundreds or thousands of dollars for doing this, the student loan relief schemes extract money from people already struggling with debt. But they can be lucrative for the people promoting them — based on typical rates, Chyna could have been paid as much as $35,000 for her post promoting the scheme, according to Mike Heller, the president and CEO of Talent Resource, a celebrity lifestyle marketing company.

As Americans grapple with more than a trillion dollars of student debt, schemes targeting borrowers looking for a way out have become widespread. "Have you seen ads offering help with your federal student loans that seem too good to be true? They probably are," reads a warning from the Secretary of Education about student debt relief scams.

youtube.com

The fees charged to former students by the company in Blac Chyna's Instagram post — which was not marked as an ad — are astronomical, and carefully disguised. When BuzzFeed News called the Student Relief Center number yesterday, a representative said the company could arrange a "graduated payment plan," where a borrower paying off a $20,000 loan would make two payments of $385, then pay $162.99 a month for 36 months, then begin paying $113 monthly.

But what they didn't say, until further prodding, was that much of that money would go to the middleman, not loan repayments. Baked into the Student Relief Center's plan were well over $2,200 in fees paid to the company, including a charge of $49.99 a month for 36 months, long after any paperwork had been filed with the government.

After the three-year time period, the representative said, the $49.99 monthly fees would become "optional" — though customers would be automatically enrolled in the payments.

Student debt forgiveness schemes like the Student Relief Center have come under increasingly harsh scrutiny in recent years. They charge sky-high fees, at times in violation of state law, for services that often involve little more than submitting free forms to the government. At worst, some companies charge hundreds and even thousands of dollars and then disappear without performing any services at all.

Representatives for Blac Chyna and the Student Relief Center did not respond to a request for comment from BuzzFeed News. The reality TV star's initial Instagram ad was deleted on Wednesday; another ad was posted on Thursday afternoon.

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