Mark Zuckerberg Cancels His Lawsuits Forcing Hawaii Families To Sell Land

Chad / Via Flickr: supercooper; Manu Fernandez / AP

Mark Zuckerberg will drop his lawsuits over Hawaiian land, he writes in an op-ed for the Hawaiian newspaper The Garden Island. He said he did not previously understand the "quiet title" process but has reconsidered his legal actions after learning more about it.

The billionaire CEO of Facebook bought 700 acres of land on Kauai for $100 million in 2014, though he did not receive exclusive rights to the land with the purchase. In seeking those rights, he began what's called a "quiet title" process, which allows for ownership of land to be decided by a judge.

The question of land ownership stems from the privatization of Hawaiian land by The Kuleana Act of 1850 and the ensuing controversy. Prior to the act, Hawaiians did not have private land ownership. The pieces of land in dispute became known as "kuleana lands."

He writes, "Our intention is to achieve an outcome that preserves the environment, respects local traditions, and is fair to those with Kuleana lands." He pledged to "work with the community on a new approach."

Zuckerberg's quiet title lawsuits named hundreds of Hawaiians with small claims on parcels of land that may have conflicted with his own, sparking a backlash from the community he sought to join. To critics, his actions reeked of the white conquest of indigenous lands that brought Hawaii into the United States in 1893.

In an effort to smooth over the tension, Zuckerberg wrote in The Garden Island, "The right path is to sit down and discuss how to best move forward. We will continue to speak with community leaders that represent different groups, including native Hawaiians and environmentalists, to find the best path."

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A Twitter Bot For Handclap Emoji Tweets Had To Shut Down Because It Became Racist

On Twitter, there’s a convention of adding the handclap emoji between each word for added emphasis. Imagine it done out loud, with a clap for each word: the effect is like a preschool teacher yelling at a child who doesn’t listen, or a cheerleader rah-rah-ing a statement. Like this:

The convention has been a meme for a few years, which means it’s permuted into various levels of irony. Like this:

Serena Parr, a graduate student at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, came up with the idea for a bot that would retweet emoji handclap tweets as a class project a few weeks ago. Since the handclaps are used for something you’re saying with conviction, Parr thought it would be amusing to see a feed of people’s most emphatic opinions, both serious and silly.

The first challenge was searching for these tweets. Normally, you can’t search emojis on Twitter, so Parr turned to a tool made by Matthew Rothenberg for his very fun website Emoji Tracker, which shows you real-time emoji use on Twitter. With a little bit of coding magic, the bot was made and launched in mid-January. She called it @lol_yelling.

And then, the inevitable and obvious thing happened. Much like Tay, the Microsoft Twitter bot that quickly became a Neo Nazi, within just two days, @lol_yelling took on the tenor of the rest of the cesspool of Twitter.

Parr wasn’t naive to the fact Twitter is often full of harassment and abuse, and she deleted her own personal account recently. “It was making me feel bad and miserable about the world,” she told me. She built into her bot a word filter to block out offensive language. But racism on Twitter isn’t just tweets that use the n-word. Ideologically racist stuff, like someone insisting that reverse racism is real or arguing that MLK’s “I have a dream” speech is bad because black people also owned slaves, kept getting through Parr’s filter. It was the kind of stuff that wouldn’t necessarily get someone banned, but is offensive to a reasonable person.

“If you click on these profiles, they’d retweet the most vile, racist, disgusting things. It was a strange glimpse into how this part of Twitter works,” Parr said. “There’s also really bad images and memes that would never get caught by a racist word filter.”

Less than five full days after it was created, Parr deactivated the bot, because she didn’t want to have to keep filtering out the bad tweets. She was keenly aware that the handclap emoji convention started in Black Twitter — the fact that it’s become so widespread that racists are using it makes the whole thing even more ironic and sad.

The bot isn’t doing any more retweets, but its account is still up, in case you want to enjoy it as a living monument to the fact that Twitter ruins everything .

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No, Signatures On The White House Petition Site Aren't Intentionally Frozen

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You may have seen stories going around questioning whether the Trump administration has frozen the signatures on certain initiatives on the We The People petition platform. That's likely not the case.

President Obama's administration created We The People in 2011 as a way for citizens to communicate with the White House about issues that mattered to them. The platform allows anyone to start a petition that others can digitally sign to show their support, and Obama's White House said it would respond to any petition that received 100,000 signatures within 30 days. That clause is still part of the "about" page on We The People, though whether the Trump administration will respond to petitions is unconfirmed. On the day of his inauguration, Trump's administration archived all existing petitions on the platform.

Right now, though, We The People seems to be barely registering some signatures. A petition titled "Preserve the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities" only had 96 signatures at press time, despite accruing hundreds of shares on Twitter alone. (The president is expected to cut funding for the NEA and NEH dramatically.) Another petition for a similar cause has showed a relatively static number of signatures, despite a continuing high volume of social shares. It is possible that the similarity of these petitions is spreading signatures thinly between them, though another petition about something entirely different shared widely on Twitter also has only one signature.

Trump's administration seemed to acknowledge that something was wrong with the website, but denied it had intentionally stalled the platform. A spokesperson for the White House told BuzzFeed News, "It's a question of high volume at the end of the day, but the signatures are being captured. Because of high volume they're having to change how they’re being captured." The spokesperson did not elaborate on what that change would entail.

Some of the shortened URLs that appear in shared social media posts for petitions have recently been leading to broken webpages, which also may be affecting the petitions' signature counts.

Macon Phillips, who served as Obama's coordinator of International Information Programs, oversaw the creation We The People. In response to questions about how slowly the site seems to be counting signatures, he told BuzzFeed News he didn't think it was intentional interference by Trump's administration. "The system doesn't really allow you to make it behave that way. It seems like more of a caching issue. I think the team there is still trying to get their heads around how it works," he said. President Trump has appointed a new acting director of International Information Programs, Jonathan Henick, who did not immediately respond to request for comment.

The number of signatures on a few other petitions also indicate that the administration is not suppressing signature counts on We The People. Two petitions on the site, "Immediately release Donald Trump's full tax returns, with all information needed to verify emoluments clause compliance," and "Divest or put in a blind trust all of the President's business and financial assets," have reached 372,520 and 114,924 signatures, respectively, at press time. White House spokesperson Kellyanne Conway responded to the tax returns petition on TV recently, at least indirectly — at first, she refused to release the returns, but then later walked back on that refusal.

This is the latest development in the Trump administration's tech struggles. Earlier this week, it was discovered that the @POTUS official Twitter account was tied to a Gmail address. The account registration was changed after journalists flagged the registration on Twitter.

Adrian Carrasquillo contributed to this report.

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Here's What It Feels Like To Be Trolled In Trump's America

Lam Thuy Vo / BuzzFeed News

A couple of weeks ago, Washington Post homepage editor Doris Truong found herself at the center of a partisan flame war.

During a break in Rex Tillerson’s confirmation hearing for secretary of state, an Asian woman was spotted appearing to take snapshots of Tillerson’s notes. Bloggers quickly decided that the woman in the video must be Truong, who also happens to be Asian. One Reddit thread, for instance, was titled “Fake News Journalist Doris Truong caught taking photos of Rex Tillerson's notes from confirmation hearing today.”

The thing is, Truong was not covering the Tillerson hearing. To put it in her own words: “Trolls decided I was taking pictures of Rex Tillerson’s notes. I wasn’t even there.”

On a typical day, Truong gets maybe a half dozen mentions on Twitter. By 10 a.m. on Thursday, Jan. 12 — the day after she had been falsely identified as the woman from the picture — she had 4,638 new mentions since the previous evening. And it just kept going. Within 24 hours, her handle had been mentioned 20,179 times, an increase of 185,300%, according to screenshots provided by Truong.

Here’s what that looked like:

Note: This graphic is based on a BuzzFeed News analysis of 24,731 mentions of Truong’s twitter handle, @doristruong, starting roughly two days before false stories of her started circulating on the web and ending seven days after the incident.

Source: Twitter’s API

Source: Twitter’s API

“That initial moment of seeing the Twitter notifications was dumbfounding,” Truong wrote in an email to BuzzFeed News. “I was looking at the app on my cellphone, where '20+' is the readout even if an account has far more mentions. I had to scroll through dozens of screens of people saying ‘how dare you’ (and worse) to finally figure out what had caught their attention.”

Experiences like Truong’s are becoming more and more common. According to a recent study from Data & Society, 47% of internet users aged 15 and older have experienced online harassment or abuse at some point. Thirty-six percent of all respondents reported that they had been harassed directly, meaning they had been threatened, called abusive names, or stalked.

When a story goes viral, this experience is amplified.

“This idea of people coming together within specific affinity groups and behaving in ways that are really good for the ‘in’ group and terrible for members of the ‘out’ group [...] there’s nothing new about that,” said Whitney M. Phillips, a professor at Mercer University who has been studying how people talk online for close to 10 years and who has written a book about online trolling titled This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things. “But having different tools means we suddenly have new superpowers.”

Though online trolling has existed for years, experts like Phillips worry that the election of Donald Trump as president may embolden people who already harass others online. Trump has insulted politicians, media organizations, public figures, and private citizens on Twitter, which, in some cases, has incited his supporters to launch social media attacks on the people he singled out. He has spread and amplified skewed information and has tweeted falsehoods.

“What do you do when the president is doing the thing that you’re trying to get average citizens not to do anymore?” said Phillips.

Truong’s story became a battleground for different factions to debate their own views about the media and politics. While roughly 70% of the 100 most retweeted tweets about her contained insults against her, the media, and/or "liberals," a little less than a third of all the mentions from that same sample were trying to defend Truong (and a small percentage were not related to the story).

Those who believed the false story about Truong slung insults toward her. “Where is your integrity? Oh wait you work for WaPo don't you” or “Media is SCUM,” some wrote. A few also featured hashtags like #WashingtonCompost in their tweets. Others swooped in to defend her:

This factioning of responses mirrors how politically divided the nation is and just how important identity politics have become in the digital realm.

Participating in debates like this is “the digital equivalent of wearing a Make America Great Again hat and a pussy hat [...] It’s that idea that you’re signaling your affiliation with your group,” said Phillips. “If someone comes at you screaming, it’s very tempting to scream back at them.”

The most intense part of Truong’s experience lasted approximately three days. And though she told BuzzFeed News that she was “mildly concerned” about her safety, she wrote that she will continue to use social media platforms: “The whole episode is not going to drive me off social media, which provides a way for me to connect with people across the miles, including strangers, and to be exposed to a diversity of opinions — including ones I disagree with.”

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Ivanka Trump's Website Promotes A Russian App That Quietly Tracks Your Location

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Ivanka Trump’s fashion-and-lifestyle website is promoting an app, developed by a Russian company, that can track people’s location even when it is not running. The app, called SkyGuru, was featured in the latest edition of “Weekly Clicks,” a roundup of recipes, fashion tips and fitness trends that “#TeamIvanka clicked, read and loved.”

SkyGuru says it can calm anxious flyers by alerting them to turbulence and tracking their flights through the air. But the small print on the app’s download page reveals another feature: it continues to monitor users’ whereabouts after their flights land, regardless of whether they close the app.

SkyGuru says this feature is no different than other GPS-related apps, like Google Maps or Uber, and that users can switch off the function.

SkyGuru was developed by Taktik Labs, a team of coders and marketers in Russia that includes a man with ties to a state-run investment firm. Amidst questions regarding President Donald Trump’s relationship with Moscow, the coincidence of electronic surveillance and the Russian government brought Trump and SkyGuru a sharp rebuke on social media.

SkyGuru’s founder, Alex Gervash, says the app “does not contain any malicious code” and the company does not store the data it collects.

“It uses GPS data just like any other navigator,” Gervash said.

Taktik Labs has built a suite of apps, including KidRadar, which allows parents to monitor their children’s movements, and MoscowSecrets, which offers tips to travelers.

One member of the Taktik team is Andrey Lebedev, a consultant whose biography says he helped establish Rusnano Capital, a government-owned company that invests in things like energy projects and nanotechnology.

Lebedev reports on LinkedIn that he helped launch Rusnano in 2007 and was “awarded a thank you letter” from the deputy prime minister. Garvesh says Taktik has no connection to Rusnano and that Lebedev’s job is to find outside investors.

After Trump's website promoted the app, Russia Today, the premiere outlet of Russian state media, proudly announced that SkyGuru's downloads had tripled.

Gervash, a pilot with a degree in psychology, told BuzzFeed News in an email: “We are very happy that our app has created such a hype and so many discussions among our followers. Allow us to remind you that the main goal of SkyGuru is to explain to anxious passengers the ongoing processes during flight in order to help them cope with fear of flying.”

It was not clear who promoted SkyGuru from Trump’s website or Twitter account. Representatives of IvankaTrump.com did not return two messages seeking comment. SkyGuru said it has no ties to either Ivanka or President Donald Trump, but found a unique way to say thanks to both of them.

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President Trump's Official Twitter Account Was Registered To A Personal Gmail Address

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Until Thursday afternoon, Donald Trump's official @POTUS Twitter was registered to a private, non-government email address, raising concerns about the security of the White House's primary social media account. The account registration was changed after journalists flagged the registration on Twitter.

The registration was first noticed by TV Guide Managing Editor, Alex Zalben:

Others have confirmed that the password reset link directs to what appears to be White House Social Media Director, Dan Scavino's personal Gmail account.

The White House press office has not yet responded to a request for comment. White House Director of Social Media, Dan Scavino has not yet responded to BuzzFeed News query asking if the account will be transferred to a different, government address in the future.

The registration to a personal account rekindles concerns about the security of the Trump administration's social media accounts, especially Trump's Twitter accounts, arguably the President's most important communications' tools. The account, which changed hands from the Obama administration just moments after Trump was sworn into office last Friday, has quickly amassed 14.3 million followers and is obsessively tracked by journalists and even financial trading algorithms. Though Trump has opted to use his personal, @realDonaldTrump account as his primary method of personal communication, the @POTUS account is largely seen as the official Twitter account of the administration.

This week a hacker who identifies himself as as WauchulaGhost told CNN that he had been able to easily find the emails associated with the @POTUS, @FLOTUS, and @VP accounts and suggested the White House update security settings. WauchulaGhost told CNN that the accounts, "haven't selected a basic security feature on Twitter that requires you to provide a phone number or email address to reset your password."

And just this morning, White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer appeared to accidentally tweet out the password to one of his accounts. Some have suggested that Spicer was trying to log-in to his Twitter account using two-factor authentication, and accidentally copied in his password.

BuzzFeed News reported earlier this month that the @POTUS account has special security protocols. The security tools, according to the White House Communications Agency include multiple password layers as well as limiting the number of encrypted devices that can post to the official account.

“It’s a small handful of devices that are under significant security and handled with extreme care,” a former director of online engagement told BuzzFeed News this month about the account. The new registration under Scavino's email would suggest this protocol has changed when the account was transferred.

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Twitter Says Goodbye To The Moments Tab, And Hello to Explore

Twitter’s Moments tab is dead. Long live Moments.

In an effort to improve content discovery on its platform, Twitter is replacing its Moments tab with a new tab called Explore. Moments themselves will live on in the Explore tab, but they will take up decidedly less real estate. The Explore tab will also feature search, a list of trends, live video (at times), and shortcuts to get to Moments categories such as News, Sports, and Entertainment.

“Over the past year, we’ve been exploring different ways to make it simpler for people to find and use trends, Moments, and search,” the company said in a blog post. “During our research process, people told us that the new Explore tab helped them easily find news, what’s trending, and what’s popular right now.”

The tab could be especially useful home for Twitter’s premium live video efforts, which have included numerous sports games, the presidential debates, and the Trump inauguration. The videos have not been easy to find inside the Twitter app, which hasn’t had a dedicated tab to host them.

Twitter, used by 317 million people each month, has struggled to attract new users. The company has cited usability as an area it needs to improve upon. One of the key issues new users have is finding the best content inside Twitter, which is what Moments is supposed to address. Twitter still plans to publish the same volume of Moments, and the team working on the feature will not be reduced.

The new Explore tab rolls out globally on iOS today and Android in the coming weeks. If you find yourself longing for Moments in its absence, you can still access the tab on desktop, at least until it eventually switches over to Explore too.

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