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SCIENCE & TECH<br />

5<br />

suNDAY, JANuArY <strong>21</strong>, 2<strong>01</strong>8<br />

Fixing Facebook is Mark’s New Year’s resolution<br />

JuLIA CArrIe WoNg<br />

Amid unceasing criticism<br />

of Facebook's<br />

immense power and<br />

pernicious impact on<br />

society, its CEO, Mark<br />

Zuckerberg, announced<br />

Thursday that his "personal<br />

challenge" for<br />

2<strong>01</strong>8 will be "to focus<br />

on fixing these important<br />

issues".<br />

Zuckerberg's new<br />

year's resolution - a<br />

tradition for the executive<br />

who in previous<br />

years has pledged to<br />

learn Mandarin, run<br />

365 miles, and read a<br />

book each week - is a<br />

remarkable acknowledgment<br />

of the terrible<br />

year Facebook has had.<br />

"Facebook has a lot of<br />

work to do whether it's<br />

protecting our community<br />

from abuse and<br />

hate, defending against<br />

interference by nation<br />

states, or making sure<br />

that time spent on<br />

Facebook is time well<br />

spent," Zuckerberg<br />

wrote on his Facebook<br />

page. "We won't prevent<br />

all mistakes or<br />

abuse, but we currently<br />

make too many errors<br />

enforcing our policies<br />

and preventing misuse<br />

of our tools."<br />

At the beginning of<br />

2<strong>01</strong>7, as many liberals<br />

were grappling with<br />

Donald Trump's election<br />

and the widening<br />

divisions in American<br />

society, Zuckerberg<br />

embarked on a series of<br />

trips to meet regular<br />

Americans in all 50<br />

states. But while<br />

Zuckerberg was donning<br />

hard hats and riding<br />

tractors, an increasing<br />

number of critics<br />

both inside and outside<br />

of the tech industry<br />

were identifying Facebook<br />

as a key driver of<br />

many of society's current<br />

ills.<br />

<strong>The</strong> past year has<br />

seen the social media<br />

company try and largely<br />

fail to get a handle<br />

on the proliferation of<br />

misinformation on its<br />

platform; acknowledge<br />

that it enabled a Russian<br />

influence operation<br />

to influence the US<br />

presidential election;<br />

and concede that its<br />

products can damage<br />

users' mental health.<br />

By attempting to take<br />

on these complex problems<br />

as his annual personal<br />

challenge,<br />

Zuckerberg is, for the<br />

first time, setting himself<br />

a task that he is<br />

unlikely to achieve.<br />

With 2 billion users<br />

and a presence in<br />

almost every country,<br />

Mark Zuckerberg sets a personal challenge each year.<br />

Photo: Noah Berger<br />

the company's challenges<br />

are no longer<br />

bugs that can be<br />

addressed by engineering<br />

code.<br />

Facebook, like other<br />

tech giants, has long<br />

maintained that it is<br />

essentially politically<br />

neutral - the company<br />

has "community standards"<br />

but no clearly<br />

articulated political<br />

orientation. While in<br />

past years, that neutrality<br />

has enabled<br />

Facebook to grow at<br />

great speed without<br />

assuming responsibility<br />

for how individuals<br />

or governments used<br />

its tools, the political<br />

tumult of recent years<br />

has made such a stance<br />

increasingly untenable.<br />

<strong>The</strong> difficulty of Facebook's<br />

task is illustrated<br />

in the company's<br />

current conundrum<br />

over enforcing of US<br />

sanctions against some<br />

world leaders but not<br />

others, leaving<br />

observers to wonder<br />

what rules, if any, Facebook<br />

is actually playing<br />

by. Zuckerberg<br />

acknowledged that the<br />

problems facing a platform<br />

with 2 billion<br />

users "touch on questions<br />

of history, civics,<br />

political philosophy,<br />

media, government,<br />

and of course technology"<br />

and said that he<br />

planned to consult with<br />

experts in those fields.<br />

But the second half of<br />

Zuckerberg's post, in<br />

which he discusses centralization<br />

and decentralization<br />

of power in<br />

technology, reveal<br />

Zuckerberg's general<br />

approach: proposing<br />

technological solutions<br />

to political problems. If<br />

Zuckerberg is interested<br />

in decentralization<br />

of power, he might<br />

wish to address his<br />

company's pattern of<br />

aggressively acquiring<br />

its competitors - or<br />

simply copying their<br />

features.<br />

Instead, the executive<br />

introduced a non<br />

sequitur about encryption<br />

and cryptocurrency,<br />

neither of which will<br />

do anything to address<br />

Facebook's role in, for<br />

example, stoking anti-<br />

Rohingya hatred in<br />

Myanmar. If Zuckerberg<br />

truly intends to<br />

spend a year trying to<br />

figure out how the<br />

blockchain can solve<br />

intractable geopolitical<br />

problems, he would be<br />

better off just doing<br />

Whole30.<br />

How YouTube places ads<br />

on popular videos<br />

An investment is something that has intrinsic value, not speculative value.<br />

Photo: getty Images<br />

Don’t think about investing in bitcoin<br />

TeCHNoLogY Desk<br />

I've been watching this bitcoin situation<br />

for a few years, assuming it would just<br />

blow over. But a collective insanity has<br />

sprouted around the new field of "cryptocurrencies",<br />

causing an irrational<br />

gold rush worldwide. It has gotten to<br />

the point where a large number of<br />

financial stories - and questions in my<br />

inbox - ask whether or not to "invest" in<br />

BitCoin.<br />

Let's start with the answer: no. You<br />

should not invest in Bitcoin. <strong>The</strong> reason<br />

why is that it's not an investment; just<br />

as gold, tulip bulbs, Beanie Babies, and<br />

rare baseball cards are also not investments.<br />

<strong>The</strong>se are all things that people have<br />

bought in the past, driving them to<br />

absurd prices, not because they did<br />

anything useful or produced money or<br />

had social value, but solely because<br />

people thought they could sell them on<br />

to someone else for more money in the<br />

future.<br />

When you make this kind of purchase<br />

- which you should never do - you are<br />

speculating. This is not a useful activity.<br />

You're playing a psychological, win-lose<br />

battle against other humans with money<br />

as the sole objective. Even if you win<br />

money through dumb luck, you have<br />

lost time and energy, which means you<br />

have lost.<br />

Investing means buying an asset that<br />

actually creates products, services or<br />

cashflow, such as a profitable business<br />

or a rentable piece of real estate, for an<br />

extended period of time. An investment<br />

is something that has intrinsic value -<br />

that is, it would be worth owning from<br />

a financial perspective, even if you<br />

could never sell it.<br />

To answer why bitcoin has become<br />

so big, we need to separate the usefulness<br />

of the underlying technology<br />

called "blockchain" from the mania of<br />

people turning bitcoin into a big dumb<br />

lottery. Blockchain is simply a nifty<br />

software invention which is opensource<br />

and free for anyone to use,<br />

whereas bitcoin is just one well-known<br />

way to use it.<br />

Blockchain is a computer protocol<br />

that allows two people (or machines) to<br />

do transactions (sometimes anonymously)<br />

even if they don't trust each<br />

other or the network between them. It<br />

can have monetary applications or in<br />

sharing files, but it's not some instant<br />

trillionaire magic.<br />

As a real-world comparison for<br />

blockchain and bitcoin, take this example<br />

from the blogger <strong>The</strong> Unassuming<br />

Banker. Imagine that someone had<br />

found a cure for cancer and posted the<br />

step-by-step instructions on how to<br />

make it online, freely available for anyone<br />

to use. Now imagine that the same<br />

person also created a product called<br />

Cancer-Pill using their own instructions,<br />

trade marked it, and started selling<br />

it to the highest bidders. I think we<br />

can all agree a cure for cancer is<br />

immensely valuable to society<br />

(blockchain may or may not be, we still<br />

have to see), however, how much is a<br />

Cancer-Pill worth?<br />

Our banker goes on to explain that<br />

the first Cancer-Pill (bitcoin) might initially<br />

see some great sales. Prices would<br />

rise, especially if supply was limited<br />

(just as an artificial supply limit is built<br />

into the bitcoin algorithm).<br />

But since the formula is open and<br />

free, other companies quickly come out<br />

with their own cancer pills. Cancer-<br />

Away, CancerBgone, CancEthereum,<br />

and any other number of competitors<br />

would spring up. Anybody can make a<br />

pill, and it costs only a few cents per<br />

dose. Yet imagine everybody starts bidding<br />

up Cancer-Pills to the point that<br />

they cost $17,000 each and fluctuate<br />

widely in price, seemingly for no reason.<br />

Newspapers start reporting on<br />

prices daily, triggering so many tales of<br />

instant riches that even your barber<br />

and your massage therapist are offering<br />

tips on how to invest in this new "asset<br />

class".<br />

Instead of seeing how ridiculous this<br />

is, more people start bidding up every<br />

new variety of pill (cryptocurrencies),<br />

until they are some of the most "valuable"<br />

things on the planet. That is<br />

what's happening with bitcoin. This<br />

screenshot from coinmarketcap.com<br />

illustrates this real-life human herd<br />

behavior:<br />

You've got bitcoin with a market value<br />

of $238bn, then Ethereum at<br />

$124bn, and so on. <strong>The</strong> imaginary value<br />

of these valueless bits of computer<br />

data represents enough money to<br />

change the course of the human race,<br />

for example, eliminating poverty or<br />

replacing the world's 800 gigawatts of<br />

coal power plants with solar generation.<br />

Bitcoin (AKA Cancer-Pills) has<br />

become an investment bubble, with the<br />

complementary forces of human herd<br />

behavior, greed, fear of missing out,<br />

and a lack of understanding of past<br />

financial bubbles amplifying it.<br />

To better understand this mania, we<br />

need to look at why bitcoin was invented<br />

in the first place. As the legend goes,<br />

in 2008 an anonymous developer published<br />

a white paper under the fake<br />

name Satoshi Nakamoto. <strong>The</strong> author<br />

was evidently a software and math person.<br />

But the paper also has some inbuilt<br />

ideology: the assumption that giving<br />

national governments the ability to<br />

monitor flows of money in the financial<br />

system and use it as a form of law<br />

enforcement is wrong.<br />

This financial libertarian streak is at<br />

the core of bitcoin. You'll hear echoes of<br />

that sentiment in all the pro-crypto<br />

blogs and podcasts. <strong>The</strong> sensiblesounding<br />

ones will say: "Sure the G20<br />

nations all have stable financial systems,<br />

but bitcoin is a lifesaver in places<br />

like Venezuela where the government<br />

can vaporize your wealth when you<br />

sleep."<br />

<strong>The</strong> harder-core pundits say: "Even<br />

the US Federal Reserve is a bunch 'a'<br />

crooks, stealing your money via inflation,<br />

and that nasty fiat currency they<br />

issue is nothing but toilet paper!" It's all<br />

the same stuff that people say about<br />

gold - another waste of human investment<br />

energy. Government-issued currencies<br />

have value because they represent<br />

human trust and cooperation.<br />

<strong>The</strong>re is no wealth and no trade without<br />

these two things, so you might as well<br />

go all in and trust people.<br />

<strong>The</strong> other argument for bitcoin's "value"<br />

is that there will only ever be <strong>21</strong>m of<br />

them, and they will eventually replace<br />

all other world currencies, or at least<br />

become the "new gold", so the fundamental<br />

value is either the entire world's<br />

GDP or at least the total value of all<br />

gold, divided by <strong>21</strong>m.<br />

Can an app help to beat<br />

smartphone addiction<br />

YouTube hopes to allay advertiser unease following scandals such as Logal Paul's video of a dead<br />

body.<br />

Photo: AFP<br />

ALex HerN<br />

Videos from YouTube's most popular channels are to be subject<br />

to human review, as the Google platform attempts to use<br />

advertising money to reign in content producers following a<br />

series of scandals.<br />

For the first time, the company will be pre-emptively<br />

reviewing large swaths of its content to ensure it meets "adfriendly<br />

guidelines", raising the bar for video creators who<br />

wish to run adverts on their content, while hoping to allay<br />

advertiser unease about the video-sharing website following<br />

scandals such as Logal Paul's video of a dead body.<br />

Advertisers can choose to focus adverts on channels verified<br />

as "Google Preferred". It is those channels, the company<br />

says, that "will be manually reviewed and ads will only run on<br />

videos that have been verified to meet our ad-friendly guidelines".<br />

"We expect to complete manual reviews of Google Preferred<br />

channels and videos by mid-February in the US and by<br />

the end of March in all other markets where Google Preferred<br />

is offered," the company said.<br />

For creators, changes will hit the YouTube Partner Program<br />

(YPP), which recruits popular creators and gives them<br />

better tools for promoting their work and engaging with fans,<br />

as well as the option of receiving a cut of the advertising revenue<br />

earned from their videos on the site.<br />

Previously, creators could join YPP if they had more than<br />

10,000 views over the lifetime of their activity on the site.<br />

Now, however, they will need 1,000 subscribers to their<br />

channel, and a total of 4,000 hours of video viewed over the<br />

previous 12 months.<br />

<strong>The</strong> move means some creators face losing a valuable<br />

source of income, but YouTube says that the majority of<br />

those affected by the stricter rules were making little money<br />

from adverts in the first place.<br />

In a blogpost written by two YouTube executives, chief<br />

product officer Neal Mohan and chief business officer Robert<br />

Kyncl, the company said that "99% of those affected were<br />

making less than $100 per year in the last year, with 90%<br />

earning less than $2.50 in the last month".<br />

YouTube has been facing advertiser unease because of a<br />

series of negative stories over the past few months noting the<br />

disturbing quality of many videos aimed at children, linking<br />

the site to child endangerment, and highlighting the questionable<br />

media ethics of some of the largest creators on the<br />

platform.<br />

Logan Paul, a celebrity video blogger with 15 million followers,<br />

prompted YouTube to pare back its commercial relationship<br />

with him after he drew public outrage for showing a<br />

suicide victim in a clip.<br />

PoPPY Noor<br />

It's March 2<strong>01</strong>2, the middle<br />

of exam term and my friend<br />

is in despair. Why? She can't<br />

access her Facebook. Nordic<br />

app Hold is hoping to combat<br />

such examples of student<br />

smartphone addiction. It<br />

rewards users for not looking<br />

at their phones on campus<br />

- a task so difficult for<br />

my zombified-friend that<br />

she resorted to using a website<br />

that locks her out of all<br />

social media accounts.<br />

In Norway, 40% of students<br />

use Hold. One in eight<br />

people are addicted to their<br />

phones and, at university,<br />

this can be toxic. Using Hold<br />

requires self-restraint: press<br />

a button and the app will<br />

time how long you refrain<br />

from using your phone, but<br />

there are no punishments if<br />

you do. If you don't, however,<br />

you will be rewarded with<br />

points that can be redeemed<br />

at partner businesses - you<br />

can cash in for cinema tickets,<br />

for example.<br />

Since I'm still a student, I<br />

decided to put the app to the<br />

test. It's harder than I imagine<br />

I am the sort of person, it<br />

turns out, who just needs to<br />

look at this email right now<br />

A screengrab of the Hold app.<br />

And this WhatsApp. And my<br />

Instagram. And, Candy<br />

Crush. Why doesn't the app<br />

just block me from distractions,<br />

so I'm not tempted by<br />

them? "We are trying to<br />

change long-term habits, not<br />

force people," says creator<br />

Maths Mathiesen. "We want<br />

their relationship to their<br />

phones to change."<br />

By the end of the week, the<br />

app hadn't changed my<br />

phone-checking habits, but<br />

it did make me seriously<br />

question my phone usage.<br />

Resisting my phone for 20<br />

minutes (the threshold at<br />

which you can start earning<br />

points for rewards) proved<br />

excruciating - but it also<br />

highlighted how much looking<br />

at my phone for a second<br />

disrupts my concentration<br />

span. Hold is still building<br />

up its network of sponsors<br />

in the UK, with beta versions<br />

being rolled out across<br />

universities in London over<br />

the next month. <strong>The</strong><br />

rewards on offer are currently<br />

quite limited one of<br />

Photo: Collected<br />

them is pencils although I'm<br />

told that Nordic students<br />

have won trips around the<br />

world. But I suppose the<br />

real reward is not spending<br />

£50,000 on a degree, only<br />

to end up with a bad grade<br />

thanks to your need to compulsively<br />

refresh, scroll and<br />

repeat.

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