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In November, on the day Amazon announced the winners of its contest for a second headquarters, I suggested that the company had fatally misunderstood the current relationship between tech giants and public opinion:

It’s hard not to feel today as if the company misread the room — overestimating the public’s appetite for a billion-dollar giveaway to one of the world’s biggest companies, and underestimating the public’s ability to raise hell on- and offline. Amazon may yet feel that pain, in the long run.

Today, the long run arrived. In a move that had been foreshadowed by an earlier report in the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, Amazon said today that it would abandon its plans for a New York regional office. Public sentiment had, indeed, killed the deal:

“After much thought and deliberation, we’ve decided not to move forward with our plans to build a headquarters for Amazon in Long Island City, Queens,” Amazon wrote in a statement this morning. Amazon said it is canceling the plans because a “number of state and local politicians have made it clear that they oppose our presence.” The plans for Amazon to move into Queens were largely hashed out in secret, without input from local lawmakers. There was immediate backlash after the deal was announced, in part because of the major concessions that New York agreed to give Amazon to entice the company to move in. That included up to $1.5 billion in incentives in exchange for creating 25,000 jobs. Amazon had promised $2.5 billion in investment.

On some level, I understand Amazon’s approach to urban dealmaking. I covered economic development at the state and city level for the first eight years of my career, where I saw my share of lucrative corporate incentives offered up in the name of jobs. Until very recently — possibly until this deal — it has been possible for corporations to get handouts simply for dangling the promise of new hires to politicians eager to burnish their reputations as job creators. (Ask the nice folks over in Racine, WI.)

Economic issues often dominate state and local campaigns, of course, and everyone wants to stand in front of the new headquarters when the ribbon is cut and the flashbulbs go off. But Amazon’s aborted effort to build in NYC shows that a simple promise of jobs is no longer sufficient to win public support — and in some ways, it may be counter-productive.

One big reason is that the economy is fracturing into two: with a small group of well educated professionals, who enjoy good jobs with rising wages; and a much lower-paid group of service-industry workers who take care of them. As Eduardo Porter wrote in the New York Times earlier this month:

There is a small island of highly educated professionals making good wages at corporations like Intel or Boeing, which reap hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit per employee. That island sits in the middle of a sea of less educated workers who are stuck at businesses like hotels, restaurants and nursing homes that generate much smaller profits per employee and stay viable primarily by keeping wages low. Even economists are reassessing their belief that technological progress lifts all boats, and are beginning to worry about the new configuration of work.

Porter lays the blame for this bifurcation at the feet of automation — an area in which Amazon, of course, is an industry leader.

For an anxious public, then, a promise of 25,000 new jobs sounds much different in 2019 than it would have in 2009. If you’re among the sea of hotel and restaurant workers that Porter describes, you know you’re likely never going to be qualified for one of the jobs that Amazon is creating in your backyard. Even if the company belatedly promised a job retraining programs for workers with fewer skills.

Moreover, if you have paid attention to the experience of other global tech capitals, most notably my home of San Francisco, you know that the arrival of high-paying jobs is typically accompanied by an extraordinary rise in rents. The rising cost of living can push homeownership even further out of reach for most workers, and may ultimately send even highly paid workers packing to the exurbs.

It’s only natural that Amazon saw its promise to create 25,000 jobs as a blessing, for creating jobs is most of what we have ever asked of American companies. But given the realities of our economy — an economy that Amazon is relentlessly and ruthlessly transforming according to its narrow self-interest — it’s also only natural that many New Yorkers wanted nothing to do with it.

Of course, the company might have realized all this sooner, had it not pursued its deal in near-total absence of public input or scrutiny. The company’s insistence that its multibillion-dollar giveaway be negotiated in secrecy insulated it from the criticisms that went viral the instant it was revealed — which illustrates how self-defeating the company’s strategy was in the first the place.

If our other tech giants take one lesson from Amazon’s aborted attempt to build a heavily subsidized regional office, I hope it’s this one: that the more secrecy you demand in negotiating with the public sector, the more risk of catastrophe you bring upon yourself.

In any case, the collapse of HQ2 in New York — its counterpart regional office project continues apace in Virginia — represents a small win for our democracy in the face of rapidly concentrating corporate power. Amazon said that it would still hire the 25,000 new people it planned to bring to New York, but would instead spread them across 17 regional hubs in the United States and Canada.

The farther Amazon spreads its bounty, the more easily each municipality can absorb the new jobs. A nationwide program of high-paying tech jobs means a secondary nationwide program of lower-paid but still meaningful service-industry jobs, distributed in more cities that could use them. And the country will get all of this without pledging billions of dollars to a company that barely pretends to need the money.

It’s worth noting that public opinion polls showed solid support for the Amazon boondoggle, and that some industry groups in New York are in public mourning over the company’s scuttled plans. My colleague Natt Garun reports:

The decision to leave New York has been disappointing for local tech leaders like Julie Samuels, who runs Tech:NYC, a nonprofit that helps grow tech companies in the city. “This is terrible for New York. You’re talking about tens of thousands of jobs that were going to be in New York City that now aren’t,” Samuels says. Tech:NYC currently has more than 700 companies in its coalition, including Etsy and General Assembly. General Assembly CEO Jake Schwartz today tweeted that Amazon’s departure was a “facepalm heard around the world,” and a “self-own by the entire NYC ecosystem.”

One, I’m not sure that Amazon won’t eventually bring thousands of jobs to New York anyway. The company has existing offices in the city; surely they will expand along with Amazon’s ambitions. Monopolies are extremely reliable in this way!

Two, to the extent that any facepalming is being done, let’s keep in mind that absolutely none of this had to play out in the fashion it did. The world had changed, and Amazon executives — famous for their “Day 1” mentality — failed to change with it. The self-own is entirely theirs.

Democracy

Facebook could reportedly face multibillion-dollar FTC fine over privacy violations

Revue’s parser struggles with Washington Post URLs sometimes, but do also read Tony Romm’s scoop that the Federal Trade Commission may actually take meaningful regulatory action against a tech company during the Trump Administration:

It would be the largest fine the FTC has ever levied on a tech company. But according to the Post, the fine’s specific amount has yet to be determined. As it stands, the largest fine ever imposed by the FTC was a $22.5 million penalty on Google back in 2012 after regulators determined the search giant had tracked users of Apple’s Safari web browser after saying explicitly that it wouldn’t do so.

After a brief rebellion, the EU link tax and upload filter will move to a final vote

The hated Articles 11 and 13 of the European Copyright Directive survived last-minute wrangling and will go to a final vote of the European Parliament in March or April, James Vincent reports:

Much of what has already been criticized remains the same. Under Article 13 of the final text, says Reda, for-profit platforms like YouTube, Tumblr, and Twitter will be forced to proactively scan user-uploaded content for material that infringes copyright. Article 11, meanwhile, gives publishers the right to charge search engines, aggregators, and other sites if they reproduce more than “single words or very short extracts” of new stories. Big tech companies, academics, and even rights-holders (many of whom initially supported the Copyright Directive) have come out against these two articles. Although much of the legislation offers a sensible overhaul of outdated copyright law for the internet age, the imprecise wording and vague ambitions of Articles 11 and 13 have infuriated many.

India Proposes Chinese-Style Internet Censorship

Vindu Goel examines the Modi government’s proposed internet regulations, which would require tech companies to automatically block a vast array of content and stifle free speech in the process. The law could pass before the week it out:

Under the proposed rules, Indian officials could demand that Facebook, Google, Twitter, TikTok and others remove posts or videos that they deem libelous, invasive of privacy, hateful or deceptive. Internet companies would also have to build automated screening tools to block Indians from seeing “unlawful information or content.” Another provision would weaken the privacy protections of messaging services like WhatsApp so that the authorities could trace messages back to their original senders. The new rules could be imposed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government anytime after the public comment period ends on Thursday night. The administration has been eager to get them in place before the date is set for this spring’s national elections, which will prompt special pre-election rules limiting new policies.

The Dawn of the Little Red Phone

David Bandurski writes about the Chinese Communist Party’s app, Xi Study Strong Nation, which awards points to citizens based on how much propaganda they have consumed. Total nightmare fuel:

The platform has been designed with a built-in “Xi Study Points” system (学习积分系统) that allows users to accumulate points on the basis of habitual use of the platform, from reading and viewing of content to the posting of comments and other forms of engagement. It has been widely promoted by local governments and ministries and departments across China, and there have also been reports that some work units have ordered employees to attain specified point levels, with disciplinary measures to be imposed for those who fail to comply.

Companies use your data to make money. California thinks you should get paid

Heather Kelly explores California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposal for a “data dividend.”

The concept is based in part on an existing model in Alaska where residents receive payment for their share of the state’s oil-royalties fund dividend each fall. The payouts, which can vary from hundreds of dollars to a couple thousand of dollars per person, have become a regular part of the state’s economy. The mention was brief, and conspicuously lacking details, but it could be enough to push the concept from fringe to mainstream. A recent surge in experiments with universal basic income, a related idea that proposes giving everyone a base wage, may help pave the way.

Ahead of EU Polls, Facebook Voids Accounts Targeting Moldovan Election

Moldova is the latest country to be found using Facebook against its own citizens:

Facebook said it dismantled scores of pages and accounts designed to look like independent opinion pages and to impersonate a local fact-checking organization ahead of Moldova’s elections later this month. “So they created this feedback loop,” Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, told reporters in Brussels. “We did assess that there were links between some of that activity and individuals associated with the Moldovan government.

Elsewhere

Facebook security keeps a detailed ‘lookout’ list of threats, including users and ex-employees, and can track their location

Sal Rodriguez reports that Facebook’s data privacy protections do not extend to people who threaten violence against the company. If you’ve threatened Facebook or its employees, the company will use your real-time location and other personal data in its response, Sal Rodriguez reports in a nice scoop.

Also exempt from data privacy: Facebook employees. Rodriguez reports on a hilarious case of Facebook believing some interns were missing based on their location data only to learn that they were playing hooky from work. But don’t worry, Facebook employees — there is “a set of protocols” guiding when Facebook will read your private messages:

After the location data did not turn up anything useful, the information security team then kept digging and learned that the interns had exchanged messages suggesting they never intended to come into work that day — essentially, they had lied to the manager. The information security team gave the manager a summary of what they had found. “There was legit concern about the safety of these individuals,” the Facebook spokesman said. “In each isolated case, these employees were unresponsive on all communication channels. There’s a set of protocols guiding when and how we access employee data when an employee goes missing.”

Pressure mounts on Facebook and Google to stop anti-vax conspiracy theories

A day after I led the newsletter with this very issue, and as a measles outbreak continues to spread in Washington state, Facebook says it is “exploring additional measures” to fight false anti-vaccine content on the platform. The move comes after Representative Adam Schiff sent a letter to Facebook and Google CEOs Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai asking them about vaccine-related misinformation on their platforms.

Facebook lets you search for pictures of your female friends, but not your male ones

Probably just a glitch. But:

A Belgian security researcher has found an unusual quirk in Facebook’s search function. Facebook lets you search for photos of your female friends, but refuses to play dice if you want to look up pictures of your male friends. The bizarre find was discovered this weekend by notorious Belgian white-hat hacker Inti De Ceukelaire.

Facebook mulled multi-billion-dollar acquisition of gaming giant Unity, book claims

Before Amazon blew up its New York deal, I had planned to devote the day’s column to this excerpt of Blake Harris’ forthcoming book about the history of Oculus, The History of the Future. Specifically, I wanted to write about Mark Zuckerberg’s remarkable 2015 strategy memo outlining his rationale for acquiring the gaming engine Unity — an acquisition that hasn’t actually happened (yet). The discussion of platform risk is particularly interesting given this month’s enterprise certificate debacle. In any case, read the whole thing:

“We are vulnerable on mobile to Google and Apple because they make major mobile platforms,” the email reads. “From a timing perspective, we are better off the sooner the next platform becomes ubiquitous and the shorter the time we exist in a primarily mobile world dominated by Google and Apple. The shorter this time, the less our community is vulnerable to the actions of others. Therefore, our goal is not only to win in VR / AR, but also to accelerate its arrival. This is part of my rationale for acquiring companies and increasing investment in them sooner rather than waiting until later to derisk them further.”

1 in 3 Americans Suffered Severe Online Harassment in 2018

The internet remains a forbidding place for too many people, according to a new survey from the Anti-Defamation League.

Despite concerted efforts by tech giants to cut back on abhorrent behavior on their platforms, a new survey finds that severe forms of online hate and harassment, including stalking and physical threats, may be on the rise. According to the survey, released Wednesday by the Anti-Defamation League, more than one third of Americans reported experiencing some type of severe online hate or harassment in 2018. A similar Pew Research Center report found that 18 percent of Americans said they were targeted with severe online harassment in 2017. For young people, the numbers are even worse, with about half of 18- to 29-year-olds saying they experienced some kind of severe harassment online in 2018.

The New York Times quietly paused its Snapchat channel

Why quietly pause when you could have loudly proclaimed that Discover is fundamentally broken? That’s what I would have done!

Launches

First look at Twitter’s Snapchatty new Camera feature

Twitter is belatedly testing an upgraded camera feature that resembles Snapchat in some ways, Josh Constine and Ingrid Lunden report:

Twitter has been secretly developing an enhanced camera feature that’s accessible with a swipe from the home screen and allows you to overlay captions on photos, videos, and Live broadcasts before sharing them to the timeline. Twitter is already used by people to post pictures and videos, but as it builds up its profile as a media company, and in the age of Snapchat and Instagram, it is working on the feature in hopes it will get people doing that even more.

Takes

With Social Media Disinformation, What — and Who — Should We Be Afraid Of?

I personally choose to be afraid of everything, but Max Read — pivoting off a New Yorker article I still haven’t read — says that when it comes to disinformation campaigns, we should worry most about wealthy people:

As state-sponsored threats are more aggressively confronted by platforms, the threat of misinformation in U.S. elections will increasingly originate not with geopolitical adversaries but with private intelligence contractors and their wealthy clients, as in Tulare. We’re already seeing this happen: In the race for Alabama’s senate seat last year, a group of “Democratic tech experts” backed by LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman carried out a secret program designed to sow division among Alabama Republicans by creating fake conservative Facebook pages. (Senator Doug Jones, the intended beneficiary of the efforts, which were likely too small to have any effect, has requested an inquiry into the campaign.) These campaigns, based as they generally are in the United States and subject to greater legal protections than those that arise in St. Petersburg or Beijing, are more difficult to identify and terminate. You don’t even need to be that rich: Psy-Group, Entous and Farrow report, was selling its services for an average price of $350,000.

In 2006, Jack Dorsey was just a simple man with a big dream: to build a website that gives everyone depression — who pixelates the boatmen? (@pixelatedboat) February 14, 2019

And finally ...

Welcome back, Darth.

Talk to me

Send me tips, comments, questions, and your funniest stories about Amazon employees buying real estate in Long Island City in the days before Regional Office 1 was announced: casey@theverge.com.