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Since 2016, when concerns first arose about Facebook’s role in spreading propaganda here in the United States, critics have asked: will Facebook devote a conference room to solving this issue?

Reader: the answer is yes. Take it away, Sheera Frankel and Mike Isaac:

Sandwiched between Building 20 and Building 21 in the heart of Facebook’s campus, an approximately 25-foot by 35-foot conference room is under construction. Thick cords of blue wiring hang from the ceiling, ready to be attached to window-size computer monitors on 16 desks. On one wall, a half dozen televisions will be tuned to CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and other major cable networks. A small paper sign with orange lettering taped to the glass door describes what’s being built: “War Room.”

Set to open next week, the conference room is in keeping with Facebook’s nick-of-time approach to midterm election preparedness. (It introduced a “pilot program” for candidate account security on Monday.) It’s a big project. Samidh Chakrabarti, who oversees elections and civic engagement, told the Times: “We see this as probably the biggest companywide reorientation since our shift from desktops to mobile phones.”

Of course, the effort extends beyond the new conference room. Chakrabarti showed the Times a new internal tool “that helps track information flowing across the social network in real time,” helping to identify misinformation as it goes viral or a surge in the creation of new (and likely fake) accounts. It sounds not dissimilar to CrowdTangle, the publisher tool that Facebook acquired in ... November 2016.

Facebook continues to favor military metaphors for its election-security efforts. “War room,” as with “arms race” before it, flatters the company by painting it as an established superpower rather than a tech giant playing catch-up. But the framing is catchy, and pretty much every outlet used the language in its headline today, including this one.

Just as the Times story went up, Facebook held a call with reporters (including me) to recap some of its other efforts to bolster election security, and to say that it will encourage users to vote. This prompted some reporters to fulminate over not being invited into the war room, adding to its allure and mystery. I personally could not bring myself to get too worked up about it, having seen my share of Facebook conference rooms before today.

Now, would I welcome an opportunity to visit the war room, preferably during a state of frantic, meme-based warfare? I would. The offer stands.

Facebook is doing all of this election work out of a feeling of obligation to its user base. But what if it had a legal obligation to act in the best interests of its users? That’s the argument Jonathan Zittrain makes today in the Harvard Business Review, and it makes for thoughtful companion reading to the day’s war-room analyses.

Zittrain’s piece explores the question of whether social networks should become what Yale Law School’s Jack Balkin calls “information fiduciaries.” It’s an idea that has gained popularity in some quarters this year — Sen. Mark Warner included it in his July proposals for possible regulation of Facebook and other platforms. Zittrain describes it this way:

“Fiduciary” has a legalese ring to it, but it’s a long-standing, commonsense notion. The key characteristic of fiduciaries is loyalty: They must act in their charges’ best interests, and when conflicts arise, must put their charges’ interests above their own. That makes them trustworthy. Like doctors, lawyers, and financial advisers, social media platforms and their concierges are given sensitive information by their users, and those users expect a fair shake — whether they’re trying to find out what’s going on in the world or how to get somewhere or do something.

To Zittrain, the appeal of such a system — which could even be voluntary — is that it brings clarity to the question of what Facebook’s policies around privacy, content moderation, and other thorny issues are actually for. In the current regime, such policies seek to mitigate legal liability and bad public relations. Zittrain says that a world in which Facebook registers as an information fiduciary is one in which it can better align its users’ interests with its own.

In any case, it’s something to ponder while the conference room comes together.

Democracy

Facebook yet to comply with EU consumer rules, Airbnb in line: EU sources

Facebook may face sanctions because it has yet to comply with EU consumer rules, Foo Yun Chee reports.

Seven months after Europe’s Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova told Facebook and other tech companies to bring their user terms in line with EU consumer laws, the social media giant has yet to address all her concerns, the sources said.

Debunking 5 Viral Rumors About Christine Blasey Ford, Kavanaugh’s Accuser

Kevin Roose finds numerous fast-spreading pieces of misinformation about the person accusing Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court nominee, of sexual assault.

Facebook Is Letting Job Advertisers Target Only Men — ProPublica

On the same day that the ACLU and Communications Workers of America filed suit against Facebook for letting job advertisers exclude women from listings, ProPublica published an investigation into the issue. The absolute most perfect detail here is that one of the women-excluding job advertisers was a literal sausage factory:

ProPublica found an ad by Johnsonville Sausage, for example, targeting men ages 18 to 60 who are interested in hunting, but the company says it is only one ad in a greater recruiting campaign for men and women. Ryan Tarkowski, communications director for the Pennsylvania State Police, says their Facebook ad targeting men was part of a larger recruitment campaign that also targeted women and other groups. Targeting by sex is just one way Facebook and other tech companies let advertisers focus on certain users — and exclude others. Based on rich data provided by users and deduced from their web activity, that powerful targeting is key to Facebook’s massive popularity with advertisers and it accounts for much of its revenue. It lets advertisers spend only on those they want to reach.

How Connected Is Your Community to Everywhere Else in America?

Emily Badger and Quoctrung Bui have a beautiful new data visualization that shows the relative probability that someone in any U.S. county has a Facebook friendship link to the rest of the country.

The networks that emerge reveal a distinct social fingerprint for each county, influenced by past migration patterns, geographical features and quirks of the local economy — whether, for example, the county is home to a military base, a resort hub or a booming oil industry. “But distance is the thing that shows up everywhere,” said Johannes Stroebel, a professor at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business and a co-author of the research, along with Michael Bailey at Facebook, Rachel Cao at Harvard, Theresa Kuchler at N.Y.U. and Arlene Wong at Princeton. “Distance matters,” Mr. Stroebel said, “in explaining every single county’s connectedness.”

QAnon Is Trying to Trick Facebook’s Meme-Reading AI

Louise Matsakis explores how trolls are attempting to trick Rosetta, Facebook’s recently announced machine-learning tool that attempts to detect memes that violate its hate-speech policies:

Rosetta works by detecting the words in an image and then feeding them through a neural network that parses what they say. The QAnon conspiracy theorists created memes and videos with deliberately obscured fonts, wonky text, or backwards writing, which they believe might trick Rosetta or disrupt this process. Many of the altered memes were first spotted on 8chan by Shoshana Wodinsky, an intern at NBC News. It’s not clear whether any of these tactics will work (or how seriously they have even been tested), but it’s not hard to imagine that other groups will keep trying to get around Facebook. It’s also incredibly difficult to build a machine-learning system that’s foolproof. Automated tools like Rosetta might get tripped up by wonky text or hard-to-read fonts. A group of researchers from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab found that the image-recognition algorithms used by WeChat—the most popular social network in China—could be tricked by changing a photo’s properties, like the coloring or way it was oriented. Because the system couldn’t detect that text was present in the image, it couldn’t process what it said.

Senior Google Scientist Resigns Over “Forfeiture of Our Values” in China

The Intercept has now published the full resignation letterfrom Jack Poulson, who quit Google over its plans to re-enter China with a censored version of its search engine.

Crowdfunding A Government Uprising In Africa- The Cameroonian ‘Kickstarter’ Adoption

Benjamin Strick reports that a Cameroonian separatist group turned to online crowdfunding to buy weapons. No one appears to have sent them any Bitcoin, but Strick suggests they may have accepted payments through PayPal.

Elsewhere

Inside the Dramatic, Painful — and Hugely Successful — Return of Reddit’s Founders

Christine Lagorio-Chafkin has the tale of how Reddit’s co-founders let their relationship sour, fixed it with therapy, and have lately had some success in relaunching Reddit as a standalone business. An excerpt of her forthcoming book:

Something else miraculous happened over the summer of 2017: Reddit’s traffic grew to such an extent that Amazon’s web analytics arm, Alexa, the primary site-ranking service, considered it the fourth most popular website in the U.S., behind only Google, YouTube, and Facebook. August and September 2017 went by without a single major community flare-up–the first time a late summer and autumn had passed in five years without Reddit nearly strangling itself out of existence. Huffman’s past cycles of self-doubt seemed to have lifted. There was joy for him in experiencing the daily rhythm of Reddit’s new home at 420 Taylor Street, the flow of staff pausing to chat on their way to their workstations. He could often be found with his laptop on a couch in front of the elevators on the third floor, his feet in scruffy Adidas soccer shoes, propped up, greeting anyone who walked by.

People are lining up to watch PewDiePie lose his spot as the top YouTube channel

Popular (and problematic) YouTube star Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg is about to lose his perch as the most-subscribed channel to T-Series, a music production company based in India. Thousands of people are now tuned into a livestream that shows T-Series’ subscriber count creeping on on Kjellberg’s. This is … a weird thing to do!

Fortnite legend Ninja is living the stream

Sports Illustrated put a competitive gamer on its cover this week, the first time that a Twitch star has been featured on the cover. (Per SI tradition, he will now suffer a career-ending thumb injury.)

Is This Article Worth Reading? Gmail’s Suggested Reply: ‘Haha, Thanks!’

Google’s new automated email replies “have baffled users with some peculiar suggestions,” report David Marcelis and Doug MacMillan. This is barely a social story but I love this detail:

During testing, Mr. Varma said, engineers working on the prototype noticed one gaffe: The algorithm was identifying the phrase “Sent from my iPhone” as a popular response to emails. They fixed the issue before the phrase became a suggested reply, he said.

How The Chillest Account On Twitter Lost Its Chill

“We are in a decidedly unchill time on the internet, a time when we need the chill vibes and positive affirmations of @chillstitch the most,” writes Steve Rousseau, about one of the most relaxing — and beloved — Twitter accounts of all time. “But writer and creator Taylor Moore just isn’t up to it any more.” Here’s my favorite quote from Moore:

Unexamined nostalgia is poison. Nostalgia for the 2016 internet, specifically, should be cured with ice baths and electroshock. That being said, I do feel affinity with people who pine for an internet before every single interaction was mediated through giant sociopathic corporate behemoths that have all the power and humanity of Lovecraftian Elder Gods. And yet. Even way back then, the internet was always heavy with Libertarians and we can see now what those assholes turned into.

Launches

Wacky

Wacky is Yo for emoji and I am extremely here for it. Without knowing anything else about this company, I am going to value it at $800 million:

Wacky is a really super simple app: after having registered with your phone number, you will be ready to communicate with all contacts in your address book who have already downloaded the app: just add them to communicate with them sending up to 3 emojis at a time. You know those busy days when you would like to hear your best friend or girlfriend but do not have the time? Sometimes just a thought, a heart ❤️ a flower a wish . So we thought of Wacky, the easiest way to communicate with your friends.

Takes

Twitter’s Chronological Timeline Will Save Us From Ourselves

Emily Dreyfuss says Twitter’s newly reinstated chronological feed will save us from ourselves:

The reason we are so against that algorithmic sorting is because it takes our agency away. What if today I didn’t want to know? What if today I just want to see the things the people I have chosen explicitly to follow are saying? It’s infuriating to make choices—who to follow, who to retweet, when to look at the site—only to have Twitter decide (even if it’s correct!) what we might really want to see. That anticipation feeds into our worst behaviors. Having to click on the Toad trend to find out what was going on forced me to be intentional about it: Do I want to know? I asked myself. Ugh, yes, my baser self replied. A chronological timeline is a chance to save ourselves—if we choose to.

Twitter’s Return to a Chronological Feed Won’t Fix the Platform

Alexis Madrigal says Twitter’s newly reinstated chronological feed will not save us from ourselves:

And finally ...

Why are people pretending to be dead on Instagram?

The hottest way to get popular on Instagram is to fake your own death, reports Edgar Alvarez:

Between August 24th and August 30th, Simrin’s Instagram page was discovered by 250,000 other users and his profile was visited 316,000 times, according to screenshots he shared with Engadget. Simrin said people are still commenting on his pictures, though not as much as when those tweets helped him go viral for a few days. “The idea just popped up in my head,” he said, adding that he wasn’t aware of anyone doing the “RIP thing” before he started to spam accounts on his own. “I decided to start doing it because why not give it a shot [and] do something new that [you] can entertain yourself with,” Simrin said. “People get famous from doing anything these days.”

RIP me.

Talk to me

Send tips, questions, comments, and notes about which link I pasted incorrectly in today’s edition: casey@theverge.com.