An English-Language, Algorithmically-Personalized News Aggregator, Based In China -- What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

from the no-social-graph-required dept

Techdirt has been exploring the important questions raised by so-called "fake news" for some time. A new player in the field of news aggregation brings with it some novel issues. It's called TopBuzz, and it comes from the Chinese company Toutiao, whose rapid rise is placing it alongside the country's more familiar "BAT" Internet giants -- Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent. It's currently expanding its portfolio in the West: recently it bought the popular social video app Musical.ly for about $800 million:

Toutiao aggregates news and videos from hundreds of media outlets and has become one of the world's largest news services in the span of five years. Its parent company [Bytedance] was valued at more than $20 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter, on par with Elon Musk's SpaceX. Started by Zhang Yiming, it's on track to pull in about $2.5 billion in revenue this year, largely from advertising.

An in-depth analysis of the company on Ycombinator's site explains what makes this aggregator so successful, and why it's unlike other social networks offering customized newsfeeds based on what your friends are reading:

Toutiao, one of the flagship products of Bytedance, may be the largest app you’ve never heard of -- it's like every news feed you read, YouTube, and TechMeme in one. Over 120M people in China use it each day. Yet what's most interesting about Toutiao isn't that people consume such varied content all in one place... it's how Toutiao serves it up. Without any explicit user inputs, social graph, or product purchase history to rely on, Toutiao offers a personalized, high quality-content feed for each user that is powered by machine and deep learning algorithms.

However, as people are coming to appreciate, over-dependence on algorithmic personalization can lead to a rapid proliferation of "fake news" stories. A post about TopBuzz on the Technode site suggests this could be a problem for the Chinese service:

What's been my experience? Well, simply put, it's been a consistent and reliable multi-course meal of just about every variety of fake news.

The post goes on to list some of the choice stories that TopBuzz's AI thought were worth serving up:

Roy Moore Sweeps Alabama Election to Win Senate Seat

Yoko Ono: "I Had An Affair With Hillary Clinton in the '70s"

John McCain's Legacy is DEMOLISHED Overnight As Alarming Scandals Leak

Julia Roberts Claims 'Michelle Obama Isn't Fit To Clean Melania's Toilet'

The post notes that Bytedance is aware of the problem of blatantly false stories in its feeds, and the company claims to be using both its artificial intelligence tools as well as user reports to weed them out. It says that "when the system identifies any fake content that has been posted on its platform, it will notify all who have read it that they had read something fake." But:

this is far from my experience with TopBuzz. Although I receive news that is verifiably fake on a near-daily basis, often in the form of push notifications, I have never once received a notification from the app informing me that Roy Moore is in fact not the new junior senator from Alabama, or that Hillary Clinton was actually not Yoko Ono's sidepiece when she was married to John Lennon.

The use of highly-automated systems, running on server farms in China, represents new challenges beyond those encountered so far with Facebook and similar social media, where context and curation are being used to an increasing degree to mitigate the potential harm of algorithmic newsfeeds. The fact that a service like TopBuzz is provided by systems outside the control of the US or other Western jurisdictions poses additional problems. As deep-pocketed Chinese Internet companies seek to expand outside their home markets, bringing with them their own approaches and legal frameworks, we can expect these kind of issues to become increasingly thorny. We are also likely to see those same services begin to wrestle with some of the same problems currently being tackled in the West.

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Filed Under: aggregator, ai, china, fake news, journalism, news, toutiao
Companies: bytedance

Unfortunate: Craigslist Continues To Be A Walled Garden

from the share-a-little,-guys dept

For many years I've been a big supporter of Craigslist, both as a user and an observer of innovative businesses. I've even argued that the company itself is too modest in pretending that it isn't a profit-maximizing firm. I've frequently defended the company when it was attacked with bogus lawsuits. However, for years, I've been baffled by Craigslist's insistence on being isolationist against the rest of the internet. Almost exactly seven years ago, we were disappointed to see they were shutting down a search tool that made Craigslist easier to use. And, over the years, we've seen this same consistent pattern, whereby the company gets upset at anyone who builds on their work -- even if it takes no money away from Craigslist and likely drives more traffic to the site. Just last year, for example, we wrote about Craigslist bullying an online aggregator.

Late last week, it went down this same path yet again, but this time it picked on a service that's really really popular (more so than most of the others it targets): PadMapper. PadMapper is a pretty neat tool if you're looking for a place to live. It builds on a few different listings sites -- including Craigslist -- to provide much more value to the listing itself, such as by including an embedded map. It sends all the traffic to the original site, so it's not taking away any traffic. It's enhancing Craigslist's value. When others increase your value, you should applaud. But, here, as in the past, Craigslist sent a legal cease-and-desist.

Craigslist has regularly defended these takedowns, by claiming that it just wants people to come directly to its site, and that's part of its view of the "community." But, again, PadMapper was driving more people to the site and making it even more useful to them.

What's interesting this time, however, is that given how popular PadMapper is, and the fact that the guy behind PadMapper is asking people to (politely) suggest to Craig and Jim that they rethink this policy, I wonder if the company will finally change its mind. It's been getting a lot of attention in the tech/startup community. Even though Craigslist has done this before many times, this is the first I can remember doing it to a site that is so popular.

As I've said in the past, I think Craigslist is making a big mistake in blocking these kinds of things. I recognize their reasoning, but at this point, it's just silly. The rationale for blocking these other sites just doesn't add up. There's simply no reason to not be "neighborly" and allow others to drive more traffic to them. It's definitely disappointing to see the company keep this policy up for so long.

Filed Under: aggregator, walled garden
Companies: craigslist, padmapper

Trying To Understand: Facebook's Lawsuit Against Power.com Makes No Sense

from the help-me-out-here... dept

Facebook has apparently sued social networking aggregator Power.com for a variety of things, including copyright and trademark infringement, unlawful competition and violation of the computer fraud and abuse act. I'm having trouble seeing how Power.com violates any of these things. Power.com, like plenty of other aggregator services, lets you bring together all your different social networking profiles in one spot. That seems like it could be valuable if you use a lot of those services. It doesn't do anything fraudulently, and it does not appear to misrepresent that it is a separate service. Users have to decide whether it's worth providing their username and password to Power.com, but it's not as if Power.com tricks anyone into doing so or does so in a misleading way. There's no confusion, so it's difficult to see what the trademark problem is about. It seems like a pretty big stretch for Facebook to also claim that showing the content from a user's profile is copyright infringement as well. Computer fraud? Please. Unlawful competition? Again, it may be (slightly) competitive, but it appears to actually improve the value of Facebook, rather than diminish it.

This is a pretty weak response from Facebook. Basically, it looks like Facebook trying to exert undue control over what other websites and services can do, and it's not clear that it has any real legal basis for doing so. It's a shame that a company like Facebook is becoming a legal bully at such a young age. I would have expected better. In the end, though, if Facebook keeps up actions like this, it will only hasten the shift to other social networks that don't try to limit what their users can do. Facebook might want to take a lesson from the eventual flop of Friendster after that social network was accused of being too controlling.

Filed Under: aggregator, copyright, fraud, trademark, unlawful competition
Companies: facebook, power.com