Curt Long 
Until then, the officers look forward to watching their progress.
“By preventing the smuggling attempt, [the team] have also ensured that the birds and eggs received the immediate care and attention that they needed,” Grant Miller, head of Heathrow’s CITES team, told the BBC. “The frontline work of my team is key to tackling the international illegal wildlife trade, which does so much environmental damage and threatens the survival of endangered animals.”
The rescue had recently taken in a mama dog who had lost her puppies while living on the streets. She was heartbroken and defeated when they found her, and it was clear she missed her puppies so much and couldn’t understand what had happened to them.
“She was walking round with food in her mouth trying to find them to feed them,” Hilary Anderson, cofounder of Barking Mad Dog Rescue, told The Dodo. “So sad.”
When the shoebox puppies arrived in the rescue’s care, they realized that the puppies needed a mom and the mama dog they had just rescued needed puppies to care for — so they decided to bring them together.
Dr. Mark Jones, associate director of Born Free Foundation UK, says the consequences for these animals could be deadly if the Congo’s plan were to move forward.
“Primates in particular are highly social,” Jones told The Dodo. “Capturing live great apes from the wild usually entails disrupting entire social groups and killing other family members, with devastating consequences for family groups. Given the precarious status of these species, the proposed transfers could have a very significant conservation impact.”
In a letter sent to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species earlier this week, Born Free and other advocacy groups pushed for the plan to be reconsidered, as the removal of endangered species from the wild is technically illegal under the Congo’s national law.
While the shelter normally permits volunteers to walk and play with the dogs, the staff realized their kennels were the safest, most secure spots for the dogs to be that evening. Fireworks can often trigger a flight response in dogs, so after 7 p.m., each pup was settled into their kennel for the night.
“We also had volunteers walking around spraying a bit of lavender oil [which promotes relaxation], and had classical music playing through the speakers,” Santiago said. “All of those things, in combination with the volunteers, really helped.”
While Santiago admits the “Calming Canines” event was somewhat of an experiment, there’s no doubt the shelter will be employing the same routine for next July 4th, and on New Year’s Eve.
Throughout the last couple of weeks, the RSPCA has been receiving a bunch of very unusual calls from beachgoers and people hanging out by the water — about drunk seagulls. At first, everyone at the rescue was a bit confused, but as soon as they went out to collect some of the seagulls in question, they realized why everyone was so concerned.
“At first, the birds look like they have botulism [an illness caused by bacteria] but then, after vomiting, most seem to recover,” Jo Daniel, an officer with the RSPCA, said in a press release. “The birds absolutely stink of alcohol when we collect them so now our vans smell like pubs!”
In 2016, the USFWS announced it would stop the protection plan and round up the survivors to put them in captivity. It was postponed after public outcry, but now the new federal plan, which was proposed by USFWS late last month, again has conservationists deeply fearful for the future of the species.
“The USFWS rightly notes that landowner support is critical to the future of red wolf recovery,” Wheeler said. “But that support can’t be achieved through the unregulated hunting and trapping of red wolves that happen to wander onto private land. This claim, offered without any evidence to uphold it, defies both history and common sense and ignores the fact that humans are the root cause of most red wolf mortalities.”
“Raju became a symbol of hope for captive, abused elephants all over the world,” Wildlife SOS said in a statement. “His spirit was all but broken, a testament to the ordeals he had been through.”
Raju was brought to the Wildlife SOS rescue center, where veterinarians rushed to treat his leg, which had been seriously injured by the shackle. He was also suffering from severe malnutrition, foot ailments and painful abscesses on his shoulders and hips from his life being ridden on the streets.
That was four years ago — and now, Raju is so content living life as a free elephant. On Wednesday, the Wildlife SOS staff surprised him with a party complete with decorations, toys and treats to celebrate his rescue anniversary.
Gone is the boss who loved first-class travel to places like Morocco and Rome, forced his staffers to find him an apartment (and a used Trump hotel mattress), and asked fast-food executives to hire his wife. But EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s many scandals haven’t been the real bugaboo for environmental advocates—rather, it’s been his rollback of environmental regulations on toxic waste, tailpipe emissions, air pollution, and greenhouse gases.
And in fact, Pruitt’s replacement might be more effective at gutting environmental protection than Pruitt himself.
Pruitt left office Thursday after questions of lavish spending, mismanagement, and ethical lapses. He was the target of 13 investigations by the EPA’s own inspector general, according to The New York Times. In June, a federal judge ordered Pruitt to produce documents supporting his statements on CNBC that humans were not a major contributor to climate change.
So when Pruitt’s resignation was tweeted by President Trump on Thursday afternoon, there was relief among many EPA employees, according to Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a non-profit legal group that represents civil servants from several federal agencies. “They were overjoyed,” said Ruch, who spoke to several EPA employees after Pruitt left. “It was ‘Ding-dong, the witch is dead.’”
In fact, the scene outside EPA headquarters in Washington got a bit nutty yesterday afternoon, as a man wearing an oversized papier-mâché Pruitt head posed for pictures with happy EPA staffers.
That glee may be fleeting. For now, Pruitt’s replacement is Andrew Wheeler, a coal industry lobbyist who worked briefly at the EPA 25 years ago and will return as the acting administrator. He was approved as deputy administrator by the Senate in April 2018, but Wheeler would face a second Senate vote if Trump nominates him to become the permanent agency head.
From 1995 to 2009, Wheeler was a staff member for James Inhofe, a Republican senator from Oklahoma who is one of Congress’s fiercest climate-deniers. Then, as a lobbyist, Wheeler represented the largest coal-mining operation in the United States, Murray Energy, for more than a decade. In 2017, Murray Energy gave Pruitt an “action plan” to overturn existing EPA rules on mercury pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and air pollution that crosses state lines.
So far, the White House and other federal agencies are on track to pass 16 of the rollbacks. Under Wheeler, “the administration’s agenda won’t change,” says Vicky Arroyo, executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center, a non-profit group at the Georgetown Law School that works with state officials on federal environmental regulatory issues. “Because Wheeler has deeper roots in DC, knows his way around these issues, and has built more relationships than Pruitt,” Arroyo says, “he might be more effective at completing [the White House] agenda.”
Just as Pruitt urged Trump to abandon the Paris Climate Agreement, Wheeler has attacked mainstream climate science, writing in 2010 that the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change was biased. “The UN IPCC has blurred the lines between science and advocacy to the point where they are unable to separate situational awareness from proposed remedies,” Wheeler wrote in a blog on his law firm’s website. “They have been advocating for specific policy actions and ignoring the original charter of informing the public on the state of science.”
At his Senate confirmation hearing in November 2017, Wheeler was noncommittal when faced with the federal government’s own climate report. “I believe that man has an impact on the climate, but what’s not completely understood is what the impact is,” Wheeler said during the hearing. At least on climate science, Pruitt and Wheeler are speaking from a similar book.
That matters because the Trump administration continues to block the Clean Power Plan, which seeks to limit greenhouse gas emissions from plants that burn fossil fuels. The plan was developed by President Obama, but Trump’s EPA reversed course and is now asking a federal court to oppose it. The Supreme Court blocked the plan from going into effect until a lower court can rule on its merits.
Under Wheeler’s tenure, Arroyo expects that her work will continue, with several states who are suing the EPA to enforce the Clean Power Plan, toxic air pollution rules, and climate protection rules. “It’s not a new day,” she says, “but we all have to be relieved that someone who is so blatantly corrupt is let go.”
The best questions are always the ones that don’t have a single clear answer. In my physics classes, I like to present students with problems that can promote a lively discussion—and to do that, they have to have multiple answers that could possibly make sense. (And they shouldn’t involve lots of math, otherwise my students will just get hung up on the calculations.)
Here is a version of one of these great questions; it’s truly a classic.
A human (person A below) has two baseballs. The human tosses the two balls at the same time but to two different people (persons B and C as labeled below). The trajectory of each ball is shown. Which ball arrives at the person first? Defend your answer.
Just to be clear, there is no air resistance on these balls—just the gravitational force is acting on them after they are “tossed.”
OK, now you need to think about your answer. Pick the best possible answer and share with your neighbors. Yes, actually get out of the house and go to your neighbor’s house and see what they think about this question. It’s going to be the beginning of a great conversation. Trust me.
Since I really want you to pick an answer, I am going to delay going over this problem. Instead, let me point out why this is such a great question for an introductory physics class.
Like I said, it’s a great question. Now, because I am weak I will go over the solution. Look away if you are still thinking about this.
Let me start with a demo. This is a demonstration you can do yourself. Here’s what you do.
Take two coins. Place one on the very edge of a flat table so that it is just about to fall off. Now take the second coin and slide it shuffleboard-style so it hits the coin balancing on the edge. The horizontal sliding coin should fly off the table and hit the ground while the edge coin just falls and hits the ground. But here’s the cool part: They both hit the ground at the same time.
Here’s what this would look like (in slow motion).
Also, here is a numerical calculation of this same thing (so you can see it better). And here is the code on trinket.io if you want to play with it—try changing the starting velocity if you want to see what happens.
What exactly should you see? You should see that the two coins hit the ground at the same time. Why? Because both coins have the same starting vertical position and the same starting vertical velocity. In the vertical sense, the two motions are identical. And this is the key to projectile motion—an object moving under the influence of the gravitational force can be broken into two separate one-dimensional problems in which the only thing in common is time. In the horizontal direction, it’s a coin moving at a constant velocity. In the vertical direction, it’s a ball that starts off from rest and accelerates.
But what does this have to do with the two-baseball problem above?
To explain, we can look at another example: Two balls that are tossed straight up (just in one dimension). Here we go.
Also, the code—in case you need it.
What does this show? This shows that the ball that goes higher stays in the air for longer. Boom. That’s your answer. It doesn’t matter what the balls are doing horizontally. It only matters what they do in the vertical direction. The ball that goes higher (even when also traveling horizontally) stays in the air for longer. In the question above, person C gets the ball first.
Maybe you don’t believe me. Maybe you think it depends on the throwing speed. It doesn’t. Here is a real numerical calculation to show you how this works. Go ahead and click Play to run it.
See. It works. The ball that goes lower gets to the person the fastest. Go ahead and change the starting speed and see what happens. I made the “people” move so that they will be in the right position to “catch” the ball. You can change the launch angle too. Go ahead and have some fun with this.
Here’s some choice equipment for cooking like a pro in the wild. Toss the packets of dehydrated soup and make a real meal at the campsite instead.
This Dutch oven is, in fact, made in the Netherlands. Combekk’s 4-liter pot is crafted from recycled iron—railroad track, mostly—and has a thermometer built into its sidewall. Set the whole thing in the campfire coals; the 6-mm-thick bottom keeps heat distributed evenly.
$300
A morning espresso blocks the sleep-inducing adenosine molecules in your brain, making you alert enough to read a trail map. Bialetti’s fountain pours two shots in about five minutes. Like the popular moka pot, it’s unfussy and made of durable aluminum.
$35
Igloo’s new BMX line is a departure from the decades-old brand’s usual style. The 25-quart cooler has been modernized with beefy latches, stainless steel kick plates, and tie-down loops for securing the load in your ride. It’ll keep ice icy for four days at 90 degrees Fahrenheit, so you can stay awhile.
$55
The tent has been pitched, all the gear has been stowed away. Now you deserve a beer. Coleman’s new growler holds several of them. If you don’t finish all 64 ounces of craft brew on the first night, this double -walled flagon maintains its chill for up to three days.
$40
When it’s all packed up, the car-camping-friendly Venture looks more like a picnic basket than a grill. That simplicity belies its smart, versatile design. The wooden lid doubles as a cutting board that can be nestled snugly onto the base—which in turn doubles as a stash spot for the propane canister.
$200
This article appears in the July issue. Subscribe now.
Reddit’s little mascot, Snoo, contains multitudes. The precious, ever-smiling alien hangs out at the top of hundreds of subreddits, mixing with the locals like a savvy politician. In r/trees, a community for marijuana enthusiasts, Snoo puffs a joint. In r/gonewild, Snoo poses for a selfie in a wig and lingerie. In r/Asceticism, Snoo dematerializes into the cyberether, its form the mere wisp of an outline.
Cheeky bugger. Indeed, Snoo’s existence has always been something of an inside joke. Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian doodled the creature in a notebook during a marketing class his senior year at the University of Virginia. Black and white with pops of red, it seemed conjured from pure whimsy: oval head, pom-pom ears, single antenna. Like a Teletubby, minus the space suit. When Reddit launched in 2005, the drawing served as a convenient icon for the site, which was then a place for sharing news links. (Advance Publications, which owns WIRED publisher Condé Nast, is now a Reddit shareholder.) At first, Ohanian wanted to call the site S’new, a marshmallow-mouthed contraction of “What’s new?” The tastier name Reddit prevailed; Snoo, more pleasingly spelled, lived on with the mascot.
As Reddit expanded and its user base splintered into tribes (subreddits), Snoo proved a fitting role model. “Snoo came to symbolize Reddit and a Reddit user,” Ohanian says, in that the icon happened to be particularly moldable. It’s a happy accident that Ohanian’s hurried sketch left Snoo colorless and genderless, a form onto which everyone could map themselves.
This creative canvas was, in some ways, illustrative of the early web, where nobody knew you were a dog. The closest thing to verification on Reddit, even now, is a confirmation that the email attached to your account is real. Anonymity is accepted, even encouraged. You can have multiple accounts, fake accounts, throwaways for posting the kinds of deep, dark musings that absolutely must not, under any circumstances, get traced back to the real you. (I have three usernames: one for lurking, one for reportage, and one for purposes I would never share in print.) Identities are fragmented; each version of you, a new Snoo.
There are some limits, especially now that Reddit has matured. You can’t harass or threaten other users, nor deploy Snoo to those ends. In fact, Snoo has several design constraints. When Reddit unveiled a new version of the site in April—its first refresh in a decade—the team canonized certain anatomical features: Snoo’s head “should always appear blank or neutral”; its eyes should be orange-red, hex #FF4500; it can’t have fingers; it should have ears (the better, perhaps, to hear, and thereby discourage, hate speech). The company also gave Snoo a more explicit purpose: to discover and explore humanity. (Following the redesign, r/trees and r/asceticism no longer feature a Snoo.)
This, it turns out, is a continuation of Snoo’s origin story. Ohanian says it was never just any alien. It’s from the future, a tiny time traveler here to observe our reality. As Ohanian explains, “It was a guarantee we weren’t going to fail. If we failed, Snoo wouldn’t be able to travel back to the present.”
Let’s parse that. There is a future, a distant one, in which Reddit still exists, in which sweet-faced creatures like Snoo merrily dwell. Certainly this is a very lovely thought. It is also a pompous and rather ingenious bit of teleology. All startup founders operate from a foundation of optimism—they’re going to change the world. But Ohanian does them one better. He built hope into his platform’s very mythology.
Nobody would mistake Reddit for a rainbowland of pure love. Trolls still yuck it up, and Snoo has seen some nasty things. But as the reputation of other social media plummets, with users turning against the algorithms that mine our every like and post, Reddit’s status as a messy myriad of supportive, mostly self-policed communities has stayed fairly constant. There is no pressure to curate a well-designed profile, to be the person Instagram or Facebook or Snapchat expects you to be. That’s what Snoo stands for. More space than substance, Snoo shows us another way to represent ourselves online: as shape-shifting cosmic weirdos, trying to find our place among the stars.
Arielle Pardes(@pardesoteric), wrote about Reddit’s recent redesign for WIRED.com.
This article appears in the July issue. Subscribe now.
There’s no need for a clever introduction to make this point: Ant-Man and the Wasp is the first film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to feature a female hero in its title. It’s the 20th film in the franchise. Every other one has been named after a man, or a group dominated by men. That’s a lot to put on the shoulders of that one woman—Hope Van Dyne/Wasp—and the woman who plays her, Evangeline Lilly. She pulls it off with aplomb. Fans of Lost expect nothing less of their erstwhile Kate. But had she not, it would’ve been bad news for the fate of the MCU.
Throughout the press tour for the new Ant-Man film, people have been asking Marvel honcho Kevin Feige about the future of the female heroes of the MCU. Having been beaten to the glass-ceiling-breaking punch by Wonder Woman, the studio will be coming out with a fully female-led movie next year in the form of Captain Marvel. But after that, Feige says, Marvel is looking to have a more gender balanced slate in its next phase, going so far as to say “more than half” of the heroes will be women.
That’s a big promise, and one that’s predicated on Marvel both building up the heroines it has, and adding more. Ant-Man and the Wasp proves that the Wasp—and Hope’s mother Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer), if she ever chooses to suit up again—has the goods. So, too, do Thor: Ragnarok’s Valkryie (Tessa Thompson), Black Panther’s Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) and Okoye (Danai Gurira), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen). After Captain Marvel (Brie Larson), there’s been talk of a standalone Black Widow film, and Marvel’s female stars have expressed extreme interest in making an all-female team-up movie. The point is, more women are coming to the MCU—the question now is what that will look like.
If the Wasp is any indication, it’ll look good. It’s easy to imagine a world where Marvel just casts a few more female characters, puts them all in uncomfortable boots and one-dimensional roles, and calls it a day. If Ant-Man and the Wasp is any indication, that won’t be the case: Lilly’s character was constantly in flat shoes. She’s also the primary mover of the action, pulling Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) into the search for her mother and leading high-speed chases. Because it’s a sequel, it’s still Ant-Man’s movie, but in another universe it easily could’ve been The Wasp (with Ant-Man Doing Some Stuff). And for a superhero with no powers beyond her suit, that’s pretty spectacular. (Though, Marvel, you better make good on that whole “Captain Marvel is the most powerful hero in the universe” thing.)
Marvel also, and I say this cautiously, seems to understand the value of involving women in the creation of stories about women. The new Ant-Man is written and directed by dudes, but Captain Marvel has several women—including Guardians of the Galaxy scribe Nicole Perlman and co-director Anna Boden—working behind the scenes. Feige has promised that the studio will hire more female directors in the future, and has met with several for the Black Widow movie, though none has been named. A lot of Marvel’s Phase 4 is still unknown—hell, we still don’t know who will survive Thanos’ snaps—but it seems possible heroines will be saving the universe just as much as their hero brethren.
Last week, Lilly got the praise and adoration of the internet when she noted she had no real gripes about the comfort level of her Wasp costume. Women, she postulated while bringing her high-heeled shoe into the view of the camera filming her, are used to being uncomfortable while doing their jobs, even if men aren’t. Her Wasp, of course, was given a slightly more manageable costume than the corset-and-heeled-boots Wonder Woman has been wearing while saving mankind. And if her trend continues, Marvel’s female heroes going forward will all be in sensible shoes—they may even one day get their own movies and backstories. She is, if nothing else, a Hope for the future.
Don’t let limited storage stop you from taking another Instagram-worthy photo or downloading another album to listen to on the go. It’s easy to free up space on your iPhone. Follow our best tips and tricks and you’ll lighten the load on your iPhone within an hour.
Before you do anything, it’s helpful to understand what’s taking up your storage space. Go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage. You’ll find a color-coded bar chart showing how your storage is being used, down to the gigabyte. Scroll down and you’ll see the list of apps and functions organized from most to least space. This is the index of your storage suckers.
Is your media taking up tons of room? The 6 GB shown next to the podcast app includes the dozens of podcasts you’ve downloaded over the year. Purge those old Reply All episodes you downloaded and listened to last year. Same goes for Spotify and any other apps with downloaded music, audio, or videos that you no longer need.
Let’s be real. You haven’t opened PokémonGo in months. To truly can’t catch ‘em all, you might need some space. Delete any of the apps you no longer need.
Other apps might be useful later on, but don’t need space on your phone right now. Offloading an app deletes the app from your device but holds onto the data stored within that app. It doesn’t create as much space as deleting does, but it reduces the load and gives you the option to re-download later on. From the iPhone Storage interface, click on an app and tap offload. Once you’ve offloaded an app, the offload button will switch to reinstall. You can reinstall whenever you’d like to bring back the app and retrieve all app data present on your iPhone.
The browsing you’ve done on your phone also uses a sliver of data, but even that can take up valuable space. Safari and Chrome save your history to fill in your sentences and make it easier to log into sites you’ve previously visited. If you care more about the space than the convenience, go to Settings > Safari and click on Clear History and Website Data. For Chrome, open up the app and go to Settings. At the bottom of History, click Clear Browsing Data.
Onto the hard stuff: photos. By default, iPhones automatically stream your most recent 1,000 photos across all of your iOS devices. It’s good backup, but it’s also a space-grabber that can lead to redundant photo storage. To stop the stream, go to Settings > Photos > Upload to My Photo Stream, and switch it off.
Another superfluous space-grabber: HDR photos. Shooting in HDR takes three separate exposures and uses the best parts each to produce one photo. There’s no real reason to hold onto the other exposures once they’ve been blended into one nice one. Go to Settings > Camera and turn off the option at the bottom to Keep Normal Photo.
Don’t need all of your photos on your phone all the time? Consider uploading them to a cloud-based service and then deleting them from local storage. Google Photos and Dropbox are both good options. Google Photos is free and offers unlimited storage if you choose the option to backup your photos in high quality or “great visual quality at reduced file size.” The other option is to back them up with the original resolution, which is limited by your Google account’s cloud quota. Dropbox is also a good tool for saving your photos outside of your phone. Download the free Dropbox app and create a basic dropbox account which will give you two GB of storage at no cost. From there, you can add photos in full resolution to your Dropbox. Note that the higher your camera quality, the more space each photo takes.
Like photos, messages can take up space, too—especially when you’ve got a zillion group chats set to save on your iPhone “forever.” Forever is a long time. Do you really need messages any older than 30 days? OK, how about a year? Those are your three options. Setting your messages to automatically expire for anything other than “forever” should help. You can do this by going to Settings > Messages and adjusting your the settings under message history.
Attachments sent through messages also take up space. If you’re in a group message thread with all of your extended relatives, chances are there’s quite a few videos of your uncle’s newborn. If your iPhone notices a lot of incoming attachments, you might see an option to Review Large Attachments, a section that sometimes shows up under Settings > General > Storage. If this does not appear, go to your messages and visit those family threads one by one. Clicking on the “i” icon in the top right corner of your message thread will bring up all photos and videos included in the thread. Go through them individually and manually delete the ones that you don’t need on your phone anymore.
On June 22, Rocket Lab started the countdown for its first real launch, in operational and not experimental mode, called “It’s Business Time.” The Electron, looking like the little pencil that could, stood on a launchpad on the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand, clouds of vapor billowing toward the cold sky. But they were the only things that would go up that day: The launch was called off at T-minus-23-minutes when a tracking dish, an antenna that communicates with and pinpoints the rocket, acted up.
On June 26, the Electron stood up to try again. But minutes after the launch window opened, the company said there was “an issue” with the motor controller, which manages commands sent to and from hardware and software on the rocket.
Rocket Lab had already delayed this inaugural commercial launch by two months, for a similar motor-controller problem. “It’s kind of like a hazard light flicking on in the dash of your car,” says Beck. “You would never go on a big trip.” Beck believed the company’s engineers had resolved the issue, but when that same metaphorical hazard light lit up again, the company called off the countdown and shut the launch window. “We’re not in the business of taking risk,” says Beck.
But no one in the launch business can be 100 percent successful, 100 percent of the time. Even much-vaunted aerospace vehicles, like the Falcon 9, explode. Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo crashed. The Russian Proton hasn’t always been a roaring success either. They’re rockets, man: They don’t work sometimes. “You can never have all the risk figured out,” says Caleb Williams, a space systems analyst at engineering and consulting firm SpaceWorks. “So there’s always going to be some leap of faith at some point.”
But it makes sense for the company to skew conservative during the Electron’s infancy. It’s kind of like if you want to make a good first impression at a party, and your options are (A) blowing up the house, (B) throwing the hosts’ valuables where they don’t belong, or (C) being late—and making everyone watch a livestream of the door till you arrive.
You’d probably pick Option C.
Two years ago today, a studio called Niantic released a game with a novel proposition: Go outside. Point your smartphone at the real world. Catch some monsters. Within a day, Pokémon Go was at the top of every app store chart. Within 200 days, players had spent a billion dollars on in-game upgrades—the shortest time to reach that milestone by a wide margin. In the summer of 2016, you couldn’t walk two blocks without running into, sometimes literally, a person in hot Pidgey pursuit. And then it stopped. Or so it seemed.
The news reports faded. Shops that had seen a sharp spike in sales thanks to Pokémon hot spots settled back into their normal routines. In just four weeks, between that August and September 2016, Pokémon Go shed nearly 20 million players, as enthusiasts headed back to school, or lost themselves in various other viral pursuits.
But the game’s long retreat from that initial burst belies its continued, unprecedented success. And in the gap between what you might think happened to Pokémon Go and the game’s current-day dominance lies an important lesson about the future of apps.
It’s true that far fewer people play Pokémon Go today than did two years ago. In July 2016, the crush of players boosted attendance at Pokémon-heavy Crystal Bridges Museum in Fayetteville, Arkansas by 50 percent year over year. By that August, the tide was already ebbing. “It seems like the hype died down in the span of a month,” says Crystal Bridges public relations director Beth Bobbitt. (She adds, “We still have a lot of ‘pokestops’ and ‘gyms’ all around the museum campus so I think we’re still a great location to play the game, for those who still are.”)
‘You’re forming real friendships with them. Friendships are sticky. That’s probably the secret sauce of the game, right there.’
Niantic CEO John Hanke
You’ve seen this yourself, anecdotally. There are no viral videos of Pokécrowds gone amuck anymore. No one makes Weedle jokes at the water cooler. The natural conclusion: Pokémon Go is just another fad that disappeared in a blink, a fameball of Pog proportions. But writing off Pokémon Go after the initial frenzy is like assuming PyeongChang no longer exists post-Olympics. What matters isn’t how Pokémon Go looked at its zenith, but how it held on from there.
“It was completely uncharted territory. The initial fervor, that global excitement around the game and the way it spread virally, globally, in such a short period of time. It was a new experience for all of us,” says Niantic CEO John Hanke. “But looking at it in retrospect, it looks very similar to all games. There’s an attrition curve that’s reasonably consistent across games. Some games are better at that attrition curve than others. That kind of separates the winners from the losers.”
By every measure that matters, Pokémon Go has been a winner. Since its launch, it has almost never dropped out of the daily top 100 downloaded apps in both the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store, according to app analytics company App Annie. It has been the top-grossing app in the Play Store this entire week. In two years, according to an estimate by app analytics firm Apptopia, it has taken in $1.8 billion in revenue.
“Even though the mega spending at the beginning has died off, the rate of revenue is still highly impressive,” says Apptopia communications lead Adam Blacker. “Where the money comes from is actually pretty evenly split between iOS and Android, which is unusual”
It also helps that mobile games don’t necessarily require lots of players to be successful. Revenue generally comes from power users, the whales that invest in PokéCoins—or whatever their poison—the way others might their 401k.
“Generally speaking within games, a smaller portion of your users are spending a lot of money. That’s true of most premium games,” says App Annie analyst Lexi Sydow. “I would imagine that trend would hold for this game.”
But the most impressive indicator of Pokémon Go’s sustained success is how much of their lives people devote to it. To this day, more cumulative time is spent playing Pokémon Go than any other game. It’s not even close: One in five minutes spent on the top 20 games on Android in May was devoted to chucking virtual Pokéballs.
“The game has been remarkably consistent and stable in terms of its performance post that bubble era, if you want to think of it that way, when we first launched,” Hanke says.
In fact, only a handful of apps—hello there, Candy Crush Saga—have had anything close to Pokémon Go’s staying power. The durability is surprising, especially if you’d forgotten Pokémon Go even existed. But it’s also instructive, especially as the app economy fully embraces the augmented reality experiences Niantic pioneered.
Niantic doesn’t offer much in the way of demographic specifics on its players, but suffice to say they don’t much resemble the Fortnite crowd. The game attracts proportionally more older people and more women than its peers—and in fact can credit much of its initial success to enthusiasts who otherwise wouldn’t be playing anything at all.
“Pokémon Go was not displacing other games. It wasn’t taking time away,” Sydow says. “We saw that it was actually additive time. People were taking more of their day playing Pokémon Go but also doing what they would originally.”
Pulling from a broader pool has helped keep Pokémon Go going. While it experiences steady attrition like any other game, it has a higher ceiling on potential new players to attract. And because it’s a game that takes place in the real world, it has more ways of making sure those players stick around.
“I think the design of the game in terms of it being an MMO should not be overlooked,” says Hanke, referring to the massively multiplayer online game genre of which Pokémon Go is a prime example. World of Warcraft would be another, a comparison that Hanke invites. Just as a WoW guild encourages regular, cooperative play, exploring the world through a Pokémon Go lens with friends can be mutually reinforcing.
“I think in Pokémon Go, because it’s a real-world game, it’s even more sticky than with League of Legends or something, where you’ve got a team but never see them face to face,” Hanke says. “With Pokémon Go, you are meeting those people face to face. You’re forming real friendships with them. Friendships are sticky. That’s probably the secret sauce of the game, right there.”
The most impressive indicator of Pokémon Go’s sustained success is how much of their lives people devote to it.
Niantic has, naturally, leaned into this advantage. In June 2017 it introduced so-called Raid Battles, a cooperative mode where groups of players team up to take down especially powerful bosses. This past January, it began organizing a monthly worldwide Community Day, using special Poké-bonuses to lure enthusiasts out into the open in major cities. And just last month, it started rolling out a Friends feature, which enables sending of gifts and trading of Pokémon among people you know in real life.
The roadmap from here follows that same course, buttressing the gaming appeal of Pokémon Go with hints of a social network. “I think there’s a ton more we can do there to basically enrich the game when you’re playing it together with people that you know,” Hanke says. That includes a system for dueling other players, which Niantic still plans to implement at some point.
Whether Pokémon Go’s durability, two years later, surprises you likely depends on if you still play it. But its disappearance for so many people for so long underscores how little we know about what happens on other people’s phones.
“Our mobile phones are our most personal devices. We have our bank accounts linked, we have our messages to our family members, we have our emails,” Sydow says. “I think that translates here.”
Its success may also prove difficult to replicate, although you can expect a swath of imitators now that both Apple and Google have invested deeply in augmented reality, and Niantic itself has opened up its platform to outsiders.
Pokémon Go is itself, after all, a spin on Ingress, a game Niantic launched in 2014 that follows the same basic pattern—minus the Pikachu appeal. Ingress had its devotees, but without generations of Pokémon fans to tap into, it had nowhere near the cultural impact. Niantic’s upcoming effort, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, will also map a famous fictional property over the real world. As AR becomes less of a novelty than the norm, the trick will be to create those experiences without the failsafe of a megahit’s built-in fan base.
Still, surely something else will catch the same lighting in a bottle—or Blitzle in a Pokéball—that Niantic has. When that happens, all due credit to the model that enabled it: Go outside. Point your smartphone at the real world. And find some friends to do it with.
Facebook’s rise in popularity in Myanmar came at a time of tremendous political and societal change in the Southeast Asian nation which fueled and enabled the platform’s growth. Myanmar had been ruled since 1962 by successive military regimes that drove the country into political isolation, crippled the economy, oppressed ethnic minorities, and repeatedly put down popular uprisings with deadly force.
A parliamentary election in 2010 was widely criticized as far from free and fair but an important step for the military’s carefully choreographed transition to quasi-civilian rule. Aung San Suu Kyi, the wildly popular opposition leader held by the military under house arrest for some 15 years, was barred from participating. Members of her party, the National League for Democracy, boycotted the vote, in which the majority of seats were won by a military backed party. Aung San Suu Kyi was freed from house arrest six days after ballots were cast.
Thein Sein was sworn in as president of Myanmar in March 2011 for a five-year term. The bespectacled, subdued leader surprised observers by embracing a number of reforms—quickly suspending an unpopular Chinese-backed dam project and, in 2012, dropping heavy-handed censorship of the press. That year, the country was enraptured by a visit from President Barack Obama, the first sitting US President to visit Myanmar. It was a remarkable turn of events given that seven years earlier, the US had labelled the country an “outpost of tyranny,” along with North Korea and Iran, and for years had punished it with harsh economic sanctions. (The last of the sanctions were lifted by the fall of 2016, though one former general has been since been sanctioned for his alleged role in the violence against the Rohingya.)
Barack Obama and Myanmar’s President Thein Sein shake hands before the East Asia Summit in Myanmar’s capitol, Naypyitaw, in November 2014.
One of Thein Sein’s most significant accomplishments was the liberalization of the country’s closed telecommunications sector, which had long been dominated by a state-owned monopoly. Under that regime, internet connectivity was severely limited and frustratingly slow. The country’s internet penetration was less than 1 percent in 2011 and there were just 1.3 million mobile subscribers, according to the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations’ agency.
This slowly began to change, and in 2012, mostly in major cities like Yangon and Mandalay, SIM card prices fell to hundreds of dollars from over a thousand, making them slightly more accessible though still out of reach to most. As internet connectivity expanded, so did social media. The state-run New Light of Myanmar newspaper declared in 2013 that in Myanmar, “a person without a Facebook identity is like a person without a home address.”
Sonny Swe, the founder of the independent Myanmar Times newspaper who was jailed by the junta, says he was hit by a “digital tsunami” when he was released from prison during an amnesty in April 2013.
He served more than eight years of his 14-year sentence, passing the time by speaking to spiders and other insects that crawled through his cell. “I named them individually and they all become my friends,” he would say later.
Upon his release, he noticed two things—the heavier traffic choking the streets of Yangon and the widespread usage of mobile phones. His son helped him set up a Facebook page days after he was freed in the back of the newspaper’s aging offices.
The digital transformation was poised to accelerate that year, when the government granted licenses to two foreign telecoms providers—Norway’s Telenor and and Qatar’s Ooredoo—ending the state monopoly.
Ambitious connectivity targets included in the license agreements by the government ensured that the country’s internet use would skyrocket in coming years. When Telenor and Ooredoo launched operations in 2014, people queued for hours for SIM cards that cost around a dollar. Mobile shops appeared seemingly overnight hawking cheap Chinese smartphones. The state-run telecom provider, Myanma Posts and Telecommunications, partnered with two Japanese firms the same year, further increasing competition and connectivity.
Mobile penetration leapt to 56 percent by 2015, according to a Deloitte report, with many Burmese accessing the internet for the first time on phones. Today, according to the UN’s International Telecommunication Union, citing official figures, internet access is around 25 percent and mobile penetration around 90 percent. In a recent briefing in Washington, DC, one longtime Myanmar expert described the adoption of Facebook that followed this sudden uptick in connectivity as the fastest in the world.
Predictably, this has all had a huge impact on the distribution of information. Last year, a public opinion survey from the International Republican Institute found that 38 percent of people polled got most, if not all, their news from Facebook. Respondents said that they were most likely to get their news from Facebook rather than newspapers, though radio, relatives and friends, and TV were more popular. There are now an estimated 18 million people who use Facebook in Myanmar, according to the company.
While the positive developments in Myanmar under Thein Sein were noteworthy, tremendous challenges remained. Conflicts between the still-powerful military and a number of ethnic armed groups, some of whom had been battling for greater autonomy for decades, continued or intensified. Land confiscation and human rights violations remained pervasive. Bouts of violence in 2012 between Buddhists and the Rohingya on the country’s west coast added a new obstacle to the country’s precarious path toward a fuller democracy. Tens of thousands of Rohingya were disenfranchised as they languished in ramshackle camps.
During the decades of military rule, the country lacked a free press and the junta operated largely in secret—the military changed the country’s flag and moved the capital with almost no prior warnings—people in Myanmar had spent decades reliant on state-run propaganda newspapers, parsing opaque military announcements for what was really happening. The arrival of Facebook provided a country with severely limited digital literacy a hyper-connected version of the country’s ubiquitous tea shops where people gathered to swap stories, news and gossip.
“Myanmar is a country run by rumors, where people fill in the blanks,” says Derek Mitchell, who served as US Ambassador to Myanmar from 2012 to 2016.
There is a great insecurity and fear among people in Myanmar that unseen powers are working in the shadows to control the levers of power, Mitchell says. The arrival of Facebook provided a platform for these rumors to spread at an alarming rate. “Facebook could have done more to proactively talk about positive speech,” he says, “how to look at things on Facebook to avoid pitfalls, and the dangers of negative speech, put their brand behind a more constructive approach to the platform.”
As hate speech and dubious articles quickly began to surface in volume on Facebook in 2012 and 2013, many targeting Muslims and the Rohingya in particular, the government raised concerns that the site could be used to incite unrest. Some activists and rights groups, however, were not totally convinced of the threat of online hate speech.
In 2013 an official from Human Rights Watch was largely dismissive that Facebook could play a major role in the spread of hate speech. He pointed to pamphlets distributed by monks and ultra-nationalist organizations in rural areas prior to the 2012 violence in Rakhine as a more pernicious vehicle for spreading disinformation.
This skepticism about the risks of Facebook was rooted in part in a fear that the government or military would use hate speech as an excuse to censor or block certain websites that it did not agree with. The fear of web suppression was not unfounded. Myanmar had in the past restricted access to the internet, notably during the 2007 monk-led popular uprising dubbed the “Saffron Revolution,” in an failed attempt to keep news of the demonstrations and subsequent crackdown from leaking out.
“The answer to bad speech, is more speech. More communication, more voices,” Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said in Yangon in March 2013. The Myanmar public was, “in for the ride of your life right now,” he added in the speech that was a gleeful take on the positives Myanmar would reap from its technological and telecoms liberation.
Chris Cox has long been the Chief Product Officer for Facebook. He has also recently been promoted to run product at WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram, which means he is effectively in charge of product for four of the six largest social media platforms in the world. He recently sat down with Wired Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Thompson at the Aspen Ideas Festival to talk about the responsibilities and plans of the platforms he helps run.
Nicholas Thompson: I’m going to start with a broad question. There are a lot of trade-offs that you talk about. There’s a trade-off between privacy and utility, right. The tougher your privacy settings are, the harder it is to code things and the harder it is for users to add apps on. There’s a trade-off between free speech and having a safe community. There’s a trade-off between a totally neutral platform and making sure the highest quality content thrives. So: Over the last year, as you’ve gone through this and as you think about the future, how has your thinking shifted on where the balance lies?
Chris Cox: It’s shifted immensely, on each of those dimensions. I started at the company 13 years ago; I joined when Facebook was 5 million American college students. It was called “The Facebook.” It was a directory only. There was really no tool for communication. People were using their real names and so it had the promise of being a place you could find each other, find a roommate, find a high school best friend, find your cousin’s new boyfriend, and you could learn about the people around you. The lesson we learned very early on was that these tools could be forces for people to come together around ideas. The first time we had a group with over 1 million people in it was a few days after we launched News Feed. There were 10 million people using the service and 1 million of them joined a group called, “Students Against News Feed.” It was a huge misunderstanding. We did a bad job of explaining how the product worked. We worked through it, but the second and the third largest groups were groups raising awareness about humanitarian issues. The second largest group was a group about Darfur, which at the time was an under-reported humanitarian issue that a lot of college students cared about.
And so we had this feeling from the early days that this platform generally wanted to be a force for good, that people wanted to come together around ideas, and we should let that happen. And so the focus was a lot more open than it is now. if you look at today, we have hundreds of our best people now working on protecting elections. And that’s the right thing for us to do—looking at over 40 countries, working with electoral commissions, data scientists, researchers, understanding the playbook of the Internet Research Agency, but also the playbooks of financially motivated spammers, who use the excitement around elections to try and make money from ad farms. There’s a whole list of things which we have done over the past year and a half. We really said we need to be experts at this. We need to be working with world experts in each of these areas and each of these countries. And that is a big change in disposition that’s happened inside of the company.
NT: Back to those general dimensions that I mentioned. I’ll just give my outsider’s guess on how you shifted on all of them. So privacy versus utility, you guys have massively shifted toward privacy. And, in fact, I bet there are people inside the company who worry you’ve been pushed too far by the Cambridge Analytica outrage, and it’s kind of too hard to build things now, but you had to move really far on privacy. On free speech and community, you’re moving much more towards making a safe community and away from the initial ideas of social media platforms from the Arab Spring of free speech. Neutral platform versus high-quality content, you’re definitely moving towards high-quality content, much more of a publisher, less of a neutral platform. Am I right or wrong on those three?
CC: You’re right on all of it. And I think we’re trying to do this in a way where we’re putting decision-making in the hands of institutions who have a history, like fact-checkers. The way we’re combatting the fake news problem is to identify when something’s going viral, then getting it quickly to fact-checkers—we’re in 15 countries now, we want to be in more—and helping the fact-checkers prioritize their work, so that rather than fact-checking whichever story may have come across their desk, they’re looking at the ones that are about to get traction on social media. Then you use that to reduce the distribution of the story and also to educate folks who are about to share it or those who are coming across the story on social media. The partnership with fact-checkers means that we can rely on institutions that have standards, are showing their work, and allow us to not be in a situation where we feel like we need to be making these really difficult calls. And they are difficult calls. I mean, the cover of Time magazine is a difficult call.
NT: The cover of Time magazine is a difficult call because it’s got a picture of a girl crying. It says, “Welcome to America” but the girl wasn’t actually crying because she was separated from her parents, right?
CC: It was part of the debate in the fact-checking community this week.
NT: That’s a great example. Let’s talk about this disinformation stuff. You just laid out some of the ways you’re dealing with it in a text-based world, or text and image-based world. But the internet’s going to be mostly pictures and videos soon, and then we’re going to move to virtual reality, and then we’re going to move to like neural interfaces, where we’re all going to be connecting our brains. How are you going to fight and counter disinformation at these different levels? I kind of know how you’re doing it on text, I don’t know how you’re doing it on images, I really don’t know how you’re doing it in VR.
‘The way we’re combatting the fake news problem is to identify when something’s going viral, then getting it quickly to fact-checkers’
CC: So it’ll be the same playbook. We’ll be finding things that start to go viral, we’ll be sending them to fact checkers. The two most interesting [things] for photos are things that are doctored and things that are taken out of context. Those are the two categories where we see the most activity on social media and on the internet. And we want to use the same principles, which is we’re going to find what’s starting to move across Facebook and Instagram, we’re going to get it in front of fact-checkers, we’re going to let fact-checkers decide, and then we’re going to educate people when they see it and reduce its distribution. And then we’ll use artificial intelligence tools and classifiers to basically spread what people have said, if it is a false story, and find other things that look like it.
NT: Wait, so stuff will start to go viral, and it will be controversial, and you’ll send it to humans, and then you’ll use AI? Won’t it be the other way around? Won’t it start to go viral, you’ll use AI, if the AI can’t solve it, then it will go to humans?
CC: So you’ll find things that are going viral, that’s just counting. Then you’ll send it to fact-checkers. Then you’ll use fuzzy matching, as it’s called. It’s just finding things that are saying the same thing but are slightly different. This is important for photos, it’s important for links. We recently had a story in France—a health hoax—that said if you’re having a stroke, you should prick your fingers and your stroke will subside. You know, health hoaxes are as old as time. They’re part of the rumor mill, they’re a part of gossip, they’re a part of conversation. But they’re really important to help people get educated. And in this instance, there were more than 1,000 stories that were all about this one hoax. And so rather than sending 1,500 stories to fact-checkers, we want to send one, and just have a tool that says these two things are the same.
NT: What is your confidence level? In the 2016 election, there were bad guys putting out this information, there were good guys trying to stop this information, good algorithms, and the bad guys won, right. What is your confidence level that in the 2018 election you’ve gotten good enough at this that you can prevent someone from hijacking an election?
CC: Well we feel very good about every election we’ve had since we’ve put this team together. We’ve been working with electoral commissions ahead of time so we have a sense of how we’re doing in their eyes, which is really important. We’ve been doing that in Mexico [for Sunday’s election] for months now. We announced recently the take-down of 10,000 Pages, Groups and accounts in Mexico and across Latin America because they violated our community standards, as well as removing 200,000 fake Likes, which could help artificially prop up political candidates. So, we’re not going to get 100 percent of everything, but I feel a lot more confident that we’ve developed our best teams with tools that are working. In the Alabama special election we saw thousands of economically motivated—meaning they’re just using it as spam to get people riled up—actors, and each time we find one of these patterns we’re getting more competent at having the right antibodies to each of the types of problems. So a lot more confident, but I can’t be 100 percent sure there’s not going to be anything.
NT: So you feel the immune system is evolving more rapidly than the virus.
‘We feel very good about every election we’ve had since we’ve put this team together’
CC: I do.
NT: That’s good to hear. Let’s talk about other viruses. One of the most interesting and complicated products in this suite of platforms you run is the toxic comments filter on Instagram. Instagram built a system, they hired a bunch of humans to evaluate comments to say “this one is racist,” “this one is sexist.” They used that to train an algorithm, and now there’s an algorithm that will go through comments on Instagram and basically vaporize anything super mean. When is that product going to be fully deployed on Facebook?
CC: Again, you’re in this balance of a platform for letting people say what they want and a platform that’s keeping people safe and helping people have constructive conversations. If it’s hateful, we’re going to take it down.
NT: Will you automatically take it down?
CC: We rely upon reporting, and then we build tools to help find language that is similar to the stuff that’s been reported as hateful. But it’s an area where people need to be involved because there are so many judgment calls around hate speech.
NT: But the filter will knock away stuff without any humans reviewing it or anybody flagging it.
CC: Based on language that’s being used on Instagram. One of the things we’re looking at, especially in my new role, is finding more places that we can re-use tools. We’re doing this in a bunch of places across Facebook and Instagram, for example taking down photos that violate our standards. The comments stuff isn’t as unified yet. We have different approaches. But on Facebook, to your question, the most interesting tool we’ve found is upvoting and downvoting. Good old-fashioned upvoting and downvoting, which is separate from liking, but just lets people surface comments that are helpful and push down comments that are unhelpful.
NT: Reddit, right? That’s the foundation of Reddit.
‘On Facebook, the most interesting tool we’ve found is upvoting and downvoting.’
CC: Yeah, that’s Reddit. But it’s really effective at collapsing things that aren’t helpful. It doesn’t hide them, but it helps keep the conversation constructive, it helps create cross-cutting positive discourse, which is what you really want here. And that’s the direction we’re heading.
NT: So, to summarize, on Instagram, if somebody writes something nasty about me on my feed it will be vaporized automatically. On Facebook, somebody writes something nasty about me, somebody will flag it and it may be vaporized the next day.
CC: With a little more detail underneath it, yes.
NT: When does it become a free speech issue? Is it just when you delete it or don’t delete it? Is it also a complicated free speech issue when you’re shrinking the image size or comments are collapsing in?
CC: They’re all on the continuum of free speech and safety. We published in April, for those of you who are interested in reading the 64-page guide, exactly how we decide. We also have the two-page version, which is our community standards, which is just: these are the things we don’t allow on the platform. Then we have the long version which is, here’s exactly how we think about a hate speech issue, how we understand what is a contextualized slur, which is a whole thing, a reclaimed slur, which can be a part of a group expressing identity in solidarity. And so these are all hard calls. We work with world experts on these in these areas to arrive at our policies. We publish the policies so that they can be debated, and that’s kind of where we stand. For the things we don’t remove, there are certain things like misinformation, we want folks to be able to see the content as well as the education around it, so informing people. And that’s where we say this has been disputed, we expand other articles that are linking to the fact-checkers, and we reduce distribution so that these stories don’t go viral.
NT: I want to ask one more question about this. When I was looking at the Instagram filter and I was asking why won’t this be implemented on Facebook, one person told me, “Well, it will never be implemented on Facebook, because as soon as you show that you can build a hate speech filter on Facebook, the German government will mandate that you use it, and it will become an impossible situation because every government will say we want to use your filter.” Is one reason you’re not deploying the tool because of the requests that would come if you deployed it?
CC: No. We published our transparency report. So every six months we release a report where we go through each of the categories of content, like fake accounts, terrorist content, hate speech, and we publish how many pieces we review, and how many we took down. The goal is just to have this stuff out in the open so that we can have a conversation about how we’re doing. And we can have scrutiny from people who study each of these areas, scrutiny from journalists, and scrutiny from people in each country to understand how we can do better. We like having this stuff out in the open in general. One of the things you’ll see in there is which things we’re able to take down proactively. And so terrorist content we’re able to take the vast majority of it down before it even shows up on the platform. This is stuff like ISIS. Hate speech is the really, really hard one. Because it is such a human judgment. And it is such a contextual judgment. And it’s one where we’re relying on policies written by people who study this for their entire lives. And we’re very committed to it because it [creates] a really bad experience, especially where it can lead to real-world harm, and that’s going to be the driving principle for how we think about the work.
NT: Alright, let’s talk about the algorithm. So at Facebook, one of the most important things is the algorithm that determines News Feed. And my critique of the algorithm has always been that the factors that go into it favor Cheetos over kale. They favor likes and immediate shares. The factors that favor kale, which is like the ratio of shares after reading to shares before reading, time spent reading an article, those things matter less, and the impulse stuff matters more. Obviously, the algorithm has been evolving. You made a whole bunch of changes to it this year, but let’s start with the different things that you can measure on the Cheetos versus kale continuum, how you think about the different measurements, and what new tools you have for measuring this stuff.
‘Hate speech is the really, really hard one. Because it is such a human judgment. And it is such a contextual judgment.’
CC: The most important tool is what people tell us. We’ll show people side-by-side, thousands of people every day, which of these things do you want to read? Why? We hear back the same thing: I care about friends and family more than anything. That is why we announced this ranking change in January; there had been a huge influx of video and other content from Pages, which is often great, but it had drowned out a lot of the friends and family stuff. So the most important quality change we made, is to make sure that people don’t miss stuff from their friends and family, that’s number one. The second is what we’re able to discern, people want to have conversations around stuff on Facebook. They don’t want to be passively consuming content. This is connected with the research on well-being, which says that if you go somewhere and you just sit there and watch and you don’t talk to anybody, it can be sad. If you go to the same place and you have five or six conversations that are good around what’s going on in the world, what you care about, you feel better. You learn something. There’s a sense of social support. And that is exactly how we should think about digital and social media, which is, to what extent are they building relationships versus being places that are passive experiences. And so the ranking change we announced in January was helping to prioritize friends and family, but then beyond that, things that were creating conversations between people because we heard from people that’s why I’m here. The third area is focusing on quality. And that’s really about the news that gets distributed on Facebook. And this isn’t why people come to Facebook primarily, but it is an important part.
NT: It’s a very important part.
‘That is exactly how we should think about digital and social media, to what extent are they building relationships versus being places that are passive experiences.’
CC: Exactly. For people who are coming to the platform, for democracy, for your paper. And what we’ve tried to do there is reduce clickbait, sensationalism, the things that people may click on in the moment because there’s an alluring headline, but then be disappointed by. And that’s where we’ve done an immense amount of work. We’ve been doing this work for a long time but we’ve doubled down on the work over the last two years.
NT: So let’s say I leave this room, I get to my laptop, and I write two articles. One has the headline: “I had this really profoundly interesting conversation with Chris Cox, here’s a transcript of it, here are the seven smartest things he said”, and I post that on Facebook. And then I take something you say and I kind of take it out of context and say, “Chris Cox says we should shut down Time.” Or let’s take something that you say a little bit out of context and make it salacious. The second one is still going to get a lot more likes and shares, right?
CC: To use my intuition, probably. Yeah.
NT: And so how do you stop that? Or how do you change that?
CC: Well, I think the most important thing there is whether over the long run that is building a good relationship with your readers or not. That is why I think the work on digital subscriptions is so important. A digital subscription is a business model that helps somebody have a long term relationship with a newspaper. Which is different from a one-at-a-time relationship.
NT: It’s a marriage versus a one-night stand.
CC: I wasn’t going to say that, but yeah it’s a longer-term relationship. And you’re seeing, for older institutions and newer ones, you’re seeing digital subscriptions as a growing business model on the internet. And it’s one that we’re committed to helping out on. Because we like the property that it helps create a relationship between a person and an institution. We just announced, actually, this week, a really interesting result on a digital-subscription product we’re building to help publishers take readers and convert them to subscribers on our platform. They get to set the meter, which is how many free reads do you get, they keep the revenue. It looks like it’s performing better than the mobile web, which is what we hoped, is that we can offer them something that improves their business. But it gets to what I think is the heart of the matter, when we start to talk about being in a headline culture, which, by the way, is not unique to social media. And that’s how do we think about business models that are about long relationships? And I think that’s a fascinating conversation, and to me is a really important area to go as an industry.
NT: And as someone who’s just launched a paywall and subscription model at WIRED, that is all music to my ears. Journalists and news organizations have been worried, fretful, since your changes were introduced in January. Maybe even going back to when they were being beta-tested, traffic is going down. We’re talking about it at WIRED. When you see drops of 20 percent, 25 percent in your Facebook referral traffic, there’s some concern that Facebook is getting out of the news. Is it?
CC: No. What we’ve done here is we’ve rebalanced; this is really going back to the ranking change I just talked about in January, where we’re trying to rebalance based on what people tell us. Which is they want to have conversations with people they care about on Facebook primarily. Among the news they get, they want it to be good. They want it to be informative. They don’t want to be fooled, they don’t want to be deceived, they don’t want to look back on it and feel like they were hoodwinked. That’s all the work we’re doing on clickbait, on quality, on working with fact-checkers, etc. and I think we do have immense responsibility on both of those.
NT: Let’s talk about regulation. You were just in Washington, your boss was also just in Washington, we all watched him on TV, probably there’s going to be some kind of regulation. The spectrum basically goes from, we’re going to ask for citizen education, to we’re going to have tough privacy regulation and tough hate speech regulation, all the way to antitrust. What is your sense of the way to make regulation work in a way that allows you to continue to innovate?
CC: I was in Washington last week, meeting with senators, civil society groups. We do a product road show just to help folks understand the work we’re doing on elections. It was a fascinating week to be in Washington. We had all the immigration stuff going on. And to me, and whether this takes the form of regulation or not is an important point, but to me the conversation is just that we need to be spending more time understanding, from people whose jobs it is to be representing the opinions of the state, what are their big issues and what can tech do about it? I think that is so productive. To me, the positive version of this is just a lot more dialogue in each of these arenas, on how should we think about data use, how do we communicate about data use; it’s a very difficult problem. It’s a problem for the next decade, how is a person to think about their data? Where is it, what can they do about it, how can they control it, how should they feel? I’m hopeful that what all of this is leading to is just a lot more clarity in each of these arenas.
NT: So you want more clarity, but let me just go through how you feel about some regulations. Again, I’ll just take the approach of guessing what Facebook’s position is. So, antitrust, clearly you are against that. The German hate speech law, my guess would be, you think it was an overreach because it puts the burden of identifying hate speech on you, meaning you have to hire tons of people, and also, the easy way out of it is just to delete everything from the platform.
CC: I’m not even sure if Germany feels like that was a good policy.
‘How is a person to think about their data? Where is it, what can they do about it, how can they control it, how should they feel?’
NT:GDPR [Europe’s new data-protection law], it seems like you’re conflicted about it. You rolled out a whole bunch of new stuff here that seems like you’re kind of in favor of a lot of what GDPR did.
CC: Yep, absolutely.
NT: And then on the sort of the easy spectrum, like the Honest Ads Act, it seems like you’re actively lobbying for it. So on that end of the spectrum, you’re good with it.
CC: You know, one of the things we did with GDPR is we worked with the folks who were writing the laws, in addition to the usual research groups, where you’re sitting down with privacy experts, you’re sitting down in user research, you’re asking about comprehensibility, your understanding, what is the design of the thing that the most people emerge understanding and feeling good about. It can’t be 100 pages long. If you make it one page long everybody says you don’t share enough, if you make it 10 pages long no one’s going to read it. It’s a hard one. But it’s nice when you can do it and say, “And, this is something we did in cooperation with the government.” So it helped having a body of people who were saying the thing is certified.
NT: My theory of government regulation is that it’s very hard for governments to regulate tech companies because by the time the bill is passed, everything is evolved past what they were thinking about. So my dream regulation would be government to get you together, to talk a lot, and to threaten you really aggressively, but then not do anything. And then you would self-regulate yourself really closely.
CC: That’s happening right now. I mean, these are arenas where—each one of them is something where we need to be really dialed in, on both exactly how the product works, and the research we’ve done to support that. I’m personally really proud of the work we’ve done in each of these areas, and my biggest takeaway from Washington is, once we explain the work, they’re pretty excited about it. And the biggest thing happening is a misunderstanding. Not understanding the election stuff we’ve done already, not understanding the way we’ve done research to design GDPR…
NT: Not understanding that you sell ads.
CC: Well I don’t mean it like that, it’s on us. You know these are really brilliant people, who do study and read the literature.
NT: I interviewed Zuckerberg after the Cambridge Analytica scandal hit, and we were talking a little bit about regulation and he said, one reason why regulation is hard is because AI is going to be the most important tool to solving the problems on our platform and regulation will be put in place before all this AI gets implemented. I agree with that. And I agree with using AI to solve all kinds of problems, even problems we haven’t imagined. But the people who cause problems will also have AI, right. And AI will also have amazing opportunities for hacking—you can hack into the training data. Explain to me sort of conceptually how you think about the arms race between AI in the service of making Facebook a better platform, and AI in the service of using Facebook to try and destroy the world.
CC: First of all, AI should be thought about as a general technology. It’s like electricity. You know, it can be used in a lot of different ways. It’s being talked about in a lot of different timeframes, it’s the buzzword of the festival this year, which is good. It’s tied up in the future of jobs, it’s tied up in the future of medicine, it’s tied up in a lot of the important conversations on how we’re going to make the world a better place, we’re going to take advantage of the power of this technology. It’s also going to be, take this French medical hoax example, if we didn’t have a classifier that could quickly look at what are all the stories that look like this, that probably would have been viral. And the most important application of this work for us right now is in that kind of stuff, safety and security. And I am not aware of seeing, in the arms race, that sort of sophistication in this arena so far. So we’re obviously going to pay attention to it but if you look at the score right now, I think it’s massively in favor of security and safety.
NT: The most important thing you do financially is you sell ads. And the best product you’ve built is this tool that can identify who I should target. When I worked at The New Yorker, it was an amazing tool because we used it to sell subscriptions to people who, based on their habits measured by Facebook, are likely to get New Yorker subscriptions. So you built this incredible ad tool based on slicing and dicing populations. The biggest problem with Facebook is filter bubbles and groups where misinformation becomes disinformation and people become radicalized, which, again, is based on slicing and dicing. My presumption would be, one of the reasons filter bubbles exist is because you can get into a small group of like-minded people. And sometimes in that small group of like-minded people, you get more and more radicalized, whether it’s into a political view or it’s into a view about vaccines causing autism. And so the question is whether the business model is tied to the problematic elements of filter bubbles and radicalization within groups.
CC: I don’t think it is. And I’ll tell you why. I think one of the most important misunderstandings based on the academic research is the literature around polarization, how social media changes a media diet, which is really the underlying issue. Are you exposed to a broader set of information or a narrower set of information? And the literature says it’s complicated. It’s complicated because a world without social media as a primary source of information in the US is going to be cable news, which, according to the researchers, is a massively polarizing thing.
NT: Oh, definitely.
CC: So what’s interesting is—this is what the empirical research says—is that social media exposes you to a broader media diet, because it connects you with friends around you, “weak ties” it’s called in the literature. This is the person you went to high school with, it’s the person you used to work with, it’s people who you’d never message with, people who you wouldn’t necessarily keep in touch with without Facebook and Instagram. They tend to read something different from you, and you tend to trust them. And it’s where you tend to get the most cross-cutting discourse, which is to say people bonding over an issue that isn’t politics, and then listening to one another on an issue which is politics. The vast majority of groups on Facebook are not political. They are a mother’s group, a group of locksmiths, a group of people who play Quidditch together in London (actual Quidditch!). What we’ve heard, and this is the vast majority of the Groups on the platform, is that these are places where bonding happens and bridging happens. Which, in the literature of community leadership, in the literature of polarization, is an incredibly important thing.
NT: I’m going to not counter it but say, you can believe both that Facebook is less polarizing than cable news, and you can believe the Groups are generally good, and also believe that Facebook should be working hard to counter the polarization that does exist both within Groups and within the regular feed.
CC: Which I agree with.
NT: So then, how do you counter it more?
CC: I think the key thing to look for there is sensationalism, hate, misinformation. These are the things where we’ve seen on the platform, and we need to find them through a combination of reporting and detection, and then we need to deal with it.
NT: You mentioned earlier that changing the business model of journalism toward subscription and away from views has a beneficial effect on the industry. What about changing the way ads work within that context and saying, you can’t slice and dice on political content, you can’t use custom audiences for a campaign.
CC: The tricky one here is there’s a massive amount of good that’s done when you let a very small business, a barber shop in London, you know, has zero customers, has $10, wants to start advertising, wants to speak to people in this age group because they know who their customers are — they just need a way to reach them. And on the ledger of the good that is enabled when you allow people to reach small audiences, we think it’s vastly good because small entrepreneurs, small businesses, a small news magazine, that wants to reach a particular type of person and couldn’t afford to reach people in the way advertising worked prior to the internet. I believe in that. If you go out and talk to small business owners in the US, you get somewhere between 50 and 60 percent say our platform was responsible for helping them grow their business meaningfully, and that translates to more successful small entrepreneurs out there. Then the question is: well what about political and issue advertising, where, again, on the one hand you have people trying to raise money for important causes. You have nonprofits in Texas trying to raise money to help reunite children with their parents. And to say, you can’t do this on our platform, we think, would be wrong. So what we’ve done is to release an archive, to label every single ad where exactly is it coming from, to let people—journalists, civil society, watchdog groups, experts—study the way that the advertising is being used, so that we can have it out in the open. We can have a conversation out in the open and, frankly, we can have help from people who are studying very specifically this one group of people in Ohio and helping us spot when there’s misuse there, and we’re going to go after it.
NT: And then you can use your other tools to help promote the people who are helping find lost children and knock away the ones who are using it to spread Russian propaganda.
CC: It’s interesting. Did anybody here hear about this fundraiser last week? This is one of the more interesting things that happened on our platform last week — a fundraiser for a Texas nonprofit raising money to reunite children with their parents after they were separated at the border. It raised $20 million in six days. It was a couple, Dave and Charlotte Willner in California, their ambition was to raise $1,500. And it created a copycat phenomenon. And it’s powerful because it’s letting people do something. It’s a release. And it’s a contribution to what the national conversation was last week.
The interview then turned to audience questions.
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