Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 7/19 - Will Fuchsia Replace Android?

Episode Date: July 19, 2018

Facebook and Zuckerberg address misinformation and censorship, Reddit rolls out live chatrooms, will Fuchsia replace Android, and who is online journalism’s newest savior? Links:Facebook says it will begin removing misinformation that leads to violence (The Verge)Full transcript: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Recode Decode (Recode)Mark Zuckerberg clarifies: ‘I personally find Holocaust denial deeply offensive, and I absolutely didn’t intend to defend the intent of people who deny that.’ (Recode)REDDIT REINVENTS THE CHAT ROOM WITH COMMUNITY CHAT (Wired)The European Commission Versus Android (Stretechery)Project ‘Fuchsia’: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android (Bloomberg)Google’s Fuchsia OS on the Pixelbook: It works! It actually works! (Ars Technica) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the TechMeme Right Home for Thursday, July 19th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Facebook and Zuckerberg address misinformation and censorship.

Reddit rolls out live chat rooms. Will Fuchsia replace Android? And who is online journalism's newest savior? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. So you might have heard various stories in recent months about how in places like Sri Lanka, Myanmar, India, and other countries, critics have accused Facebook and WhatsApp and other Facebook platforms of being the breeding ground for misleading, downright false, and inflammatory posts that have been put online intending to stir people up to the point of violence.

In fact, there have been many cases of actual acts of violence in those countries. critics say were instigated by posts on Facebook. Sri Lanka, in fact, temporarily shut down Facebook earlier this year after posts led to actual mob violence in several areas. So Facebook yesterday announced a new policy wherein the company will be reviewing posts that it feels have the intent of causing violence or physical harm. The posts will be reviewed in partnership with local organizations that Facebook identifies as being in the best position to monitor threats on the ground. When Facebook identifies such a dangerous post, it will be removed. The policy was quietly put into place in Sri Lanka last month and will roll out to other markets soon. Facebook has long had a policy of banning posts that are directly or obviously violent, and now that

extends to posts that might not explicitly call for violence, but that might indirectly do so. In a somewhat related controversy that I'm sure you've heard of, but I'm not quite sure what to make of, you might have heard that Mark Zuckerberg gave an interview to Kara Swisher on her Recode podcast yesterday, and in response to questions about how, why, or even if Facebook should police misinformation on its platforms, Zuckerberg said this, quote, I'm Jewish, and there's a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened. I find that deeply offensive, but at the end of the day, I don't believe.

that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don't think that they're intentionally getting it wrong, but I think to which Swisher then interrupted by saying, quote, in the case of the Holocaust deniers, they might be, but go ahead. Zuckerberg continued, quote, it's hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent, end quote. Zuckerberg later emailed Swisher to clarify saying, quote, I personally find Holocaust denial deeply offensive, and I absolutely didn't intend to defend the intent of people who deny that. Our goal with fake news is not to prevent anyone from saying something untrue, but to stop fake news and misinformation spreading across our services.

If something is spreading and is rated false by fact checkers, it would lose the vast majority of its distribution in the news feed. And of course, if a post crossed the line into advocating for violence or hate against a particular group, it would be removed. These issues are very challenging, but I believe that often the best way, way to fight offensive bad speech is with good speech, end quote. So I think we need to try to take these two news items in tandem. It's complicated to say the least, but okay, Facebook has always taken down posts that explicitly call for violence. Facebook will now begin taking down posts that could

indirectly lead to violence, especially if they are false and misleading posts with the intent to rile people up to the point of violence. But vis-a-vis Zuckerberg's statement about Holocaust denying posts, people had difficulty lining up the logic. For example, Zinip Tufetchi tweeted, quote, Harder to find a group of people more intentional about denying an atrocity in order to pave the way for more violence than Holocaust deniers. I mean, happened in Europe within living memory, with more documentation than almost any other mass killing, end quote. Mitch Kapoor tweeted, quote, what Mark Zuckerberg needs to understand, the intent of Holocaust deniers, is not the sole proper standard of judgment.

We can debate limits to free expression, but it's the impact that matters greatly, not the intent, end quote. Here's Kevin Ruse trying to square the circles, possibly with the news of the new misinformation policy I mentioned at the top. Quote, among the revealing pieces of Kara Swisher's interview with Zuckerberg, he seems to think there's a meaningful difference between domestic misinformation, wrongfulness protected by free speech, and misinformation abroad, which causes, quote, real harm, end quote.

And on Daring Fireball, John Gruber wrote, quote, Facebook's stance on this is genuinely detrimental to society. They're offering a powerful platform that reaches the entire world to lunatics who, in the pre-internet age, were relegated to handing out mimeographs while spouting through a megaphone on a street corner, end quote. Which, from the best I can parse from the transcript of the Karaswisher interview, is maybe exactly what Zuckerberg is trying to say, however, obliquely. He is thinking of Facebook as the street corner.

In his mind, he can no more take a megaphone or a mimeograph machine away from people because he doesn't like what they're saying, then he can stop people from saying things that he doesn't agree with on Facebook. Yesterday, we spoke about some executive shuffling and changing of the guard at Nest and Google. Today, some similar news out of Apple. Last week, Apple confirmed that it was combining its members, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and Siri teams under the leadership of John G. Andrea, who was hired from Google earlier this year where he was the head of search and AI.

Because of this new regime change, Tom Gruber, who was a co-founder of Siri and the last remaining Siri founder still at Apple, and Apple's own head of search, ViPolved Prakash, are both leaving the company. So in a way, we can look at these as similar stories. At Google slash Nest, they're consolidating teams and resources to work on smart devices. At Apple, they're reorganizing teams and resources to do all things, machine learning and AI. Reddit is beginning to roll out live chat rooms, which will be organized by subreddit and can only be created by subreddit administrators. This is not replacing the posts and threads that Reddit is known for, but Reddit is,

noticed that on some subreddits, with very strong communities, users were often self-organizing outside of Reddit on places like Slack and Discord when they needed more immediate feedback-style interaction. Reddit figured, why can't we just give that to Redditors on our own? So, soon in your favorite subreddit, you might begin to see good old, real-time chat rooms, just like the old-and-timey AOL chat rooms or even IRC. Everything old is new again, it seems, quoting from a piece on this in Wired. The company has been testing the feature with a small group of communities and plans to roll out to the rest of Reddit at the end of the month.

Think of it like a community center for a subreddit. It creates a space to talk without pretense, to bring discussions beyond the comment threads, or to simply hang out with strangers online. The company imagines chat becoming an integral part of the Reddit experience. The question is whether it can stick. and whether a throwback to a simpler time on the web can withstand the Internet in 2018, end quote. And that would be the pressing question, right? Reddit's product team tells Wired that so far they haven't seen any increase in trolling, harassment, or abuse in chat,

but the beauty of chat is the short memory of the medium. Even if a flame war erupts one evening, it can be scrolled into oblivion overnight. Of course, by its nature, that could also lead to hit-and-run trolling, guerrilla trolling, if you will. But Reddit is building tools to combat that, and Jason Lee, the Redditor in charge of this new chat rollout, tells Wired, quote, for a troll or someone trying to ruin the experience,

there's just not that much incentive. Their message goes away so quickly. I thought I'd give you guys a couple quick analyses of the Google Fine News from yesterday. Ben Thompson and Strateree comes down narrowly on the side of the European Commission, but says, quote, Still, it is an unsatisfying remedy.

Google built Android for the express purpose of monetizing search, and to be denied that by regulatory edict, feels off. Google, though, bears a lot of the blame for going too far with its contracts. More broadly, the European Commission continues to be a bit too cavalier about denying companies, well, Google mostly, the right to monetize the products they spend billions of dollars at significant risk to develop. This was my chief objection to last year's Google's shopping case. In this case, I narrowly come down on the commission's side almost by accident. I think Google acted illegally by contractually foreclosing Android competitors at a time when it might have made a difference, but I am concerned that the commission's publicly released reasoning doesn't seem to grasp exactly how Android has developed, the choices Google made, and why.

That noted, I highly doubt Google would do anything differently when it comes to the company's goals. Android could not be a bigger success. if anything, this ruling is evidence of just how successful the project was, end quote. In his newsletter, charged, Owen Williams gives the perspective from Europe itself. And what he said, I found super interesting. Like Thompson, Williams points out that Google's actions were in response to a very real market problem that was harming consumers, the complete and total fragmentation of the Android ecosystem, where a quote-unquote Android phone from one manufacturer could be so different from one

made by a different manufacturer as to be unrecognizable. The remedy the EU Commission has set up could actually harm consumers if it returns the Android ecosystem to the bad old chaotic Wild West early days. Quote, while I believe that regulation on monopolies is good in many instances, it seems like this law is being broadly applied to benefit manufacturers' bottom line, not consumers. Manufacturers have been loudly complaining that Google's practices are unfair because they're blocked from doing deals to further monetize the consumers. For example, some manufacturers have expressed interest in the type of deals where they'd

change the default browser bundled with a phone in exchange for cash, or building their own custom flavors of Android with, to give a theoretical example, an SMS app that might show ads. If anything, the European Union's ruling is dangerous because it will make it easier for the competition to accelerate. If Google is forced to strip its apps and must instead, leave that up to the manufacturers. Imagine what the setup experience might be like. Download your SMS app, your phone app, browser, and so on by hand one by one, when you get a new phone and uninstall the crappy bundled ones, end quote.

Williams ends by noting that this could have the knock-on effect of actually strengthening the hand of another major player in the market, Apple, who would have a more cohesive user experience by default. Speaking of Android, and as many people have pointed out, it's probably no coincidence that this just so happened to surface today. But Bloomberg has a piece up about Google's fuchsia operating system, which Bloomberg says is intended to replace Android. But that's really selling it short, as it might be better to consider fuchsia as a kind of next generation operating system that Google could use to underpin all sorts of devices from smartphones to laptops to Internet of Things gadgets. and an operating system that would incorporate all of the modern bells and whistles like voice input and AI. As again, Owen Williams said on Twitter, quote, Project Fuchsia is fascinating because it's the first real modern OS built from the ground up with all of the learnings from a decade of smartphones, end quote.

Inside Google, Project Fuchsia has 100 plus engineers assigned to it at this point, but according to the Bloomberg piece, there has been no firm roadmap settled on for the OS. and there are fierce internal debates about what the project should even be in the end. I'm going to link to this Bloomberg piece that does an excellent job of outlining that debate, but also I'll link to an Ars Technica piece from earlier in the year that is more detailed

in slightly different ways. But in light of the previous segment, consider this scenario. Let's say Google loses its Android appeal to the EU. Google has to revamp how it does Android and has to cede more control over Android than it wants to. Okay, fine. Android is open source. It can continue to move forward for years to come, but one day, some years from now, Google unveils fuchsia and it's proprietary, and Google charges for it, and thus has more control over it.

As Jeffrey Grossman, co-founder of messaging app confide, says in the Bloomberg piece, quote, switching away from Android could provide Google the opportunity to hit the reset button on any mistakes they believe they made a decade ago. They might be able to regain some power that they've ceded to device manufacturers and telecom carriers. Finally, yesterday I did a piece about BuzzFeed and BuzzFeed News. So here's another quick little nugget about the space we used to call the blogosphere. Earlier this year, it looked like we were going to lose sites like Gothamist and DNA Info and a whole bunch of other community-based news and blogging sites. When those sites were abruptly and unceremoniously shut down, some of the sites have remained.

dead, but some of them, like Gothamist, thankfully have been saved, thanks to a consortium of public radio stations, including WNYC, which acquired the assets of sites like Gothamist, DCist, and LAist. Again, thank God. You don't know how valuable a hyper-local news site is to your community until you lose one. Well, one more is getting saved. Chicagoist, and the savior is none other than Chance the Rapper. as Neiman Labs says, add rappers to the list of those who are capable of potentially saving journalism.

This is apparently what happened as the rapper reached a deal to buy the assets of Chicagoist from WNYC, something that he announced in the lyrics of a track to his upcoming album that he dropped at midnight last night. You might know that Chance is a Chicago native and has been called Chance the Philanthropist for his community work in his hometown. In a statement, Chance says he's a Chicago native. He is committed to relaunching the site, but no firm date as to when that would happen was announced at this time. That's it for the Tech Meme Ride Home for this fine Thursday. I've been your host, as always, Brian McCullough. To quote the great man himself, you don't want no problems, want no problems with me.

I'm living my best life, turned all my L's into lessons. Talk to you tomorrow.