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In 2017 Facebook noticed a drop in user engagement- fewer comments, fewer posts, and less sharing. To address this Facebook made a change in its algorithm, which is a bunch of mathematical equations which determine what you see in the newsfeed. The result says this WSJ Facebook Investigation was to make Facebook an angrier place, a place where divisive comments were being posted, and sensational or exaggerated comments were being shared. This increased the level of divisiveness in the US during the early period of the Trump administration. As America looks back on this time- the issues related to migration across its southern border that are still alive today and on which there is now a consensus across Democrats and Republicans on returning migrants. The issues related to the urban-rural divide that many presidents preceding Trump and Biden had chosen to ignore, and which the Tech community showed little interest in. The divide also across educational lines with college educated splitting away from people lacking college education just as costs of college had soared. All these issues were out in the open and instead of having an educated debate these algorithms never intended for solving social problems actually made them worse.  It is now in the interest of both Republicans and Democrats to take a hard look at what went wrong and restore the civility and dialogue that marked American experience across all ages and income groups, and remove the overstated influence of such algorithm based apps. The WSJ Facebook Investigation is a way to restore the traditional media's true place in the national dialogue and push back against the insidious and dangerous influence of algorithm based news feeds such as this one.  Outrage Algortihms may be good for a few people and a few in tech  business in California and in capital markets in New York, yet they are bad for America and the American people as a whole, bad for the vast landscape of America and the vast majority of the American people. Mindless infatuation with pictures of young adults leads to a mindless and dangerous result in mental health, bad effects on women, illusions about what is right living, and increasing divisiveness in America.  ...

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Algorithm based media do poorly when it comes to mental health. This article in the WSJ series looks at how users can escape the algorithm when they feel it is harmful to their health, and whether this is possible.

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Macron says about the ban of under 15's by social  media platforms-  the emotions of children and teenagers should not be "for sale or manipulated by American platforms and Chinese algorithms." The bad effects  on all adolescents of social media, especially on girls is seen in mental health issues for teenagers and the lack of focus for education in schools. It is a big price to pay for all countries to ruin the prospects in life of a new generation of children who are growing up in ways that no previous generation of children in the history of humanity was exposed to. This is no time for dangerous experiments with our children. It is an interesting comment on today that it is lobbyists (and donations) for platforms that are the problem. And that these lobbyists are from what is called Far Right, Right,  Left, Far Left, it makes no difference they all get paid for work, which shows that such labels have little meaning today- looking for common sense and what is right for (children's) health and education is the best approach not falling in line with Far Right, Right,  Far Left, Left, or Moderate or some such label or a Culture War label that is essentially meaningless when it comes to common sense. Good common sense, that much is sufficient. Many other important issues we face require the same approach. ...

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The Biden administration says that the video app must divest itself from its parent or face a nationwide US ban. China says it is opposed to such a divestment or forced sale. China has made the export of of algorithm based technology such as TikTok subject to export controls.

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Crypto currency Terra founder Do Kwon is arrested in Montenegro. US and South Korean authorites have lawsuits against the cryptocurrency founder saying financial crimes were committed. About $40 billion in value of assets was wiped out in this scheme. Terra founder claimed the support for the currency came from algorithms as there was no solid asset at a bank supporting the currency. To strain credibility further the currency was called Stablecoin. Kwon Do was a computer science degree graduate from Stanford. The use of tech algorithms or computerized programs to create currency that has always been done by central banks of each country- such as the Federal Reserve in the US -was possible because of the culture set by Silicon Valley in the San Francisco region of California that has prevailed in the last two decades. Without this culture and its spread across America and the world no sane person would even think of putting out currency, which is the sole responsibility of the government and central bank of each country. Too many people were hurt, lives disrupted or damaged by the financial crisis from faulty mortgages in 2009 for the Federal Reserve and the Biden administration to allow cryptocurrency or some other such scheme to operate and repeat these mistakes.   ...

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Tim Berners Lee, inventor of the world wide web says on its 28th anniversary that the fake news development is dangerous and needs to be tackled to prevent serious damage. He says Google and Facebook have responsibility to see to it that misinformation is not spread. He says the algorithms used by the social media sites need to be revealed so that the public knows how the information is selected. The revenue for these sites is based on clicks, and so he says as people click on information, "fake news" that is surprising, shocking or made so that it has appeal can generate more attention and spread like a wild fire. 

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India is a founding member and lead chair of Global Partnership on AI. At the GPAI Summit at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi, December 11, 2023, prime minister Narendra Modi talks about India's potential  for cutting edge research and also about the risks and dangers of AI. "AI is transformative. Yet its transparency is essential, data and algorithms have to be transparent, and free from bias, for its right beginning, to be useful to humanity." Modi describes the useful aspects of AI for India's health sector and for other sectors, and India's UN Sustainability Goals. The safe and ethical use of AI and its democratization with AI for All a focus in India.

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On CBS "Face the Nation" last weekend both Mark Warner and Senator Rubio expressed concern about unknown algorithms targeting 150 million young users in America. The problem extends beyond that into the effects of TikTok and other social media that is harmful to children taking so much of their time that basic civics, reading, sports and exercise, outdoor activities, suffers enormously. No other generation has faced this and the US Congress and the White House have fallen far behind the curve of setting the rules and regulating use of the new information technologies. 

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Coalition Against Climate Disinformation at the COP30 Belem Brazil Summit. CAAD says about the state of disinformation-

"Big Carbon's spending and Big Tech's algorithms are preventing us from seeing and hearing one another online. Instead, we're exposed to one lie after another."

The frequent fires and floods all over the world which happen suddenly and quickly show the effects and costs of climate change are real. Actions need to be taken on climate change even as the cost of living crisis and struggles of people in China,India and Africa and in the US and EU have to be considered for access to electricity and for cost of living concerns. Fossil only provides a short term transition to a long term plan for the future based on renewable energy, and the fight for climate change action to be renewed by EU, China, Brazil and India as the US sorts out its own problems with the transition.

 

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This article in the Wall Street Journal by Greg Ip shows what a case against Google and Facebook on antitrust charges would look like. He says Standard Oil and American Telephone and Telegraph had over 80% of their market. Ip points out that Google and Facebook's share is 89% and 95%. Here Ip shows that there are secondary effects beyond innovation by such Tech companies and Amazon which restrain competition and could be grounds for antitrust action. These companies favor their own products and skew their algorithms to promote them, making it difficult for newcomers. Also providing less access to venture capital that prefers not to invest in the newcomers that compete with the dominant tech companies.

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A news story about French president Francois Hollande saying he wanted to see tough negotiations sends the British pound plummeting on October 7, 2016. It fell to $1.18 before recovering to $1.24 to the dollar. Experts say algorithms overreacted to the news story about Hollande's remarks. Further declines are expected as Brexit negotiations happen in 2017 closer to elections in Germany and France, with issues such as movement within the EU likely to be obstacles. Other factors influencing the pound are the that the pound is no longer a safe haven following Brexit, and the uncertainties generated by the Brexit "yes" vote. This would mean higher prices in Britain's retail stores for imported products, costlier vacations overseas, and higher inflation. It could boost British exports with a devalued currency making them more competitive. 

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News Corp, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, is developing a news aggregation service called Knewz.com, a a website and a mobile app, to enable more independent sites to be able to reach a wider audience. It is intended to give smaller quality sites a chance to reach a broader audience, not happening today because of the presence of algorithm based sites such as Google. The idea is to give more exposure to smaller quality sites neglected by Google. The goal is to highlight deserving news stories, original content, from both progressive as well as conservative sites to give rich content to readers.

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A whistleblower's revelations in the US Congress on Facebook, and the WSJ Facebook investigation, both show that the social media and news information products have at toxic effect on young women and children. Congress is in a bipartisan mood to take action. One solution is removing algorithmic news feeds, removing the effect of algorithms in information that is put out. Another solution is the breakup of the company and removing the algorithmic feeds. Keeping social media organizations out of the news and information business is an effective solution, as coming up with solutions that accomplish this would remove the social ills that affect American, European and Indian society today. It would restore the situation that existed before the emergence of social media such as Twitter and Facebook that distorted news and media information and improperly took much of the space that long established news organizations had carefully developed for a hundred years.  ...

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Emma Tucker Editor of The Times will take over as Editor of The Wall Street Journal from Matt Murray. Emma Tucker started at The Financial Times before moving on to the Times of London as deputy editor, and Editor of the Sunday Times.

Ms. Tucker led The Times of London from 2020 leading to digital subscriptions increasing from 320,000 to 450,000 by Sept 2022. Matt Murray joined the Dow Jones at its Pittsburgh bureau in 1994, before serving as executive editor and deputy editor in chief. He started the audio podcasts, and a series on Facebook's negative effects on young women and TikTok's algorithm can introduce adult content to minors. He took the digital subscriptions from 1.59 million to 3.16 million as Editor of WSJ. Murray's strategy was for the WSJ to remain focused on its core strengths in business, finance and economics even as it pursued general interest readers by simplifying the reading.

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This WSJ report looks at the work of Sandberg in building up the advertising revenue part of Facebook. Ms Sandberg took many risks which were highlighted in WSJ investigations of Facebook. This showed the toxic effects on young girls mental health, on democratic processes, on an angrier discourse with algorithm changes to reverse falling user engagement. 

This period of social media growth, and tech growth at other companies such as Google and Apple, which turned into monopolistic behaviour has damaged America's social fabric. This period is now coming now coming to an end as America looks to the future to rebuild after decades in which its manufacturing was ceded to other countries with the loss of  manufacturing communities in America through actions of tech companies. And the growth of social media has disrupted the normal discourse and discussion in America.

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Google's effort during its 15th anniversary in 2013 to introduce semantic search in its results for queries, by using the Hummingbird Algorithm and the Knowledge Graph.

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Fake news ads on Google Search are a couple of the hard to believe results Hiroko Tabuchi finds in one of his searches using the words "climate change." One ad says "Global Warming Hoax." More alarming is the way the Google algorithm and a person's search history is used by Google to send that person what he likes or approves. So that a NYT reporter's account may show a different ad on Search for "climate change" - mostly positive ones from Environmental Defense Fund. Tabuchi says some of the ads calling climate change false are still appearing on Google even after the New York Times alerted Google about the problem.  A perceptive observer would find that that this is exactly how Search can end up reinforcing people and dividing them into different camps hostile to each other. More significantly it might make people resistant to even hear another person with different ideas, a problem we face today in American democracy. ...

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WSJ investigations of Facebook and Instagram showed how these social media companies business activity was damaging to young women's health in the US, Europe and other countries. Because of the reach of social media companies into the lives of millions of young people the damage was serious and extensive. This report in the WSJ describes the activities of management at Facebook and the resignation of one of the key executives from burnout herself. This WSJ report says that during the WSJ series on the investigations this and other key executives remained silent on the issues facing young women for mental health in the use of Facebook products.  One WSJ report in 2021 said that company documents showed Facebook knew that the company's products were toxic for teenage girls. Other issues emerged in the WSJ investigations such as the Outrage Algorithm which the WSJ says was made by tweaking some aspects of the company's algorithm as a way to counter dropping user engagement. This led to much angrier discourse on Facebook according to WSJ and other reports. The experiences at Facebook reflect the general experience of this period in 2000-2015 when business management shifted to an entirely different conception of business that ignored the importance of human values in the blind pursuit of rapid growth, profits to make acquisitions of smaller companies for further growth creating monopolistic firms. This extended to disruptions of democratic process with the Cambridge Analytica access to records of data of 87 million Facebook users as reported in WSJ, that were used to target social media users in the period leading to the 2018 election. With such activities the risks could be seen to the democratic process itself in addition to mental health by the emergence of social media in the short period of a dangerous decade 2010-2020, when there was little or no regulation of this medium.   ...

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The resignation of Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo, from his positions at the company on Jan. 17, 2012. Yahoo hired a new CEO, Scott Thompson, from eBay's Pay Pal unit n 2011. Yang started Yahoo with David Filo. They setup "David & Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web," a list of favorite websites, as computer science students at Stanford in 1995. What followed was a trajectory similiar to the one observed today for Facebook- by 1999 the company was valued at $120 billion in the dot com bubble. A decade later Google, a newcomer with a search algorithm, replaced Yahoo as the most widely used search engine. Yahoo and its peer site AOL from the 1990's never recovered from the technological change in the internet with broadband and a new generation of search engines. Yang holds a 3.8% stake in Yahoo. Yahoo has a 40% stake in Ali Baba, which was formed when Yahoo turned over its Chinese operations to Ali Baba in exchange for a large stake in operations. Yahoo is planning to sell its stake in Ali Baba....

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Facebook announced changes in June 2016 for the way its algorithm for news feed will work with increasing importance for content that is posted by the friends and family of users. The impact of this change is that the content directly posted by publishers will now get less importance. Under the Instant Articles initiative Facebook had previously given publishers a way to reach the larger social media audience it attracts. This now changes with publishers reminded of the uncertainty in the way social media sites continue to change their algorithm.