Linked List: February 23, 2022

Wednesday, 23 February 2022

How an Obscure Far-Right Website With Three Employees Dominates Facebook in 2022 

Judd Legum, writing at Popular Information:

Most people have probably never heard of the website Conservative Brief. It employs just three writers and it does not produce any original reporting. Nearly all of its articles are aggregations of Tweets, YouTube videos, or other media websites, presented with a far-right spin. Recent headlines include “More Damning Evidence Surfaces Against Hillary Clinton in Durham Probe,” and “Trump Gives Love To Mike Lindell, Showers Him With Praise For The Good He Has Done.” Conservative Brief has been cited repeatedly for publishing false claims.

Yet Conservative Brief has emerged in 2022 as a dominant force on Facebook. It has recently become more popular on the platform than the New York Times and the Washington Post.

How did this happen? Popular Information has uncovered evidence strongly suggesting that Conservative Brief is paying a network of large Facebook pages, including several controlled by prominent conservative political personalities, to post its content. This conduct, if it is indeed occurring, is in direct violation of Facebook’s rules.

This sort of thing strikes me as far more pernicious than false conspiracy theories appearing in search results. With search results, you’re looking for something already. With Facebook, this stuff keeps getting served, endlessly, to those with a propensity to engage with it. That people are being paid to promote it, without disclosing that arrangement, is chicanery.

WSJ: ‘Inside Facebook’s $10 Billion Breakup With Advertisers’ 

Suzanne Vranica, Patience Haggin, and Salvador Rodriguez, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link):

Martha Krueger, who runs a gift-basket business called Giften Market, used to spend her entire advertising budget on Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook and Instagram. She picked up a new customer for every $14 she spent. When Apple Inc. introduced a privacy feature for mobile devices last year that restricts user tracking, she said, her costs to acquire such customers rose 10-fold. In October, she shifted her whole ad budget to search ads on Alphabet Inc.’s Google.

I’m not saying this isn’t true for Krueger’s specific case, but a 10-fold increase in customer acquisition cost doesn’t sound right in general. It feels like we’re talking about Facebook’s business model having utterly collapsed. Their “bad” results last quarter showed an 8 percent year over year drop in profit, yes, and investors very much were spooked by that, yes — but they still reported over $10 billion in profit and almost $34 billion in revenue for the quarter.

Putting aside the company’s claim to be shifting its attention to a “metaverse” future, it’s a mistake — or at least very premature — to speak in the past tense about Facebook as we know it.

Nick Heer, writing at Pixel Envy:

But there is one argument I think can be addressed in short order: all Apple did to push Meta’s buttons is that it now requires explicit consent for tracking. If Meta’s business model cannot handle a simple question of permissions, that is a pretty crappy business model. It should have been better prepared for a day when lawmakers started asking questions. But it was not. Meta’s best move has been to use the plight of small businesses, lured by its short-term promises, to excuse its unethical practices. Shame.

Update: A brief follow-up post.

Search Engines and Conspiracy Theories 

Stuart A. Thompson, writing for The New York Times, under the provocative headline “Fed Up With Google, Conspiracy Theorists Turn to DuckDuckGo”:

Other research has also found that Bing’s algorithm surfaces less trustworthy information than Google does when searching for conspiracy theories. One study last year showed that slightly fewer than half of all results on Bing and DuckDuckGo for six popular conspiracy theories mentioned or promoted the ideas. Google fared better, with about a quarter of links mentioning the ideas but nearly none supporting them. Yahoo fared worse than Bing and DuckDuckGo, and the Russian search engine Yandex fared worst among the group.

Newer and more esoteric conspiracy theories are far more likely to return misleading results because of the so-called data void. Conspiracy theorists tend to publish content about new ideas long before mainstream sources, dominating search results as the terms begin spreading online. Other topics never grab the attention of mainstream sources, giving the conspiracy theorists a long-term presence in search results.

What a tricky problem for search engines to solve. This Times story does suggest that Google is ahead of rival search engines at presenting results that don’t support bunk conspiracy theories, but I don’t think it’s clear what the “correct” balance is here. If you really do want to see the crazy “QAnon” theories for yourself, you should be able to find them, no? But at the same time search engines certainly don’t want to legitimize radicalizing nonsense.

State of the Desktop Browser Battle: Microsoft Edge Is Moving Up 

Anthony Spadafora, writing for TechRadar:

According to data from web analytics service StatCounter, Microsoft Edge is now used on 9.54% of desktops worldwide, just behind Safari at 9.84%. As you may have guessed, Google Chrome still holds the top spot at 65.38%, with fellow challenger Mozilla Firefox now trailing in behind with 9.18%.

While Edge may be catching up to Safari worldwide, in North America it’s a different story, as Apple’s browser is used on 16.87% of desktops compared to Edge’s 11.93% market share.

These stats are desktop-only — Safari comes in much higher on mobile, of course. No pun intended, but even limiting the stats to “desktop” is not an apples-to-apples comparison, because Safari is available only on the Mac (but, has the enormous advantage of being the default). StatCounter pegs MacOS’s share of North America desktop usage at 26%, which suggests that roughly one-third of Mac users use Chrome (or Edge or Firefox — but probably Chrome). Chrome dominates the desktop overall, but second place appears to be a very tight three-way race between Safari, Edge, and Firefox.

Also worth noting: mobile browsing is so profoundly popular that only Chrome (63%) and Safari (20%) register above the baseline when you look at all browsing across all platforms.

Update: Alexandre Dieulot reminded me that in 2019 Apple changed Safari’s default user-agent string on iPadOS to look like Safari’s for MacOS. (This happened with the release of iPadOS 13, the first version with the name “iPadOS”.) You can see the apparent uptick in StatCounter’s numbers for “MacOS” starting in September 2019.