21 September 2019

Meet Facebook’s latest fake


Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, a 35-year-old billionaire who keeps refusing to sit in front of international parliamentarians to answer questions about his ad business’ impact on democracy and human rights around the world, has a new piece of accountability theatre to sell you: An “Oversight Board“.

Not of Facebook’s business itself. Though you’d be forgiven for thinking that’s what Facebook’s blog post is trumpeting, with the grand claim that it’s “Establishing Structure and Governance for an Independent Oversight Board”.

Referred to during the seeding stage last year, when Zuckerberg gave select face-time to podcast and TV hosts he felt comfortable would spread his conceptual gospel with a straight face, as a sort of ‘Supreme Court of Facebook’, this supplementary content decision-making body has since been outfitted in the company’s customary (for difficult topics) bloodless ‘Facebookese’ (see also “inauthentic behavior”; its choice euphemism for fake activity on its platform)

The Oversight Board is intended to sit atop the daily grind of Facebook content moderation, which takes place behind closed doors and signed NDAs, where outsourced armies of contractors are paid to eyeball the running sewer of hate, abuse and violence so actual users don’t have to, as a more visible mechanism for resolving and thus (Facebook hopes) quelling speech-related disputes.

Facebook’s one-size-fits-all content moderation policy doesn’t and can’t. There’s no such thing as a 2.2BN+ “community” — as the company prefers to refer to its globe-spanning user-base. So quite how the massive diversity of Facebook users can be meaningfully represented by the views of a last resort case review body with as few as 11 members has not yet been made clear.

“When it is fully staffed, the board is likely to be forty members. The board will increase or decrease in size as appropriate,” Facebook writes vaguely this week.

Even if it were proposing one board member per market of operation (and it’s not) that would require a single individual to meaningfully represent the diverse views of an entire country. Which would be ludicrous, as well as risking the usual political divides from styming good faith effort.

It seems most likely Facebook will seek to ensure the initial make-up of the board reflects its corporate ideology — as a US company committed to upholding freedom of expression. (It’s clearly no accident the first three words in the Oversight Board’s charter are: “Freedom of expression”.)

Anything less US-focused might risk the charter’s other clearly stated introductory position — that “free expression is paramount”.

But where will that leave international markets which have suffered the worst kinds of individual and societal harms as a consequence of Facebook’s failure to moderate hate speech, dangerous disinformation and political violence, to name a few of the myriad content scandals that dog the company wherever it goes.

Facebook needs international markets for its business to turn a profit. But you sure wouldn’t know it from its distribution of resources. Not for nothing has the company been accused of digital colonialism.

The level of harm flowing from Facebook decisions to take down or leave up certain pieces of content can be excruciatingly high. Such as in Myanmar where its platform became a conduit for hate speech-fuelled ethnic violence towards the Rohingya people and other ethnic minorities.

It’s reputational-denting failures like Myanmar — which last year led the UN to dub Facebook’s platform “a beast” — that are motivating this latest self-regulation effort. Having made its customary claim that it will do a better job of decision-making in future, Facebook is now making a show of enlisting outsiders for help.

The wider problem is Facebook has scaled so big its business is faced with a steady pipeline of tricky, controversial and at times life-threatening content moderation decisions. Decisions it claims it’s not comfortable making as a private company. Though Facebook hasn’t expressed discomfort at monetizing all this stuff. (Even though its platform has literally been used to target ads at nazis.)

Facebook’s size is humanity’s problem but of course Facebook isn’t putting it like that. Instead — coming sometime in 2020 — the company will augment its moderation processes with a lottery-level chance of a final appeal via a case referral to the Oversight Board.

The level of additional oversight here will of course be exceptionally select. This is a last resort, cherry-picked appeal layer that will only touch a fantastically tiny proportion of the content choices Facebook moderators make every second of every day — and from which real world impacts ripple out and rain down. 

“We expect the board will only hear a small number of cases at first, but over time we hope it will expand its scope and potentially include more companies across the industry as well,” Zuckerberg writes this week, managing output expectations still many months ahead of the slated kick off — before shifting focus onto the ‘future hopes’ he’s always much more comfortable talking about. 

Case selection will be guided by Facebook’s business interests, meaning the push, even here, is still for scale of impact. Facebook says cases will be selected from a pool of complaints and referrals that “have the greatest potential to guide future decisions and policies”.

The company is also giving itself the power to leapfrog general submissions by sending expedited cases directly to the board to ask for a speedy opinion. So its content questions will be prioritized. 

Incredibly, Facebook is also trying to sell this self-styled “oversight” layer as independent from Facebook.

The Oversight Board’s overtly bureaucracy branding is pepped up in Facebook headline spin as “an Independent Oversight Board”. Although the adjective is curiously absent from other headings in Facebook’s already sprawling literature about the OB. Including the newly released charter which specifies the board’s authority, scope and procedures, and was published this week.

The nine-page document was accompanied by a letter from Zuckerberg in which he opines on “Facebook’s commitment to the Oversight Board”, as his header puts it — also dropping the word ‘independent’ in favor of slipping into a comfortable familiar case. Funny that.

The body text of Zuckerberg’s letter goes on to make several references to the board as “independent”; an “independent organization”; exercising “its independent judgement”. But here that’s essentially just Mark’s opinion.

The elephant in the room — which, if we continue the metaphor, is in the process of being dressed by Facebook in a fancy costume that attempts to make it look like, well, a board room table — is the supreme leader’s ongoing failure to submit himself and his decisions to any meaningful oversight.

Supreme leader is an accurate descriptor for Zuckerberg as Facebook CEO, given the share structure and voting rights he has afforded himself mean no one other than Zuckerberg can sack Zuckerberg. (Asked last year, during a podcast interview with recode’s Kara Swisher if he was going to fire himself, in light of myriad speech scandals on his platform, Zuckerberg laughed and then declined.)

It’s a corporate governance dictatorship that has allowed Facebook’s boy king to wield vast power around the world without any internal checks. Power without moral responsibility if you will.

Throughout Zuckerberg’s (now) 15-year apology tour turn as Facebook CEO neither the claims he’ll do things differently next time nor the cool expansionist ambition have wavered. He’s still at it of course; with a plan for a global digital currency (Libra), while bullishly colonizing literal hook-ups (Facebook Dating). Anything to keep the data and ad dollars flowing.

Recently Facebook also paid a $5BN FTC fine to avoid its senior executives having to face questions about their data governance and policy enforcement fuck-ups — leaving Zuckerberg & co free to get back to lucrative privacy-screwing business as usual. (To put the fine in context, Facebook’s 2018 full year revenue clocked in at $55.8BN.)

All of which is to say that an ‘independent’ Facebook-devised “Oversight Board” is just a high gloss sticking plaster to cover the lack of actual regulation — internal and external — of Zuckerberg’s empire.

It is also an attempt by Facebook to paper over its continued evasion of democratic accountability. To distract from the fact its ad platform is playing fast and loose with people’s rights and lives; reshaping democracies and communities while Facebook’s founder refuses to answer parliamentarians’ questions or account for scandal-hit business decisions. Privacy is never dead for Mark Zuckerberg.

Evasion is actually a little tame a term. How Facebook operates is far more actively hostile than that. Its platform is reshaping us without accountability or oversight, even as it ploughs profits into spinning and shape-shifting its business in a bid to prevent our democratically elected representatives from being able to reshape it.

Zuckerberg appropriating the language of civic oversight and jurisprudence for this “project”, as his letter calls the Oversight Board — committing to abide by the terms of a content decision-making review vehicle entirely of his own devising, whose Facebook-written charter stipulates it will “review and decide on content in accordance with Facebook’s content policies and values” — is hardly news. Even though Facebook is spinning at the very highest level to try to make it so.

What would constitute a newsworthy shock is Facebook’s CEO agreeing to take questions from the democratically elected representatives of the billions of users of his products who live outside the US.

Zuckerberg agreeing to meet with parliamentarians around the world so they can put to him questions and concerns on a rolling and regular basis would be a truly incredible news flash.

Instead it’s fiction. That’s not how the empire functions.

The Facebook CEO has instead ducked as much democratic scrutiny as a billionaire in charge of a historically unprecedented disinformation machine possibly can — submitting himself to an awkward question-dodging turn in Congress last year; and one fixed-format meeting of the EU parliament’s conference of presidents, initially set to take place behind closed doors (until MEPs protested), where he was heckled for failing to answer questions.

He has also, most recently, pressed US president Donald Trump’s flesh. We can only speculate on how that meeting of minds went. Power meet irresponsibility — or was it vice versa?

 

International parliamentarians trying on behalf of the vast majority of the world’s Facebook users to scrutinize Zuckerberg and hold his advertising business to democratic account have, meanwhile, been roundly snubbed.

Just this month Zuckerberg declined a third invitation to speak in front of the International Grand Committee on Disinformation which will convene in Dublin this November.

At a second meeting in Canada earlier this year Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg both refused to appear — leading the Canadian parliament’s ethics committee to vote to subpoena the pair.

While, last year, the UK parliament got so frustrated with Facebook’s evasive behavior during a timely enquiry into online disinformation, which saw its questions fobbed off by a parade of Zuckerberg stand-ins armed with spin and misdirection, that a sort of intergovernmental alchemy occurred — and the International Grand Committee on Disinformation was formed in an eye-blink, bringing multiple parliaments together to apply democratic pressure to Facebook. 

The UK Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee’s frustration at Facebook’s evasive behavior also led it to deploy arcane parliamentary powers to seize a cache of internal Facebook documents from a US lawsuit in a creative attempt to get at the world-view locked inside Zuckerberg’s blue box.

The unvarnished glimpse of Facebook’s business that these papers afforded certainly isn’t pretty… 

US legal discovery appears to be the only reliable external force capable of extracting data from inside the bellow of the nation-sized beast. That’s a problem for democracies. 

So Facebook instructing an ‘oversight board’ of its own making to do anything other than smooth publicity bumps in the road, and pave the way for more Facebook business as usual, is like asking a Koch brothers funded ‘stink tank’ to be independent of fossil fuel interests. The OB is just Facebook’s latest crisis PR tool. More fool anyone who signs up to ink their name to its democratically void rubberstamp.

Dig into the detail of the charter and cracks in the claimed “independence” soon appear.

Aside from the obvious overriding existential points that the board only exists because Facebook exists, making it a dependent function of Facebook whose purpose is to enable its spawning parental system to continue operating; and that it’s funded and charged with chartered purpose by the very same blue-veined god it’s simultaneously supposed to be overseeing (quite the conflict of interest), the charter states that Facebook itself will choose the initial board members. Who will then choose the rest of the first cohort of members.

“To support the initial formation of the board, Facebook will select a group of cochairs. The co-chairs and Facebook will then jointly select candidates for the remainder of the board seats,” it writes in pale grey Facebookese with a tone set to ‘smooth reassurance’ — when the substance of what’s being said should really make you go ‘wtf, how is that even slightly independent?!’

Because the inaugural (Facebook-approved) member cohort will be responsible for the formative case selections — which means they’ll be laying down the foundational ‘case law’ that the board is also bound, per Facebook’s charter, to follow thereafter.

“For each decision, any prior board decisions will have precedential value and should be viewed as highly persuasive when the facts, applicable policies, or other factors are substantially similar,” runs an instructive section on the “basis of decision-making”.

The problem here hardly needs spelling out. This isn’t Facebook changing, this is more of the same ‘Facebook first’ ethos which has always driven its content moderation decisions — just now with a highly polished ‘overseen’ sheen.

This isn’t accountability either. It’s Facebook trying to protect its business from actual regulation by creating a blame-shifting firewall to shield its transparency-phobic execs from democratic (and moral) scrutiny. And indeed to shield Zuckerberg & his inner circle from future content scandals that might threaten to rock the throne, a la Cambridge Analytica.

(Judging by other events this week that mission may not be going so well… )

Given the lengths this company is going to to eschew democratic scrutiny — ducking and diving even as it weaves its own faux oversight structure to manage negative PR on its behalf (yep, more fakes!) — you really have to wonder what Facebook is trying to hide.

A moral vacuum the size of a black hole? Or perhaps it’s just trying to buy time to complete its corporate takeover of the democratic world order…

Because of course the Oversight Board can’t set actual Facebook policy. Don’t be ridiculous! It can merely issue policy recommendations — which Facebook can just choose to ignore.

So even if we imagine the OB running years in the future, when it might theoretically be possible its membership has drifted out of Facebook’s comfortable set-up “support” zone, the charter has baked in another firewall that lets Zuckerberg ignore any policy pressure he doesn’t like. Just, y’know, on the off-chance the board gets too independently minded. Truly, there’s nothing to see here.

Entities structured by corporate interests to role-play ‘neutral’ advice or ensure ‘transparent’ oversight — or indeed to promulgate self-interested propaganda dressed in the garb of intellectual expertise — are almost always a stacked trick.

This is why it’s preferable to live in a democracy. And be governed by democratically accountable institutions that are bound by legally enforcement standards of transparency. Though Facebook hopes you’ll be persuaded to vote for manipulation by corporate interest instead.

So while Facebook’s claim that the Oversight Board will operate “transparently” sure sound good it’s also entirely meaningless. These are not legal standards of transparency. Facebook is a business, not a democracy. There are no legal binds here. It’s self regulation. Ergo, a pantomime.

You can see why Facebook avoided actually calling the OB its ‘Supreme Court’; that would have been trolling a little too close to the bone.

Without legal standards of transparency (or indeed democratic accountability) being applied, there are endless opportunities for Facebook’s self interest to infiltrate the claimed separation between oversight board, oversight trust and the rest of its business; to shape and influence case selections, decisions and policy recommendations; and to seed and steer narrative-shaping discussion around hot button speech issues which could help move the angry chatter along — all under the carefully spun cover of ‘independent external oversight’.

No one should be fooled into thinking a Facebook-shaped and funded entity can meaningful hold Facebook to account on anything. Nor, in this case, when it’s been devised to absorb the flak on irreconcilable speech conflicts so Facebook doesn’t have to.

It’s highly doubtful that even a truly independent board cohort slotted into this Zuckerberg PR vehicle could meaningfully influence Facebook’s policy in a more humanitarian direction. Not while its business model is based on mass-scale attention harvesting and privacy-hostile people profiling. The board’s policy recommendations would have to demand a new business model. (To which we already know Facebook’s response: ‘LOL! No.’)

The Oversight Board is just the latest blame-shifting publicity exercise from a company with a user-base as big as a country that gifts it massive resource to throw at its ‘PR problem’ (as Facebook sees it); i.e. how to seem like a good corporate citizen whilst doing everything possible to evade democratic scrutiny and outrun the leash of government regulation. tl;dr: You can’t fix anything if you don’t believe there’s an underlying problem in the first place.

For an example of how the views of a few hand-picked independent experts can be channeled to further a particular corporate agenda look no further than the panel of outsiders Google assembled in Europe in 2014 in response to the European Court of Justice ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling — an unappealable legal decision that ran counter to its business interests.

Google used what it billed as an “advisory committee” of outsiders mostly as a publicity vehicle, holding a large number of public ‘hearings’ where it got to frame a debate and lobby loudly against the law. In such a context Google’s nakedly self-interested critique of EU privacy rights was lent a learned, regionally seasoned dressing of nuanced academic concern, thanks to the outsiders doing time on its platform.

Google also claimed the panel would steer its decision-making process on how to implement the ruling. And in their final report the committee ended up aligning with Google’s preference to only carry out search de-indexing at the European (rather than .com global) domain level. Their full report did contain some dissent. But Google’s preferred policy position won out. (And, yes, there were good people on that Google-devised panel.)

Facebook’s Oversight Board is another such self-interested tech giant stunt. One where Facebook gets to choose whether or not to outsource a few tricky content decisions while making a big show of seeming outward-looking, even as it works to shift and defuse public and political attention from its ongoing lack of democratic accountability.

What’s perhaps most egregious about this latest Facebook charade is it seems intended to shift attention off of the thousands of people Facebook pays to labor daily at the raw coal face of its content business. An outsourced army of voiceless workers who are tasked with moderating at high speed the very worst stuff that’s uploaded to Facebook — exposing themselves to psychological stress, emotional trauma and worse, per multiple media reports.

Why isn’t Facebook announcing a committee to provide that existing expert workforce with a public voice on where its content lines should lie, as well as the power to issue policy recommendations?

It’s impossible to imagine Facebook actively supporting Oversight Board members being selected from among the pool of content moderation contractors it already pays to stop humanity shutting its business down in sheer horror at what’s bubbling up the pipe.

On member qualifications, the Oversight Board charter states: “Members must have demonstrated experience at deliberating thoughtfully and as an open-minded contributor on a team; be skilled at making and explaining decisions based on a set of policies or standards; and have familiarity with matters relating to digital content and governance, including free expression, civic discourse, safety, privacy and technology.”

There’s surely not a Facebook moderator in the whole wide world who couldn’t already lay claim to that skill-set. So perhaps it’s no wonder the company’s ‘Oversight Board’ isn’t taking applications.


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Meet Facebook’s latest fake


Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, a 35-year-old billionaire who keeps refusing to sit in front of international parliamentarians to answer questions about his ad business’ impact on democracy and human rights around the world, has a new piece of accountability theatre to sell you: An “Oversight Board“.

Not of Facebook’s business itself. Though you’d be forgiven for thinking that’s what Facebook’s blog post is trumpeting, with the grand claim that it’s “Establishing Structure and Governance for an Independent Oversight Board”.

Referred to during the seeding stage last year, when Zuckerberg gave select face-time to podcast and TV hosts he felt comfortable would spread his conceptual gospel with a straight face, as a sort of ‘Supreme Court of Facebook’, this supplementary content decision-making body has since been outfitted in the company’s customary (for difficult topics) bloodless ‘Facebookese’ (see also “inauthentic behavior”; its choice euphemism for fake activity on its platform)

The Oversight Board is intended to sit atop the daily grind of Facebook content moderation, which takes place behind closed doors and signed NDAs, where outsourced armies of contractors are paid to eyeball the running sewer of hate, abuse and violence so actual users don’t have to, as a more visible mechanism for resolving and thus (Facebook hopes) quelling speech-related disputes.

Facebook’s one-size-fits-all content moderation policy doesn’t and can’t. There’s no such thing as a 2.2BN+ “community” — as the company prefers to refer to its globe-spanning user-base. So quite how the massive diversity of Facebook users can be meaningfully represented by the views of a last resort case review body with as few as 11 members has not yet been made clear.

“When it is fully staffed, the board is likely to be forty members. The board will increase or decrease in size as appropriate,” Facebook writes vaguely this week.

Even if it were proposing one board member per market of operation (and it’s not) that would require a single individual to meaningfully represent the diverse views of an entire country. Which would be ludicrous, as well as risking the usual political divides from styming good faith effort.

It seems most likely Facebook will seek to ensure the initial make-up of the board reflects its corporate ideology — as a US company committed to upholding freedom of expression. (It’s clearly no accident the first three words in the Oversight Board’s charter are: “Freedom of expression”.)

Anything less US-focused might risk the charter’s other clearly stated introductory position — that “free expression is paramount”.

But where will that leave international markets which have suffered the worst kinds of individual and societal harms as a consequence of Facebook’s failure to moderate hate speech, dangerous disinformation and political violence, to name a few of the myriad content scandals that dog the company wherever it goes.

Facebook needs international markets for its business to turn a profit. But you sure wouldn’t know it from its distribution of resources. Not for nothing has the company been accused of digital colonialism.

The level of harm flowing from Facebook decisions to take down or leave up certain pieces of content can be excruciatingly high. Such as in Myanmar where its platform became a conduit for hate speech-fuelled ethnic violence towards the Rohingya people and other ethnic minorities.

It’s reputational-denting failures like Myanmar — which last year led the UN to dub Facebook’s platform “a beast” — that are motivating this latest self-regulation effort. Having made its customary claim that it will do a better job of decision-making in future, Facebook is now making a show of enlisting outsiders for help.

The wider problem is Facebook has scaled so big its business is faced with a steady pipeline of tricky, controversial and at times life-threatening content moderation decisions. Decisions it claims it’s not comfortable making as a private company. Though Facebook hasn’t expressed discomfort at monetizing all this stuff. (Even though its platform has literally been used to target ads at nazis.)

Facebook’s size is humanity’s problem but of course Facebook isn’t putting it like that. Instead — coming sometime in 2020 — the company will augment its moderation processes with a lottery-level chance of a final appeal via a case referral to the Oversight Board.

The level of additional oversight here will of course be exceptionally select. This is a last resort, cherry-picked appeal layer that will only touch a fantastically tiny proportion of the content choices Facebook moderators make every second of every day — and from which real world impacts ripple out and rain down. 

“We expect the board will only hear a small number of cases at first, but over time we hope it will expand its scope and potentially include more companies across the industry as well,” Zuckerberg writes this week, managing output expectations still many months ahead of the slated kick off — before shifting focus onto the ‘future hopes’ he’s always much more comfortable talking about. 

Case selection will be guided by Facebook’s business interests, meaning the push, even here, is still for scale of impact. Facebook says cases will be selected from a pool of complaints and referrals that “have the greatest potential to guide future decisions and policies”.

The company is also giving itself the power to leapfrog general submissions by sending expedited cases directly to the board to ask for a speedy opinion. So its content questions will be prioritized. 

Incredibly, Facebook is also trying to sell this self-styled “oversight” layer as independent from Facebook.

The Oversight Board’s overtly bureaucracy branding is pepped up in Facebook headline spin as “an Independent Oversight Board”. Although the adjective is curiously absent from other headings in Facebook’s already sprawling literature about the OB. Including the newly released charter which specifies the board’s authority, scope and procedures, and was published this week.

The nine-page document was accompanied by a letter from Zuckerberg in which he opines on “Facebook’s commitment to the Oversight Board”, as his header puts it — also dropping the word ‘independent’ in favor of slipping into a comfortable familiar case. Funny that.

The body text of Zuckerberg’s letter goes on to make several references to the board as “independent”; an “independent organization”; exercising “its independent judgement”. But here that’s essentially just Mark’s opinion.

The elephant in the room — which, if we continue the metaphor, is in the process of being dressed by Facebook in a fancy costume that attempts to make it look like, well, a board room table — is the supreme leader’s ongoing failure to submit himself and his decisions to any meaningful oversight.

Supreme leader is an accurate descriptor for Zuckerberg as Facebook CEO, given the share structure and voting rights he has afforded himself mean no one other than Zuckerberg can sack Zuckerberg. (Asked last year, during a podcast interview with recode’s Kara Swisher if he was going to fire himself, in light of myriad speech scandals on his platform, Zuckerberg laughed and then declined.)

It’s a corporate governance dictatorship that has allowed Facebook’s boy king to wield vast power around the world without any internal checks. Power without moral responsibility if you will.

Throughout Zuckerberg’s (now) 15-year apology tour turn as Facebook CEO neither the claims he’ll do things differently next time nor the cool expansionist ambition have wavered. He’s still at it of course; with a plan for a global digital currency (Libra), while bullishly colonizing literal hook-ups (Facebook Dating). Anything to keep the data and ad dollars flowing.

Recently Facebook also paid a $5BN FTC fine to avoid its senior executives having to face questions about their data governance and policy enforcement fuck-ups — leaving Zuckerberg & co free to get back to lucrative privacy-screwing business as usual. (To put the fine in context, Facebook’s 2018 full year revenue clocked in at $55.8BN.)

All of which is to say that an ‘independent’ Facebook-devised “Oversight Board” is just a high gloss sticking plaster to cover the lack of actual regulation — internal and external — of Zuckerberg’s empire.

It is also an attempt by Facebook to paper over its continued evasion of democratic accountability. To distract from the fact its ad platform is playing fast and loose with people’s rights and lives; reshaping democracies and communities while Facebook’s founder refuses to answer parliamentarians’ questions or account for scandal-hit business decisions. Privacy is never dead for Mark Zuckerberg.

Evasion is actually a little tame a term. How Facebook operates is far more actively hostile than that. Its platform is reshaping us without accountability or oversight, even as it ploughs profits into spinning and shape-shifting its business in a bid to prevent our democratically elected representatives from being able to reshape it.

Zuckerberg appropriating the language of civic oversight and jurisprudence for this “project”, as his letter calls the Oversight Board — committing to abide by the terms of a content decision-making review vehicle entirely of his own devising, whose Facebook-written charter stipulates it will “review and decide on content in accordance with Facebook’s content policies and values” — is hardly news. Even though Facebook is spinning at the very highest level to try to make it so.

What would constitute a newsworthy shock is Facebook’s CEO agreeing to take questions from the democratically elected representatives of the billions of users of his products who live outside the US.

Zuckerberg agreeing to meet with parliamentarians around the world so they can put to him questions and concerns on a rolling and regular basis would be a truly incredible news flash.

Instead it’s fiction. That’s not how the empire functions.

The Facebook CEO has instead ducked as much democratic scrutiny as a billionaire in charge of a historically unprecedented disinformation machine possibly can — submitting himself to an awkward question-dodging turn in Congress last year; and one fixed-format meeting of the EU parliament’s conference of presidents, initially set to take place behind closed doors (until MEPs protested), where he was heckled for failing to answer questions.

He has also, most recently, pressed US president Donald Trump’s flesh. We can only speculate on how that meeting of minds went. Power meet irresponsibility — or was it vice versa?

 

International parliamentarians trying on behalf of the vast majority of the world’s Facebook users to scrutinize Zuckerberg and hold his advertising business to democratic account have, meanwhile, been roundly snubbed.

Just this month Zuckerberg declined a third invitation to speak in front of the International Grand Committee on Disinformation which will convene in Dublin this November.

At a second meeting in Canada earlier this year Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg both refused to appear — leading the Canadian parliament’s ethics committee to vote to subpoena the pair.

While, last year, the UK parliament got so frustrated with Facebook’s evasive behavior during a timely enquiry into online disinformation, which saw its questions fobbed off by a parade of Zuckerberg stand-ins armed with spin and misdirection, that a sort of intergovernmental alchemy occurred — and the International Grand Committee on Disinformation was formed in an eye-blink, bringing multiple parliaments together to apply democratic pressure to Facebook. 

The UK Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee’s frustration at Facebook’s evasive behavior also led it to deploy arcane parliamentary powers to seize a cache of internal Facebook documents from a US lawsuit in a creative attempt to get at the world-view locked inside Zuckerberg’s blue box.

The unvarnished glimpse of Facebook’s business that these papers afforded certainly isn’t pretty… 

US legal discovery appears to be the only reliable external force capable of extracting data from inside the bellow of the nation-sized beast. That’s a problem for democracies. 

So Facebook instructing an ‘oversight board’ of its own making to do anything other than smooth publicity bumps in the road, and pave the way for more Facebook business as usual, is like asking a Koch brothers funded ‘stink tank’ to be independent of fossil fuel interests. The OB is just Facebook’s latest crisis PR tool. More fool anyone who signs up to ink their name to its democratically void rubberstamp.

Dig into the detail of the charter and cracks in the claimed “independence” soon appear.

Aside from the obvious overriding existential points that the board only exists because Facebook exists, making it a dependent function of Facebook whose purpose is to enable its spawning parental system to continue operating; and that it’s funded and charged with chartered purpose by the very same blue-veined god it’s simultaneously supposed to be overseeing (quite the conflict of interest), the charter states that Facebook itself will choose the initial board members. Who will then choose the rest of the first cohort of members.

“To support the initial formation of the board, Facebook will select a group of cochairs. The co-chairs and Facebook will then jointly select candidates for the remainder of the board seats,” it writes in pale grey Facebookese with a tone set to ‘smooth reassurance’ — when the substance of what’s being said should really make you go ‘wtf, how is that even slightly independent?!’

Because the inaugural (Facebook-approved) member cohort will be responsible for the formative case selections — which means they’ll be laying down the foundational ‘case law’ that the board is also bound, per Facebook’s charter, to follow thereafter.

“For each decision, any prior board decisions will have precedential value and should be viewed as highly persuasive when the facts, applicable policies, or other factors are substantially similar,” runs an instructive section on the “basis of decision-making”.

The problem here hardly needs spelling out. This isn’t Facebook changing, this is more of the same ‘Facebook first’ ethos which has always driven its content moderation decisions — just now with a highly polished ‘overseen’ sheen.

This isn’t accountability either. It’s Facebook trying to protect its business from actual regulation by creating a blame-shifting firewall to shield its transparency-phobic execs from democratic (and moral) scrutiny. And indeed to shield Zuckerberg & his inner circle from future content scandals that might threaten to rock the throne, a la Cambridge Analytica.

(Judging by other events this week that mission may not be going so well… )

Given the lengths this company is going to to eschew democratic scrutiny — ducking and diving even as it weaves its own faux oversight structure to manage negative PR on its behalf (yep, more fakes!) — you really have to wonder what Facebook is trying to hide.

A moral vacuum the size of a black hole? Or perhaps it’s just trying to buy time to complete its corporate takeover of the democratic world order…

Because of course the Oversight Board can’t set actual Facebook policy. Don’t be ridiculous! It can merely issue policy recommendations — which Facebook can just choose to ignore.

So even if we imagine the OB running years in the future, when it might theoretically be possible its membership has drifted out of Facebook’s comfortable set-up “support” zone, the charter has baked in another firewall that lets Zuckerberg ignore any policy pressure he doesn’t like. Just, y’know, on the off-chance the board gets too independently minded. Truly, there’s nothing to see here.

Entities structured by corporate interests to role-play ‘neutral’ advice or ensure ‘transparent’ oversight — or indeed to promulgate self-interested propaganda dressed in the garb of intellectual expertise — are almost always a stacked trick.

This is why it’s preferable to live in a democracy. And be governed by democratically accountable institutions that are bound by legally enforcement standards of transparency. Though Facebook hopes you’ll be persuaded to vote for manipulation by corporate interest instead.

So while Facebook’s claim that the Oversight Board will operate “transparently” sure sound good it’s also entirely meaningless. These are not legal standards of transparency. Facebook is a business, not a democracy. There are no legal binds here. It’s self regulation. Ergo, a pantomime.

You can see why Facebook avoided actually calling the OB its ‘Supreme Court’; that would have been trolling a little too close to the bone.

Without legal standards of transparency (or indeed democratic accountability) being applied, there are endless opportunities for Facebook’s self interest to infiltrate the claimed separation between oversight board, oversight trust and the rest of its business; to shape and influence case selections, decisions and policy recommendations; and to seed and steer narrative-shaping discussion around hot button speech issues which could help move the angry chatter along — all under the carefully spun cover of ‘independent external oversight’.

No one should be fooled into thinking a Facebook-shaped and funded entity can meaningful hold Facebook to account on anything. Nor, in this case, when it’s been devised to absorb the flak on irreconcilable speech conflicts so Facebook doesn’t have to.

It’s highly doubtful that even a truly independent board cohort slotted into this Zuckerberg PR vehicle could meaningfully influence Facebook’s policy in a more humanitarian direction. Not while its business model is based on mass-scale attention harvesting and privacy-hostile people profiling. The board’s policy recommendations would have to demand a new business model. (To which we already know Facebook’s response: ‘LOL! No.’)

The Oversight Board is just the latest blame-shifting publicity exercise from a company with a user-base as big as a country that gifts it massive resource to throw at its ‘PR problem’ (as Facebook sees it); i.e. how to seem like a good corporate citizen whilst doing everything possible to evade democratic scrutiny and outrun the leash of government regulation. tl;dr: You can’t fix anything if you don’t believe there’s an underlying problem in the first place.

For an example of how the views of a few hand-picked independent experts can be channeled to further a particular corporate agenda look no further than the panel of outsiders Google assembled in Europe in 2014 in response to the European Court of Justice ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling — an unappealable legal decision that ran counter to its business interests.

Google used what it billed as an “advisory committee” of outsiders mostly as a publicity vehicle, holding a large number of public ‘hearings’ where it got to frame a debate and lobby loudly against the law. In such a context Google’s nakedly self-interested critique of EU privacy rights was lent a learned, regionally seasoned dressing of nuanced academic concern, thanks to the outsiders doing time on its platform.

Google also claimed the panel would steer its decision-making process on how to implement the ruling. And in their final report the committee ended up aligning with Google’s preference to only carry out search de-indexing at the European (rather than .com global) domain level. Their full report did contain some dissent. But Google’s preferred policy position won out. (And, yes, there were good people on that Google-devised panel.)

Facebook’s Oversight Board is another such self-interested tech giant stunt. One where Facebook gets to choose whether or not to outsource a few tricky content decisions while making a big show of seeming outward-looking, even as it works to shift and defuse public and political attention from its ongoing lack of democratic accountability.

What’s perhaps most egregious about this latest Facebook charade is it seems intended to shift attention off of the thousands of people Facebook pays to labor daily at the raw coal face of its content business. An outsourced army of voiceless workers who are tasked with moderating at high speed the very worst stuff that’s uploaded to Facebook — exposing themselves to psychological stress, emotional trauma and worse, per multiple media reports.

Why isn’t Facebook announcing a committee to provide that existing expert workforce with a public voice on where its content lines should lie, as well as the power to issue policy recommendations?

It’s impossible to imagine Facebook actively supporting Oversight Board members being selected from among the pool of content moderation contractors it already pays to stop humanity shutting its business down in sheer horror at what’s bubbling up the pipe.

On member qualifications, the Oversight Board charter states: “Members must have demonstrated experience at deliberating thoughtfully and as an open-minded contributor on a team; be skilled at making and explaining decisions based on a set of policies or standards; and have familiarity with matters relating to digital content and governance, including free expression, civic discourse, safety, privacy and technology.”

There’s surely not a Facebook moderator in the whole wide world who couldn’t already lay claim to that skill-set. So perhaps it’s no wonder the company’s ‘Oversight Board’ isn’t taking applications.


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5 Fascinating and Educational YouTube Channels to Keep You Engrossed


educational-youtube-channels

YouTube isn’t only a rabbit-hole of time-wasting videos. You can be having fun while learning something new. Check out these YouTube channels that make animated videos to explain, educate, and entertain.

No, this list doesn’t include old stalwarts like CGP Grey, ASAPScience, Minute Physics, or Wendover Productions. We want to talk about some of the less heralded channels that follow the “animation for explanation” format. And yet, they deliver something new which is just as interesting and fascinating as the YouTube bigwigs.

1. Half as Interesting: Five Minutes of Fascination

Half As Interesting creates fascinating educational videos in five minute animations

Every Thursday, Half As Interesting releases a new video that packs a fascinating story into a tight five minutes. What’s awesome is that the channel isn’t dedicated to any broad topic, so you get astounding facts about a wide range of subjects.

The makers are the same people behind Wendover, so you’re assured of thorough research and thought-out arguments. For example, the featured video seeks to find out the longest drivable distance on Earth. They’re careful to lay out caveats, explain why certain routes aren’t possible, and then show you the longest possible connection. It’s a wild ride.

Half As Interesting doesn’t rely as heavily on humor as stalwarts like CGP Grey do, but maybe that’s for the better. These bite-sized lessons are entertaining because of the subject matter and given their short duration, it’s fun to learn too.

2. Second Thought: Going Beyond Fact

Second Thought creates entertaining and educational animated videos

Like Half As Interesting, Second Thought doesn’t focus on one subject. So you’ll learn about enough diverse subjects rooted in science and fact, like the loneliest place in the universe, or a secret Soviet death island, or how one man cheated death 600 times.

Where it gets interesting is in exploring the unknown. Like some of the other great “what if” blogs and vlogs, Second Thought tries to answer the craziest hypothetical questions too. Videos include explorations into what happens after death, how to denuclearize the world, what would happen if people stop dying, and what would happen if oceans disappeared.

If I had a complaint, it would be that Second Thought’s videos don’t match the quality of their research and subject matter. They often look crude and amateurish. Nonetheless, with a new video every Friday, it’s a guarantee of something worth thinking about over the weekend.

3. WonderWhy: Detailed Explainers About Geography and History

WonderWhy creates animated video explainers on geography and history

Why are there two Congos? How logical are you? What’s the oldest country in the world? Why do the Dutch wear orange? WonderWhy is here to answer all these questions in entertaining videos.

The channel focuses more on our world’s geography, history, and culture. But once in a while, it will also divert to other topics like logic, astronomy, economics, and so on. On average, each video is about 15 minutes in length, so you will gain more than a cursory understanding of the subject.

Naturally, making such long videos takes some time, so you will find a new video every month or so at WonderWhy. But hey, it’s worth the wait to get all that knowledge while on your daily commute.

4. Business Casual: How Corporations Shape Our World

Business Casual creates fun animated videos about how business and corporations affect the world

Business Casual puts an interesting twist on a seemingly boring subject. You probably suspect that companies and corporations are deeply rooted in our world today, and their actions shape much of our lives. Well, find out how.

Every two weeks, a new video looks at the story of a business and its dealings with a certain topic. Some examples include how the Korean War led to the birth of Samsung, how Coca Cola lost India and then won her back, and the rise of the world’s richest family, the Rothschilds.

The visual storytelling of Business Casual deserves a special mention. They edit the videos exquisitely and seem to have carved a style of their own that is refreshingly modern. Aided by the expert use of audio, this attention to detail is what makes even a drab subject into something worth watching for the 5-10 minutes of the video.

5. Suibhne: The Animated History of…

Suibhne creates animated videos about history

Who knew learning about the entire history of a country or its people could be this interesting? Suibhne presents animated videos on the fascinating tidbits of a nation’s history. They pepper the videos with humor, as well as real audio and pictures.

A lot of existing YouTube channels already try to teach history through an entertaining perspective. Yet Suibhne manages to stand out in that crowd. They’ll endear you with the little cartoon figurines and capture your attention with a well-scripted and acted voiceover. All in all, you’re generally having a good time while you learn.

It might seem like entertainment is the focus here, but there’s a surprising amount of research that goes into it. Using old recordings is a wonderful way of adding that authentic flavor to the videos.

A Hand-Picked Selection of Fascinating Videos

Any of these five channels are worth subscribing to, and in fact, I’d suggest adding them all your list. These channels upload no more than one video per week, so you won’t be overloaded with a bunch of pending videos in your “watch it later” playlist.

Alternately, you can check out our list of YouTube videos guaranteed to make you question everything. From finding out why February has 28 days to the science of binge-watching, there’s plenty of brain fodder here.

Read the full article: 5 Fascinating and Educational YouTube Channels to Keep You Engrossed


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Facebook has suspended ‘tens of thousands’ of apps suspected of hoarding data


Facebook has suspended “tens of thousands” of apps connected to its platform which it suspects may be collecting large amounts of user profile data.

That’s a sharp rise from the 400 apps flagged a year ago by the company’s investigation in the wake of Cambridge Analytica, a scandal that saw tens of millions of Facebook profiles scraped to help swing undecided voters in favor of the Trump campaign during the U.S. presidential election in 2016.

Facebook did not provide a more specific number in its blog post but said the apps were built by 400 developers.

Many of the apps had been banned for a number of reasons, like siphoning off Facebook user profile data or making data public without protecting their identities, or other violations of the company’s policies.

Despite the bans, the social media giant said it has “not confirmed” other instances of misusing user data beyond those about which it has already notified the public. Among those previously disclosed include South Korean analytics firm Rankwave, accused of abusing the developer platform and refusing an audit; and myPersonality, a personality quiz that collected data on more than four million users.

The action comes in the wake of the since-defunct Cambridge Analytica and other serious privacy and security breaches. Federal authorities and lawmakers have launched investigations and issued fines from everything from its Libra cryptocurrency project to how the company handles users’ privacy.

Facebook said its investigation will continue.


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Take cover, it’s a drone with a nail gun!


The FAA has warned against equipping your drone with weapons such as flamethrowers and handguns. But can a nail gun really be considered a weapon — that is, outside of Quake? Let’s hope not, because roboticists at the University of Michigan have made a roofing drone that uses that tool to autonomously nail shingles into place.

In a video shot in UM’s special drone testing habitat, the craft flies up, approaches its bit of roof, and gingerly applies the nail gun before backing off and doing it a couple more times.

It’s very much just a tech demonstration right now, with lots of room to improve. For one thing the drone doesn’t use onboard cameras, but rather a system of static cameras and markers nearby that can tell exactly where the drone is and where it needs to go.

This is simpler to start with, but eventually such a drone should be able to use its own vision system to find the point where to touch down. Compared with a lot of the computer vision tasks being accomplished out there, finding the corner of a roof tile is pretty tame.

Currently the drone is also free flying and uses an electric nail gun; This limits its flight time to about 10 minutes and a few dozen nails. It would be better for it to use a tether carrying power and air cables, so it could stay aloft indefinitely and use a more powerful pneumatic nail gun.

Drones are already used for lots of industrial applications, from inspecting buildings to planting trees, and this experiment shows one more area where they could be put to work. Roofing can be both dull and dangerous, and rote work like attaching shingles may as well be done by a drone overseen by an expert as by that expert’s own hands.

The drone is the subject of a paper (“Nailed it: Autonomous roofing with a nailgun-equipped octocopter”) by UM’s Matthew Romano and others, submitted for the International Conference on Robotics and Automation later this year.


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YouTube CEO says it ‘missed the mark’ with verification overhaul


Less than 24 hours after YouTube announced that it would be changing its creator verification process, CEO Susan Wojcicki admitted that the news hasn’t gone over very well.

“To our creators & users – I’m sorry for the frustration & hurt that we caused with our new approach to verification,” Wojcicki tweeted. “While trying to make improvements, we missed the mark. As I write this, we’re working to address your concerns & we’ll have more updates soon.”

The stated goal of the changes was to make it clear that verification isn’t an endorsement from YouTube, but simply a statement that the creator really is who they claim to be. This distinction became increasingly important as YouTube faced criticism for allowing the spread of hate speech and misinformation, with executives then defending the service as an open platform.

So moving forward, YouTube said it would focus on verifying public figures, famous brands and well-known creators — rather than allowing any account with more than 100,000 subscribers to request verification.

As a result of the new policy, numerous YouTube creators (including some with millions of subscribers) were notified that would be losing their verified status. Naturally, they went public with their unhappiness. (The news also led to some false alarms, like complaints that popular YouTuber PewDiePie had lost his checkmark, when he had not.)

While it remains to be seen how extensively YouTube will be revising or reversing its plans — and whether creators will be satisfied — this still seems like a clear mea culpa from YouTube leadership.


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How to Cast Local Media From Your Mac to Chromecast


mac-chromecast

If you want to cast content from Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, or any other streaming app to your TV, you can do a lot worse than buying a Chromecast. The majority of popular streaming apps are Chromecast-enabled and can begin playback at the touch of a button.

But what about local media? Specifically, local media that you have saved on your Mac? How can you connect a Mac to a Chromecast so you can stream movies, TV shows, music, photos, and other files directly on the big screen?

In this article we’ll show you how to stream to a Chromecast from your Mac.

Chromecast Apps for Mac Videos

We’ll start with movies, since that’s what the Chromecast excels at.

If you have locally saved movies on your Mac that you want to stream on your Chromecast, you’re going to need to use a third-party app.

Airflow

airflow mac app

Our first pick is Airflow. It lets you watch local content on your Chromecast and also on any Apple TV boxes that you have in your home.

We particularly like the app due to its incredible ease-of-use. Once you’ve installed the app on your system and performed some initial setup steps, you just need to drag-and-drop a video file into the app’s window to start playback.

Other noteworthy features include support for subtitles, the ability to create playlists, synchronized playback positions, and support for 5.1 surround sound audio.

A license for Airflow costs a one-time fee of $18.99.

Download: Airflow ($18.99)

Videostream

videostream mac app

The other Chromecast app for Mac that’s worth considering is Videostream. It used to only be available as a web app, but a desktop version was released in mid-2018. The web app is still supported, but we do not recommend using it.

Videostream makes our list primarily because of the impressive list of supported video and audio codecs. At the time of writing, it offers more than 400. The list is growing all the time.

Once again, the setup process is fast and painless. Once the app has located the Chromecast on your network, starting video playback is as easy as selecting the video you want to watch via the in-app browser. The video will begin almost instantaneously.

Unlike Airflow, Videostream does have a free tier. However, if you want to create and use playlists, edit your subtitles’ size and color, use the night mode, or enable auto-play, you will need to pay for the premium version. It costs $1.49/month, $14.99/year, or $34.99 for a lifetime pass.

Videostream also has free apps in the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. You can use them to control playback without needing to touch your Mac.

Download: Videostream (Free, premium version available)

How to Stream Music to Chromecast From Mac

airfoil mac app

Your MacBook, like most laptops, kicks out a fairly low volume from its built-in speakers. We’ve talked about a few ways to fix Mac audio, but using external speakers (or headphones) is almost always the best idea.

If you’ve got an expensive sound system connected to your TV, you might want to take advantage of it by casting your local iTunes library directly to your Chromecast.

The best solution to stream local music from a Mac to a TV is Airfoil. It can send any music playing on your computer to dozens of different devices, including Chromecasts, Apple TVs, SONOS speakers, Bluetooth speakers, and HomePods. It even works with streaming apps like Apple Music (which is not Chromecast-enabled).

The Airfoil app costs a one-time fee of $29.

If you don’t want to shell out on Airfoil, an alternative (yet less elegant) solution is to upload all of your local music to Google Play Music. You can upload 50,000 tracks for free. As you’d expect, Google’s own streaming music app is tightly integrated with Chromecasts, so playback is straightforward.

Download: Airfoil ($29)
Download: Google Play Music Manager (Free)

How to Stream Photos to Chromecast From Mac

pictacast mac app

If you’re wondering how to send photos to your Chromecast from a Mac, you will be disappointed to learn that the options are extremely limited.

Indeed, the best option out there is PictaCast for Chromecast. It’s an app in the Chrome Web Store, which means you’ll have to run it on Google Chrome rather than from your desktop. If you’re one of the people who hate using Chrome on a Mac, it’s not ideal.

You just need to tell the extension which local photos you want to appear on your Chromecast; then you can sit back and relax. Customizable features include the background music, slideshow speed, an on/off time display, and support for rotated displays.

The free version of the app lets you cast photos for 30 minutes per day. If you require more time, you’ll need to buy the full app for $2.

Download: PictaCast (Free, premium version available)

How to Cast Your Mac Desktop to Chromecast

Remember, if you’re running Chrome on your Mac, you can use it to cast your entire Mac desktop to your Chromecast device.

To do so, open Chrome and head to More > Cast. Then click on your Chromecast’s name and select Cast desktop from the dropdown list of sources.

Although this approach lets you use your Chromecast with any local media on your Mac, it can be prone to lagging and poor resolution. As such, it’s a reliable solution for casting music and some photos but is not a long-term answer for casting movies and TV shows.

Other Ways to Stream Media From a Mac

The various solutions we’ve looked at in this article show that it is possible to use a Chromecast on a Mac. Sure, it’s not as straightforward as casting from Windows or Android, but it is doable.

Taking a step back, however, if you’re a Mac user who doesn’t already own a Chromecast, we wouldn’t recommend buying one. Instead, you should consider buying an Apple TV instead; it’s tightly integrated with macOS and offers a less frustrating and more seamless user experience.

To learn more about streaming content from your Mac, read our articles explaining how to combine AirPlay and Google Cast and how to view photos on your Apple TV.

Read the full article: How to Cast Local Media From Your Mac to Chromecast


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6 Ways to Find Symbols and Look Up Symbol Meanings


While surfing the internet (or even offline), you’ve probably come across a lot of symbols. Some of them are common, but for others, you’ve probably needed help identifying the symbol.

The internet has resources to help. We’ll show you how to find out what a symbol means using a variety of methods.

1. Visit Symbols.com

Symbols Com Search

The aptly-named Symbols.com is a great place to start your search. Along with featured picks and categories on the homepage, you can use its symbol search engine to find what you’re looking for. Just type in query at the top, and you’ll see symbols that match it.

That’s great if you want to find a symbol by text (for example, looking up the symbol for “kosher”). But in many cases, you’ll see a symbol and wonder what its meaning is. Thankfully, the site offers other ways to identify a symbol.

In the bottom-left corner of the page, you’ll see the Graphical index section. This allows you to search for a symbol based on its characteristics. It provides a few simple dropdown boxes allowing you to specify whether the shape is open or closed, if it has colors, whether the lines are curved or straight, and similar.

Input as much information as you know, then click Search to look up symbols that match your criteria. If this doesn’t help you find what you’re looking for, you can use the Symbol categories to browse by groupings like Currency signs, Warning symbols, and others.

Failing that, you can search alphabetically using the letters at the top of the screen. If you’re not looking for anything in particular, the Random button can help you learn something new.

2. Draw a Symbol to Find Out Its Meaning

Draw Symbol Shapecatcher

If you’re puzzled by something you saw offline, it makes more sense to find the symbol by a picture. You’ll find several sites that offer this functionality.

One of these is Shapecatcher. Simply draw the symbol you want to look up using your mouse or touchscreen and click the Recognize button. The service will return symbols that match your drawing.

If you don’t see a match, draw it again and give it another try. The site only uses free Unicode fonts, so it might not have every possible symbol. Try Mausr for a similar alternative if this one doesn’t work for you.

3. Search Symbols With Google

Google Symbol Search

If you come across an unfamiliar icon while you’re browsing the web, you don’t have to worry about looking it up on a symbol identifier site. Simply run a symbol search with Google, and you should have your answer within seconds.

In Chrome, along with most other browsers, you can easily search Google for any text. Simply highlight it on the page, right-click, and choose Search Google for “[term]”. This will open a new tab with a Google search for the term. If your browser doesn’t have this for some reason, you can simply copy the symbol like you would any other text and paste it into Google.

Either way, Google should point you in the right direction to find the meaning of that symbol.

4. Browse a List of Symbols

Compart Unicode Symbol List

Unicode (the standard for text encoding) supports a number of common symbols, which is how they can appear like standard text. While they don’t have dedicated keys on a standard keyboard, you can use ALT codes to enter symbols instead.

If you couldn’t find the symbol you’re looking for using any of the above methods, you might be able to find it by browsing through all the symbols Unicode supports. Have a look at Compart’s list of “other symbol” Unicode characters and you might find the one you’re interested in. If you prefer an alternative, check out the Unicode Character Table.

Of course, not all symbols are supported in Unicode. Road signs, religious symbols, and everyday consumer symbols aren’t part of it. You may need to dig into Wikipedia’s list of symbols page for those kinds of icons.

5. Learn Emoji Symbols

Emojipedia Guide

While you could argue they’re not technically symbols, emoji often pose a point of confusion for people. After all, there are hundreds of emoji to keep track of, plus design changes and new ones popping up all the time.

First, we recommend reviewing our emoji face meanings guide. This will get you up to speed on some of the most common ones.

If you still have questions about emoji symbols, have a look at Emojipedia. Here you can search for a specific emoji, browse by categories, and read up on emoji news. Each emoji’s page tells you not only what its official meaning is, but what it’s often used for.

6. Utilize a Stock Ticker Symbol Finder

MarketWatch Apple Stock

We round out our discussion of discovering symbol meanings by mentioning financial symbols. They’re obviously different than the symbols mentioned above, but they’re still a type of symbol you may want to look up.

MarketWatch, one of our favorite financial sites for keeping up with the market, offers a handy symbol lookup tool. If you know the symbol you’re interested in, enter it to see details on that company. If you’re not sure what it is, enter a company name and you’ll see matches for it.

Once you’ve landed on a company’s page, you can see all kinds of data such as trends, news, and competitors.

Knowing What the Meaning of Any Symbol Is

Now you know where to turn whenever you come across an unfamiliar symbol. Whether it’s a quick Google search or drawing out something you saw offline, you don’t have to guess what these icons mean any longer.

Facebook has its own bundle of symbols that you might not understand. If that’s the case, take a peek at our guide to Facebook’s many symbols.

Read the full article: 6 Ways to Find Symbols and Look Up Symbol Meanings


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The 20 Best Free Games on Steam That Won’t Trick You to Spend Money


free-games-steam

Years ago, you’d pay a flat price for a video game and get everything included. These days? You generally pay full price for the “base” game and then pay extra to unlock bonus content. Or you might download a “free” game only to be swindled by psychologically manipulative tactics that suck your wallet dry.

And because these tricks are so profitable, freemium games aren’t going anywhere. The good news is, not all developers are so greedy. Here are the best free games on Steam (one of the must-have apps for PC gamers) that don’t rely on scummy monetization methods.

15 Totally Free Games on Steam

You can download these games at no charge and play them without worrying about any pressure to spend money in-game.

1. Iron Snout

Rating: 98% | Genre: Fighting

You’re a pig in a forest. Fend off waves of wolves who want to tear you apart. It’s simple but fun, and between the different weapons and body parts dropped by attackers, there’s a surprising amount of replayability. Iron Snout is one of the best ways to kill time and one of the best free games on Steam.

Download: Iron Snout on Steam

2. The Expendabros

Rating: 97% | Genre: Action Platformer

The Expendabros is exactly what it sounds like: non-stop bullet-spraying action that’s as silly and campy as it is fun and fast. “High octane” doesn’t even begin to describe it, and you have 10 complete missions to play through as seven different characters. It’s hilarious and addictive, and it’s one of the best free single-player games on Steam. Does it get any better than that?

Download: The Expendabros on Steam

3. Eternal Senia

Rating: 97% | Genre: Action RPG

Eternal Senia is an RPG that anyone can play. The game is built on simplicity and straightforwardness, yet it’s deep enough to provide hours of enjoyment. It offers a complete experience, with puzzles, equipment, and a satisfying story. Eternal Senia was made in RPG Maker over the course of one year and is available to all for free.

Download: Eternal Senia on Steam

4. Alien Swarm

Rating: 94% | Genre: Third-Person Shooter

Alien Swarm is a cooperative tactical online shooter where you and your friends crawl through levels and solve puzzles while fighting off hordes of aggressive aliens. It’s fun but hard, and you’re bound to slam your table out of frustration at least a few times. Not a bad way to kill time when you’re with online friends.

Download: Alien Swarm on Steam

5. Shadow Warrior Classic

Rating: 94% | Genre: First-Person Shooter

Remember the original Doom? Well, Shadow Warrior Classic is kind of like that but crossed with a bit of Duke Nukem. It’s intense and gory and downright silly at times, but it holds up well even after 20 years (as well as an MS-DOS game can hold up, anyways).

Download: Shadow Warrior Classic on Steam

6. Sisyphus Reborn

Rating: 94% | Genre: Adventure Story

Sisyphus Reborn is a short game driven by its mysterious narrative and atmosphere. It’s all quite pointless, but maybe that’s the point. It’s the kind of game that’ll make you think, and even if philosophy isn’t quite your cup of tea, I promise Sisyphus Reborn will leave an impression on you. It only takes 30 minutes to beat. Why not give it a go?

Download: Sisyphus Reborn on Steam

7. The Desolate Hope

Rating: 91% | Genre: Action Platformer

Here we have one of the strangest games you’ll play this year. The Desolate Hope is quirky, to say the least, and so unique that it’s hard to even describe. It’s futuristic but also retro. It has RPG elements but isn’t quite an RPG. And the one-of-a-kind art style will blow you away. If nothing else, you should play it just for that!

Download: The Desolate Hope on Steam

8. You Have to Win the Game

Rating: 92% | Genre: Platformer

Looking for a healthy dose of 80s retro platformer fun? You Have to Win the Game will fill that void. It’s an exploration game so you won’t see much action, but don’t take that to mean it’s boring—“thrilling yet relaxing” is what you should expect. You can also ramp up the difficulty with the You Only Live Once mode!

Download: You Have to Win the Game on Steam

9. Sigils of Elohim

Rating: 92% | Genre: Puzzle

Sigils of Elohim is actually a companion mini-game to The Talos Principle. By solving the various puzzles in this game, you unlock bonuses for the other game. But even if you don’t have The Talos Principle (which is a great game), you can still enjoy this one for what it is: a basic “fit the blocks into a shape” puzzle game.

Download: Sigils of Elohim on Steam

10. Fistful of Frags

Rating: 90% | Genre: First-Person Shooter

While most multiplayer first-person shooters take on a military or futuristic theme, Fistful of Frags is unique with its Wild West setting. It features duel, free-for-all, and team modes to satisfy all kinds of playstyles, plus some interesting gameplay mechanics (e.g. dual wielding) and a unique scoring system.

Download: Fistful of Frags on Steam

11. Endless Sky

Rating: 90% | Genre: Open World

Not to be confused with No Man’s Sky, Endless Sky is an open-world game where you explore, trade, and fight in space as a ship. Unfortunately it’s not a multiplayer game, but the main storyline takes about 10 hours to beat and then opens up to hours of more fun, so you’ll definitely get your money’s worth. (I’m joking, it’s free!)

Download: Endless Sky on Steam

12. Port of Call

Rating: 89% | Genre: First-Person Adventure

You board a ship, you don’t remember who you are, and nothing is what it seems. Port of Call only takes about 30 minutes to beat, but those minutes are well worth the download if you enjoy horror and suspense. If nothing else, it’s an interesting experiment on whether short narrative games can succeed—and I think Port of Call proves it to be true.

Download: Port of Call on Steam

13. Teeworlds

Rating: 88% | Genre: Action Platformer

Teeworlds is like Kirby meets Mario meets Quake. In this multiplayer platformer arena game, you play as one of many cute little ball-shaped people trying to kill other ball-shaped people. The grappling hook mechanic introduces an exciting physics component on top of the weapons and game modes, which include Deathmatch and Capture the Flag.

Download: Teeworlds on Steam

14. Super Crate Box

Rating: 89% | Genre: Action Platformer

Super Crate Box puts you inside a box arena with no way out and sees how long you can survive against endless waves of monsters. Enemies you fail to kill respawn and move faster every time. Various weapons spawn around the arena at random, each one having different advantages and disadvantages. A fun arcade-y experience, for sure, and of the many fun free games on Steam, this one sits near the top.

Download: Super Crate Box on Steam

15. TrackMania Nations Forever

Rating: 86% | Genre: Racing

No other racing game franchise offers a better, more satisfying experience than TrackMania. This particular game is the only free title in the series, but with 65 fun stock tracks, an in-game track editor, an in-game video studio for recording footage, and multiplayer capability, TrackMania Nations Forever is simply amazing.

Download: TrackMania Nations Forever on Steam

The 5 Best Free-to-Play Games on Steam

Unlike the above, these games include in-game purchases. But they do so in a way that isn’t invasive, so you can still enjoy them without spending any money.

16. Team Fortress 2

Rating: 93% | Genre: First-Person Shooter

Team Fortress 2 played a huge role in popularizing the whole “pay for cosmetics” business model, and even after all these years remains one of the best free-to-play games on Steam with the fairest monetization methods. You can either buy cosmetic-only items or dropped/unlockable items that do change gameplay but are never strictly better than the default loadouts.

Download: Team Fortress 2 on Steam

17. Path of Exile

Rating: 92% | Genre: Action RPG

In a lot of ways, Path of Exile is what Diablo 3 should have been. Most notable is the fact that Path of Exile is completely free and committed to an “ethical monetization” model. It has no gated content and no pay-to-win perks; only cosmetic items that are entirely optional. Is there any wonder why Path of Exile is still going strong? This is free-to-play done right and easily one of the top free games on Steam.

Download: Path of Exile on Steam

18. Warframe

Rating: 92% | Genre: Third-Person Shooter

Often described as a “poor man’s Destiny,” Warframe is a multiplayer cooperative PvE first-person shooter that sets you off to complete narrative missions and quests. It also has a PvP mode for those with a competitive itch. Yet despite the game’s success, the developers have never pushed a hard monetization model. Anything you can buy, you can also acquire in-game, and it’s never a grind because the game itself is fun.

Download: Warframe on Steam

19. Dota 2

Rating: 85% | Genre: MOBA

Dota 2 is the second most-popular MOBA in the world. But whereas League of Legends (its main competitor) forces its players to grind and grind to unlock champions, Dota 2 gives all players access to every hero right from the start. You only spend money on cosmetics, and yes, Dota 2 cosmetics are truly cosmetic! They have zero effect on gameplay.

Download: Dota 2 on Steam

20. Battlerite

Rating: 83% | Genre: Team Arena Brawler

Imagine the Arena PvP mode in World of Warcraft but with a top-down scheme, every ability replaced with skillshots, no mana, and no random numbers. Well, that game is called Battlerite. It distills team-based PvP gameplay down to its essence: outplay the other team and kill them before they kill you. As a free player, you have a limited champion rotation with the ability to unlock champions with in-game currency earned through playing.

Download: Battlerite on Steam

What Are Your Favorite Free Steam Games?

These games will provide you with dozens of hours of awesome gaming at zero cost. They prove that you don’t have to pay a ton of money for an enjoyable game, so why not check them out? You could find a new favorite.

For more, check out the best free games on Linux, as well as /r/FreeGamesonSteam on Reddit.

Read the full article: The 20 Best Free Games on Steam That Won’t Trick You to Spend Money


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