Until just a few years ago quantum computers were a fifty year's old concept first introduced by Richard Feynman in 1959. In 2009 Yale scientists created a two-qubit chip and IBM now has a 20-qubit system the IBM Q that it has made available to outside developers for testing applications.

This acceleration in quantum computing technologies has brought forward the that day when quantum computers will break our public/private key encryption. Welcome to the future transparency of today.

Fortunately there is a solution -- protect your data with lattice cryptography. This is an encryption method that is resistant to quantum computers and it uses the same amount of computing resources that public/private key uses so there will not be a penalty in terms of performance.

There are other possible forms of encryption that resist quantum computer attacks but IBM has put its weight behind lattice cryptography as unbreakable and has offered it as an industry standard.

Arvind Krishna. Director of IBM Research recently said that to ensure data protection of at least ten years --- people should plan to move their data today.

Lattice cryptography encrypts data inside mathematical lattices and is considered unbreakable (without a backdoor ). It has an additional benefit in that it can be used to perform processes on an encrypted file without decrypting its data first -- a technology called Fully Homomorphic Encryption. This greatly improves overall system security.

Here is a video of IBM researcher Cecilia Boschini explaining lattice cryptography.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kD2ryHMkFA

Your ID doesn’t change but you are not the same person throughout your day.

Each of has one name but we are at least 18 different people maybe more. Consider how different you are in your day and week when you have a senior role at work compared with your family persona; you are a soccer coach on Wednesday and Saturdays and at weekends you organize a bicycle club; in the evenings you do yoga classes and dance classes; and on Friday afternoons you volunteer at the local food bank.

You visit your grandparents every Sunday with your siblings and children; you go dancing and socializing with the same group of (non-work) pals every Saturday and you regularly attend your local alumni events; then there’s your Sunday silent DJ hiking group and your online photo community, and other professional associations; and then there is your children’s school with its parent and teacher communities,…etc.

Same name —18 very different people.

Yet the algorithms of Facebook and Google have mashed up all these different personas into one ID — but we’re only one person at a time. Despite all their data about us all — these massive platforms still don’t seem to know us much at all.

For example: I don’t need or want to know everything about a work colleague or the office details of a distant family member. And why do I need to impose notifications on my activities to others when it’s not necessary or related. People need partitions between their various activities and they seek them. Just because it is easy to aggregate a person’s activities doesn’t mean it is a service to them — it is not. It is a service for advertisers.

We now have a national debate about people’s rights to their data and to their privacy. We need to recognize that each user is 18 different people with different privacy needs.

As for targeted advertising — which one of my personalities are being advertised to? My personalities are expressed one at a time and do not have simultaneous interests.

Several years ago Google scrapped separate IDs for each of its services in favor of a single user ID. This simplified ad sales and created large potential audiences for advertisers. But the user experience becomes messy and the advertising less effective as the advertising algorithms target one your more profitable online personalities — usually when you aren’t using it. This wasn’t a problem with contextual advertising where ads for cameras appeared on a camera content page.

This might explain why Google's advertising isn’t working very well. Google parent Alphabet [$GOOG] reported strong Q1 financial results earlier this week but again — there was a big drop in revenues per click compared with a year ago and this time it fell nearly one-fifth or 19%.

Every single quarter for the past few years Google announces a substantial loss of revenues per click of 15% to 20%.

But it manages to find more places to sell more ads to counteract what has been an unstoppable slide in revenues per click. Less clicks per ads but more ads — that’s Google’s growth strategy. And that’s our future on Google’s web: even more ads because they are less and less effective.

The ever more intrusive aspects of targeted adverting plus the prospects of a web filled with even more ads puts the future into sharp focus: people will join single-topic walled-garden online communities where shared interests and activities stay there unless voluntarily shared by each person or by community agreement. Many will be subscription based services which means there’s no need to snoop and snitch on users. And many online communities will be very local.

This is the only way that people will take control over their personal data because they have no control over its uses today.

People will be able to retreat into communities with absolutely no advertising. That will be a big setback to the Brands and their insatiable thirst for customer data.

But why does your soap powder need to know so much about you? The data collection is harmful — the Brands have chosen an adversarial marketing strategy that will push people away — and into ad-free enclaves. Good luck reaching them there.

Doc Searls, Editor of Unix Journal writes, "Facebook's Cambridge Analytica problems are nothing compared to what's coming for all of online publishing."

...Every person, and what they look at online, is routinely profiled by companies that receive these data from the websites they visit. Where possible, these data and combined with offline data. These profiles are built up in "DMPs".

Many of these DMPs (data management platforms) are owned by data brokers...There is no functional difference between an #adtech DMP and Cambridge Analytica.

I agree with much of Doc Searls's analysis but I would change the headline to: "Facebook's Cambridge Analytica problems are nothing compared to what's coming for all the Big Brands."

All publishers even large ones such as New York Times contribute a tiny fraction to the overflowing consumer data lakes that are financed by the largest corporations. It's not publishers -- but the Big Brands and their Big Brother ad strategies -- that now come into sharp focus.

Marketing costs have always been huge -- 50% to 80% depending on your industry. If you are a large business like Procter & Gamble -- marketing has always been a science and digital ads make it into a data science because of the vast amounts of information a simple ad collects. 

• To save a few dollars on selling soap powder or any other product and service -- every aspect of our online wanderings both desktop and mobile -- is analyzed and categgorized.

People are told that targeted ads will mean better ads and even maybe less ads. But they aren't told that the same data will make you vulnerabke political manipulation and abuse. And it will get worse as the ad technolgies get better.

Welcome to a future consumer hell where our ad tech is is jeopardising our democracy. 

People don't mind data being used to sell them more stuff that they like --  consumerism is fun. They don't want to be judged by others -- or more vulnerable to hidden manipulation. 

Targeted advertising forces Big Brands into an adversarial position to their customers -- which side are they on?

Take a look:

- Big Brands have been financing the ad technologies that spy-and-snitch on Internet users for years and building ever larger private data dossiers on each consumer.

- The data on consumers will grow and continue to be used in unintended but potentially damaging ways for years.

- Consumers are judged by society and governments because of data used to sell products. By collecting for one innocent purpose you enable the second far more harmful purpose. There's no way to separate one from the other.

- The European GDPR data laws will lead to even more powerful ad tech precisely because of the constraints on sharing data.

- Big Brands' problems will worsen as the ad technologies improve. Advanced AI and algorithms will make the spy-and-snitch ad tech far more effective, powerful and intrusive -- and people will be far more troubled and resentful in the future than today.

Foremski's Take: Big business won't be able to defend its continued use of ad tech and data collection because it runs counter to the interests of society as a whole -- and their customers.

For the sake of a Procter and Gamble being able to save on selling soap powder we have created the means for monitoring and controlling the behaviors of billions of people and making them vulnerable to political and idealogical manipulations. The costs are too high. 

Selling ideas uses the same data as selling shoes. Consumerism enables the technologies of totalitarianism --my fear is that we could paint ourselves into a very unpleasant corner -- a N. Korea but with far more powerful systems for oppression and suppression of dissent.

Ethics will matter...

It's worth highlighting the fact that the Facebook/CA scandal did not involve anything illegal -- it was the terms of service that were broken. It's the overall ethics of the matter that matter.

Businesses will try -- but it's going to be impossible to defend their continued and rapidly improving means of data collection.

Simply put companies have to consider this equation: Saving money on advertising costs versus the colossal potential damage to society and individuals.

If the data isn't collected it can't be leaked, stolen, or abused. Businesses will have to stop the practice otherwise, how will they build the trust they need to do business?

Trust me...click here

Richard Edelman, CEO of the world's largest private PR firm Edelman, warned earlier this year of "an unprecedented crisis of trust in the US" and other countries. A global survey of 33,000 people across 28 countries revealed the issue.

"Building trust is now the No. 1 job for CEOs, surpassing producing high-quality products and services," Edelman said.

How will CEO's build trust while employing spy-and-snitch ad tech and maintaining ever more detailed dossiers on customers?

Trust cannot be built if you are using devious means to sell products and exposing customers to all sorts of other issues and abuses.

Brands will have to side with their customers or accept a permanent adversarial position toward them. The future is rapidly narrowing for the ad tech industry.

The SEC usually focuses its resources on protecting retail investors -- the not-so knowledgeable and not-so smart investors -- from the darker corners of finance. Yet these investors made rookie mistakes.

Francine McKenna at Marketwatch reports:

Theranos and founder Elizabeth Holmes raised $700 million from mostly wealthy investors without ever having to provide financial statements audited by an independent public accounting firm.

Super smart investors plus an impeccable board of directors: Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former Secretaries of State; William Perry, former Defense Secretary; Bill Frist and Sam Nunn, former US Senators; Jim Mattis, the current US Defense Secretary; and Richard Kovacevich, the former CEO of Wells Fargo Bank.

The investors and the board were all capable of asking for basic financial information and checking the blood-testing technology claims.

Instead, they rounded up other investors and raised even more money, and they used their contacts in government and industry to win large contracts for Theranos and for a technology that did not exist. Ouch! This is hugely embarrassing for these powerful people, but it has nothing to do with startups.

They were all suckered in by a Stanford dropout who convinced them she had the chemical engineering knowledge to lead the development and commercialization of a very complex technology: Multiple blood test results from a single drop of blood.

The SEC said:

“The Theranos story is an important lesson for Silicon Valley. Innovators who seek to revolutionize and disrupt an industry must tell investors the truth about what their technology can do today, not just what they hope it might do someday.”

Silicon Valley investors want their startups to think big. They want giant ambitions because if you promise the stars and you miss you might hit the moon and a moonshot is great.  

I heard Elizabeth Holmes speak in September 2015 (above), and she is incredibly impressive. She authentically believes in her mission and her talents. And she speaks passionately and directly to people's experiences. She can raise the hairs on the back of your neck. It's a valuable talent.

She lives simply and has not sought to cash out her stock or enrich herself in other ways. But knowing what we now know -- in those interviews from 2015 she appears to be as deluded about her own talents and the bright future for Theranos as her investors used to be yet she knew it to be fake. 

So far, the SEC has said nothing about the conduct of the board of directors or its responsibilities in this case. It would be a very brave SEC to question that board.

If there is a meaningful lesson for tech investors from the Theranos case it might be this:

A startup founder's passion cannot substitue for talent or ability - but you will fund it anyway.

Passion almost substitutes for talent and ability -- it can fill in the gaps. It's tremendously useful in leadership but it needs guidance and that's the missed opportunity for the Theranos board. 

I wish Facebook kept an eye out for me -- instead of keeping an eye on everything I do.

If Facebook worked for me, it wouldn't have to keep guessing the news sources or people I want to see in my news feed. I'd gladly tell it. And it wouldn't have to worry about developing ad technologies and new ways to sell more stuff.

If Facebook worked for me, I would pay it to make sure my mom can still get to my photos. I'd pay for messaging, calendar, and other services.

If Facebook worked for me, it wouldn't need to collect, store, analyze, and sell all that private information. It wouldn't need to build all that IT infrastructure.

If Facebook worked for me, it wouldn't have to keep guessing the news sources or people I want to see in my news feed. I'd gladly tell it. And it wouldn't have to worry about developing ad technologies and new ways to sell more stuff.

If Facebook worked for me, I would pay it to make sure my mom can still get to my photos. I'd pay for messaging, calendar, and other services.

If Facebook worked for me, it wouldn't need to collect, store, analyze, and sell all that private information. It wouldn't need to build all that IT infrastructure. And it would have just one person to worry about -- a Facebook user -- instead of having to deal with advertisers, politicians, regulators, privacy groups, endless media attention, and disgruntled staff.

AI and Algorithms...

It's not going to get any better. It's going to get worse, and AI and algorithms can't help.

Zuckerberg clearly wants to do the right thing. A solution to his headaches is to convert Facebook to a paid service -- one that helps people thrive in the modern digital world instead of becoming their chief adversary.

The bell tolls for Google, too. It might think it's getting away scot-free in the storm raging around Facebook, but it won't be able to side-step the inevitable regulations that will come.

They're inevitable because Facebook and Google won the media war. They hold two-thirds of the entire digital advertising market and more than 85 percent of all new mobile advertising deals.

The remainder goes to Microsoft, Oath, Amazon, and Twitter,  in order of size. There is no traditional mass media company on that list.

Mass media laws...

Facebook and Google have disrupted mass media. They have displaced mass media. They are now the mass media. And mass media is heavily regulated. Legislators understand the problems mass media can create -- better than Facebook and Google it seems -- which see themselves only as technology platforms.

Politicians know a media company when they see one, and they will apply similar controls.

Silicon Valley can change entire industries, but disrupting governments is a fantasy. Legislators know how to code laws, which always trumps coding apps.

Robin Li, an investor with the San Francisco venture capital firm GGV Capital, stood in the Madison building in downtown Detroit and said, "This is nicer than San Francisco."

Roose spent three days on a luxury bus with a few venture capitalists touring "rust belt" locations and discovered that there are startups everywhere. Which means one thing: the end of Silicon Valley.

Not one person in the article says, "Silicon Valley is over" so where does the headline come from? A desk editor or sub-editor penned that headline but why?

It's a headline that's not true and not supported by the article -- a strange editorial decision in this age of fighting fake news.

It's also strange why the rise of a regional innovation center in South Bend, Indiana; Flint, Michigan; or Youngstown, Ohio should always be reported as the end for Silicon Valley. Déjà vu all over again, and again and again.

There have been countless media stories over the years about the death of Silicon Valley amid the rise of innovation elsewhere.

We don't live in a binary world. Silicon Valley can continue to do well and other innovation centers can also succeed.

Yet there seems to be a constant desire to see Silicon Valley fail -- not realizing that's how it succeeds -- by funding so many failures.

Silicon Valley knows that the winners more than balance out the losers but that's the secret. Others love to laugh at Silicon Valley's failed startups as if that proves anything.

Silicon Valley Scales

Silicon Valley is not going anywhere and it's not dying. But it is changing.

Yes, you can innovate anywhere in the world -- potentially. But you will come to Silicon Valley to scale your business.

Silicon Valley capital is large and bold and ready to scale a promising startup. And it has the expertise -- both technical and managerial to scale businesses. And it has the connections to sell them.

Scale is the new business of Silicon Valley because scale wins. First to scale trumps first mover advantage and it establishes dominant businesses in each market and industry with little room for other companies.

Scale is not good for innovation because a startup cannot compete against scale -- it would take it years to build its business organically.

Large platform companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, SAP, Cisco Systems, Oracle, etc, can acquire startups and immediately scale those technologies across their entire platform. It would take years to do that organically. And all those former startup competitors are suddenly in the dumpster.

Hollywood movie production moved to Canada years ago but LA kept the glamour. The innovation might originate elsewhere but Silicon Valley will keep the innovation mantle even if the source is elsewhere.

Innovation is a brand

Silicon Valley is becoming like San Francisco's Union Square district with its flashy flagship stores for big brands -- designed more for public relations than profit.

Similarly Silicon Valley is where large companies are flocking to site their "Silicon Valley Research/Innovation Labs". A few that are already here: SAP, Baidu, Ford Motor Company, GE, Qualcomm, Samsung, Panasonic, Volkswagen, and there will be lots more joining them.

[Microsoft closed its Silicon Valley Research Lab in 2014 but it doesn't need to establish its innovation capabilities unlike many others.]

No research or innovation will come out of these corporate sites -- unless it's accidental. It is where the big companies can host their key customers and also provide job perks to their global engineers with three-month stints in Silicon Valley. It's for show and not for development.

Silicon Valley is not over -- it will co-exist with every other innovation center.

Lastly, people here aren't much affected by criticism of Silicon Valley because no one identifies with Silicon Valley -- the region only exists for outsiders.

Unilever's warning last week to Facebook and Google that it will pull more than $2 billion in online advertising if they cannot curtail "toxic content" and fake news -- will force other large advertisers to reassess their advertising strategies.

Hamza Shaban reports:

Unilever's chief marketing officer, Keith Weed, called on Silicon Valley on Monday to better police what he describes as a toxic online environment where propaganda, hate speech and disturbing content that exploits children thrive.

"Fake news, racism, sexism, terrorists spreading messages of hate, toxic content directed at children -- parts of the internet we have ended up with is a million miles from where we thought it would take us," Weed said in a speech at the Interactive Advertising Bureau's Leadership Meeting in Palm Desert.

Giant advertiser Unilever threatens to pull its ads from Facebook and Google over 'toxic content'

If Unilever leads other big advertisers to do the same it will be a massive potential disaster for Facebook and Google because between them they win about 85% of all new digital advertising deals.

Up for grabs...

There's a potential gold mine of billions of dollars in digital ads that can potentially be won by traditional media companies which unlike Facebook and Google -- already fake news and toxic content-- they already have solutions in place and they work extraordinarily well -- it's a key competitive advantage over their code-restricted media competitors.

Facebook and Google insist on using algorithms or in Facebook's case: asking readers for their expertise in recognizing real and fake news. Yet the recent global Edelman Trust Barometer survey found that most people say they cannot distinguish between what is quality journalism and what is fake. The survey of 33,000 people in 28 countries blamed fake content an unprecedented global loss of trust.

It's all good...

Why is Facebook asking its users to do its news filtering? Especially when Facebook reformats news stories including the fake ones and adds photos and layout to make them look highly professional, as it did countless times during the political elections and was never challenged.

Fake news web sites look like they were made by a high school kid because they usually are but Facebook's layout algorithm made them look like the New York Times. It's no wonder people are confused about what they are reading if Facebook messes with the look and feel of a media brand.

Facebook's attempts to use its users to sort fake news or train special algorithms that don't work shows how little understanding it has about the problem including it's own role in creating it.

Trusted media matters...

There is a solution to the fake news problem and traditional media uses it every single day -- they employ editors. But Facebook and Google won't use it because they refuse to acknowledge they are media companies -- they don't want the regulations and the social responsibilities of a media company -- they insist on being classified as a technology company.

But it's going to be difficult to keep maintaining a tech company alias in Washington D.C. because politicians are hugely media savvy and if it looks like a media company -- they publish pages of content with advertising around it -- it's a media company and you cannot hide behind an algorithm -- a set of content management and editing instructions programmed by a person.

American companies...

Late last year I was at a media dinner in San Francisco with Congresswoman Anna Eshoo who represents part of Silicon Valley and is very influential on communications issues such as net neutrality. She clearly sees Facebook and Google as being media companies. In addition, she expects them to be supportive to their country in the fight against Russian political influence and any other threats to national interests.

These are American companies, she said and she expects them to behave like loyal Americans.

I pointed out that they'd rather be Switzerland. They'd prefer to be seen as neutral platforms that reflect a broader society -- with all its ills and conflicts -- blameless.

It is the same for Amazon, Twitter, etc. You will see their lawyers in front of congressional panels and senate committees but you never see their CEOs facing the politicians. They understand that if they are seen as stooges for the US government happily giving up information on non-American users -- it will be very bad for business. There is a reason that America Online changed to AOL.

However, the Americanization and the politicization of Facebook, Google and the other digital media companies is inevitable. And it's likely going to raise costs of doing business and the cost of advertising -- which is not a terrible thing if it means less bad advertising and it levels the playing field a little with regard to traditional media and its higher operational costs.

Machine learning failure...

For all the algorithmic and computational finery professed by Facebook and Google the emperor's clothes remain transparently non-existent when it comes to solving Unilever's multi-billion dollar challenge to their advertising business -- a challenge certain to mushroom over the coming weeks as every big brand rethinks their advertising strategies.

Big business loses...

For each day that the fake news problem continues big brands are losing value. Can consumers trust that they are buying a real product? Is it real or fake information they are reading? Is that review real? Business will slow to a crawl as purchasing friction builds ever higher.

Once this type of general distrust takes root in consumer society all the careful brand building that took years of investments will be undone.

Trust in media...

The production and promotion of trusted media content is essential to fighting fake news.

Large corporations have to lead the rebuilding of trust in society because they have the most money to lose while the rest of us have the most to win: higher quality media content helps us make better decisions as a democracy (garbage in -- garbage out).

But it needs more than putting huge monetary pressures on Facebook and Google. Businesses must also stop all marketing practices that damage trust perceptions:

- Native advertising should be stopped immediately -- advertisers deliberately confuse readers despite labels. Surveys have shown it reduces trust in the media publication that carries native advertising.

- Content marketing has to restructured and it has to be more clearly labelled and defined from marketing content. The editorial content should be of service to the reader rather than self-serving. Media as a Service (MaaS media is the best corporate editorial media.)

- Big brands must stop funding the fake news sites and hate speech sites through their indiscriminate ad spending and insist -- as rarely is doing -- that the metrics and publishers on the ad networks are vetted.

- Advertisers should reprogram their programmatic dashboards and seek out the media companies that are already producing quality content free of fake news and toxic ideas. They are easy to find because they are the ones that employ editors, writers, photographers and have been publishing for many years.

- Unilever and other businesses must follow through on threats to shift their advertising spend -- but how will they do it? Where else can they spend billions of dollars in digital advertising? Facebook and Google will see it all as an empty threat if there's no viable competition.

- It is time for Unilever and other large businesses to help build a more competitive media industry. They should establish relationships with media companies that can become viable competitors to the social media giants.

Competition for billions of ad dollars will keep everyone highly motivated and engaged in solving the serious problems around trust and fake news-- these are fundamental bedrock issues that have to be solved in building a common future.

But threatening to shift billions of dollars in advertising is an empty threat if there is nowhere else to spend it.

We need a competitive media industry with sustainable business models -- if scale wins society will lose. We are on a losing trajectory, imho.

The 1.2 million-square-foot office-and-retail property at 75 Ninth Avenue is home to the popular food hall as well as Major League Baseball and the Food Network. Google is already the largest tenant at the building, leasing about 400,000 square feet of space. The company’s New York headquarters, at 111 Eighth Avenue, is right across the street.…They said that Google is paying over $2 billion, or north of $1,600 a square foot.

Google already owns substantial amounts of office space in New York but its tenants are not moving out as quickly as it expected leading to new deals.

The Real Deal Reports:

Google is already one of the most significant tenants in Chelsea.

-It paid a then-record $1.77 billion in 2010 to buy its New York headquarters at 111 Eighth Avenue…

- It also has about 240,000 square feet at Vornado Realty Trust and Related Companies’ 85 10th Avenue.

- In December 2015, Google signed a 250,000-square-foot lease at RXR Realty and YoungWoo & Associates’ SuperPier project.

- While that space is being built out, the company has been negotiating to take about 200,000 square feet at RXR’s Starrett-Lehigh Building on a short-term basis.

Google has made huge real estate investments in the San Francisco Bay Area. Here are some recent headlines:

- July, 2017: Google has reportedly spent $820 million on properties in Silicon Valley

- December 2017: Google approved to build 10,000 homes in Mountain View but it had threatened to halt the housing project if it wasn’t allowed to expand its business park. 

Foremski’s Take: Google is a surprisingly old-fashioned company since it clearly wants its workers to be in its offices — developing among other things: remote working technologies such as Google Hangouts, Google Docs, Sheets, phone, and Google Drive.  

With such powerful collaborative telecommuting technologies why isn’t Google eating its own dog food? Why does Google insisting on bussing its Silicon Valley workers  in three-hour-plus commutes — daily between its Mountain View HQ and San Francisco?

Google has said that it has tested the productivity of remote teams and on-site teams and found no difference in performance. So why are there no telecommuting jobs at Google?

There is only one reason Google insists on its workers being under its control: keeping them separate from non-Google environments as much as possible with the aim to create company culture and prevent conspiracy. Google doesn’t want its engineers hooking up with others in coffee shops and plotting a Google-killer. The more it can keep its people company men and company women the better.

When was it cool to be a company man? Singing the company song, being paid partly in script, eating at the company lunch counter? Riding the company bus? It was never cool especially not in San Francisco.

Why doesn’t San Francisco, New York, Mountain View, London — anywhere Google has a large numbers of workers: insist that Google allow its workers at least one-day a week to work from home. 

Here’s why this is important:

- It helps integrate the tech communities with their neighbors. They become known by name rather than shapes sitting behind giant black-windowed coaches. Bussing workers to distant enclaves is divisive to communities. 

- Google’s office expansions have a huge negative effect on local small businesses. They cannot compete with all the free food and free services Google provides for its staff. And the businesses displaced by Google lead to further lost customers. As Google moves into downtown areas in Palo Alto, and Sunnyvale the local merchants are very concerned about living in the shadow of the Googleplex.

Google’s Sunnyvale plans unleash merchants’ worries and warnings | Real Estate Marketplace

- On their telecommuting days Googlers will spend money on their own lunches and with local small business services. And they'll get to know people outside of work. And they'll maybe see some problems around the city that need fixing. Engineers love solving problems.

Cities need to ask Google why it doesn't allow telecommuting and insist it is vital to stemming commute times for everyone; and it is vital to fighting division in their neighborhoods. The same should be asked for all the other giant employers. 

Facebook, Google and Twitter's failure to deal with the damaging effects of fake news has created a broad distrust in social media platforms, search engines and news applications reports the Edelman Trust Barometer 2018 -- a survey of more than 33,000 people in 28 countries.

But trust in journalism has improved greatly and there is now a wide divide between peoples' low regard for media platforms and their much higher respect for journalists and journalism.

Richard Edelman, president and CEO of Edelman, the largest privately held public relations company, said there is "an unprecedented crisis of trust in the U.S." Especially the U.S. government, followed by business, NGOs and media.

"This is the first time that a massive drop in trust has not been linked to a pressing economic issue or catastrophe like the Fukushima nuclear disaster. In fact, it's the ultimate irony that it's happening at a time of prosperity, with the stock market and employment rates in the U.S. at record highs. The root cause of this fall is the lack of objective facts and rational discourse."

A small amount of fake news and the inability of social media platforms and search engines to deal with it has created a cascade of trust issues across all types of institutions in most countries surveyed.

It's a large fallout with a potentially large long-term cost for the media platforms. Facebook shares fell more than 6% when it announced it would stop showing as many news stories in users' feeds -- which signaled that it couldn't find an engineering solution.

The Edelman report discovered that large numbers of people (63%) said they could not trust themselves to know if a news story was from a reputable journalistic source or "tell good journalism from rumor or falsehoods." Yet people's trust in journalism and journalists jumped by double-digits -- the largest of all categories.

Trust in business...

Edelman says that the global crisis in trust can only be addressed by the business community. Nearly two-thirds of respondents expect CEOs to lead on policy-change and not wait on government action. Businesses have a far higher trust rating than government institutions. 

...building trust (69 percent) is now the No. 1 job for CEOs, surpassing producing high-quality products and services (68 percent)....

Technology firms are the most trusted industries (but not the tech media platforms) at 75%; Education 70%; professional services, 68%; transportation 67%; automative 62%; packaged goods 60% and financial services at 54%.

Trust in US headquartered companies showed the largest fall among all countries surveyed.

More details here:

The news release

The PDF of the report

Please see:

No news: The engineering failure to block fake news and hate speech

2018 prediction: The endangered hyperlink

NetSolving Silicon Valley's diversity problem

Facebook's decision to use fewer news items in users' feeds is a direct result of failure to filter out fake news and hate speech - in advance of European laws and increased pressure from US lawmakers.

The move will hurt many large news publishers who have relied on Facebook traffic due to earlier Facebook programs that courted news and magazine publishers to come onto the platform.

Representatives of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (Google) were grilled by the Senate Commerce Committee in Washington, Wednesday. The Senators were critical of the poor progress made by the companies to quell Russian propaganda, fake news and harmful content.

Dave Lee at BBC News reports,

Google, which owns YouTube, has pledged to hire more human moderators to add an extra layer of protection for this process...

Twitter said it would implement several new measures to monitor discussions for any potential manipulation, as well as open up more formal communications lines with US politicians to escalate any problems.

Foremski's Take: Filtering out most of the news is an easy way for Facebook to tackle the problem of blocking most of the fake news. But it is not a solution. People will still be sharing information of various types and interacting about things that will be classed as harmful content. Filtering out news links is not a solution.

And without a solution Facebook, Google and Twitter and others, all face a future where they must still find a way to deal with fake information and hate speech and all types of other harmful content.

Tens of thousands of top engineers have collectively failed to come up with an engineering solution to this problem despite all their machine learning, AI and algorithmic prowess. Along with access to phenomenal amounts of computing power. It's a big failure. But there is a solution.

Facebook, Google, and Twitter are media companies - they publish pages of content with advertising - and they should look to traditional media companies and see how they handle this problem. They handle it superbly.

A tried and tested solution...

The traditional media industry has a solution that works incredibly well and is available to everyone - it's an open-source solution. It employs editors, journalists, and moderators to ensure third-parties don't use their publishing platforms as vehicles for hate speech, fake news and all the other problems facing the new media companies.

It's not a cheap solution - hiring people is expensive compared to running an algorithm.

But Facebook, Google, and Twitter are rich and their failure at building an engineering solution should not absolve them from using tried and true methods.

Traditional media companies bear this cost burden and so should their much larger and wealthier competitors.

Europe tries to fight hate, harassment, and fake news without killing free speech - Columbia Journalism Review

Facebook's News Feed changes: A look at the likely consequences | ZDNet

Senate presses tech firms on anti-extremism efforts - BBC News

Peggy Noonan Wall Street Journal writes :

“The Franken case represents not a collapse of tolerance for flawed

human behavior but a rise of judgment about what is acceptable.”

This means that you always have to choose a higher morality than is available today. The future has only one lens.

It reminds me of this post from 2006:

“Welcome to the future transparency of your life”

http://zd.net/1iujaEA

In the same way that we find it hard to forgive slave owners even if they made great contributions to society or country we can only judge others by the societal standards of the day. If you believe in moral and ethical progress then the future will judge us and likely desoise us.

It might not be judgement about sexual behavior but about other things such as consukerism. For example: if you ran a hugely successful campaign sellng a gazillion units of Pet Rock2 that might be considered a crime against the environment. A criminal use of resources and energy for personal enrichment with no value to socierty.

Or it might be about something else. But it will be about something we do daily and don't think about much. We should think about it, imho.