This morning I opened up the iOS App Store and was astounded to find a thing called "Goat Simulator" at No. 4.

U serious? Goat Simulator?

So, I downloaded the game. And at first, it seemed very, very dumb. I was just a goat walking around in a yard. That was it!

But then, something magical happened. I found a "jump" button. Immediately upon discovering this, my goat leapt out of the yard and was free! Peace, other goats. Catch you never.

Freedom can be intoxicating. My goat immediately started making bad decisions, and showed a blatant disregard for traffic rules.

Then my goat found a protest. I'm all for democracy, but this game has a head-butt button, and I wasn't going to spend all day staring at it.

The signs say "No pointy food."

Then it was time to rough up the neighbors with the loud music.

Hope that sends a message. You fucked with the wrong goat.

My goat then dragged one of the neighbors around with its tongue for good measure.

Even though my goat was largely on a terrorizing rampage, it did do some productive stuff.

Like slide down this water slide and catapult itself into the bushes.

But breaking stuff was more fun. So my goat concentrated on that.

Into the drink you go, sir.

Sorry, can I help you with something?

Yeah, didn't think so.

Things change fast in goat world.

Soon enough, my goat was wearing a jet pack and jumping on a trampoline.

Some may view my goat as a villain, and they may be right. But...

...remember, this goat world is a simulation. And those aren't real people getting hurt. Maybe the goat is all of us, and those people are the kinds who would like to keep us down. The goat is hope, the goat is courage, the goat is triumph.

When life gives you hurdles, jump right over them.

Don't try this at home.

U.S. President-Elect Donald Trump speaks at an event at Carrier HVAC plant in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Chris Bergin / Reuters

At a rally last week in the Milwaukee suburb of West Allis, WI, President-Elect Donald Trump promised that his administration will focus on “three words: jobs, jobs jobs.” Two of the focal points of his post-election campaign have been keeping US factory jobs, like at the Carrier furnace factory in Indiana, from moving to Mexico, as well as prioritizing American workers over foreign ones.

In Milwaukee county, where factories employ almost 16% of the workforce, these kinds of promises are particularly popular with Trump’s supporters. But although Trump succeeded in convincing Carrier to keep its plant in the US with $7 million in tax breaks, the factory’s parent company has said it will invest $16 million into making the factory competitive through automation, which will ultimately cut human jobs.

For the most part, Trump supporters at the rally didn’t seem to mind. They’ve known the automation of factory jobs was coming whether they liked it or not, they told BuzzFeed News. For some, that means that the president-elect has no obligation keep factory jobs safe from the machines that would streamline them out of existence.

“I don't see any negative to innovation in automation. We're ready to get moving with the times,” said Jodi Perkins, a supporter living in Milwaukee. “He doesn’t need to protect those frontline jobs. We’ve got to get the boot of government off the neck of business.”

Jodi Perkins, right, at Trump's Wisconsin Thank You rally

Blake Montgomery

Mel Geschke, a forklift operator with Quad/Graphics who attended the Milwaukee rally, said automation threatens his job daily. Automated guided vehicles can do the work of forklift operators, though Geschke believes they do not work as well as humans in fast-paced situations.

Yet he feels ambivalent about whether Trump should protect his job. He said, “He'll do what he can to protect my job from automation, but in some cases you've got to go with the flow.”

American manufacturing, by many measures, is succeeding even as the president-elect reiterates that America “is losing,” as he did at the Wisconsin rally. Mark Miro, a senior fellow at the Brookings research institute, writes in the MIT Technology Review that American manufacturing is now producing 254% of what it did in 1980 while employing just 66% of the workforce of that same year.

Reverting manufacturing processes from machines to people would likely be bad for the bottom line of many businesses. The Boston Consulting Group found in 2015 that it costs only $8 per hour for a robot to do the same job — spot welding to produce cars — that a human could do for $25 per hour. Trump’s own labor secretary pick Andy Puzder has spoken publicly about preferring robots to human workers.

Several supporters at the rally offered the consolation that workers who lost their jobs to automation could become repairmen or technicians in the same factories.

Tim Kempen summed up a common feeling at the rally: “If we don't stay with new tech, we'll be less productive and fall behind other countries. It's sad that a machine may take jobs, but at least those people could go out and get jobs repairing the machines.”

But to Michael Gallant, head of communications at n-Join, a company that uses artificial intelligence to monitor manufacturing machines for deficiencies, the comparison of frontline factory jobs to more specialized occupations does not hold up. “That’s not an apples to apples analogy. Becoming a technician or an engineer requires a great deal training, whereas frontline manufacturing does not.”

And jobs for those without that training are fast disappearing. A recent Georgetown study found that of the 11.6 million jobs added after the economic crisis of 2008, workers with some degree of higher education took 11.5 million of them.

Workers with a high school education lost 5.6 million jobs in the recession, the study said, and regained less than 1% of them because many of the jobs for high school graduates like manufacturing and clerical work have been automated.

Tomas Jimenez, a sociologist of immigration at Stanford University, told BuzzFeed News Trump’s supporters’ ambivalence towards automation but enthusiastic support for the Carrier deal and his anti-illegal immigration agenda isn’t entirely surprising. “It’s easier to blame people than it is to blame things. It’s possible that among supporters there is a sentiment that machines have no agency, but people — Mexico and its emigrants — do.”

“Our responsibility is more to look for companies that manufacture their wares in the US,” said Jodi Perkins at the rally. “It’s more important to keep jobs in the US than to protect them from automation.”

Trump, for his part, hasn’t said much about the impact automation may have on his plans for the American economy. But in a wide-ranging interview with the New York Times, the president-elect said the US would build more factories under his administration because “we don’t make anything.” He did, however, acknowledge that “robotics is becoming very big.” His solution? “We’ll build the robots, too.”

Twitter wants to be a news app, having recently moved to that category from the "social networking" category in the iOS App Store. And so now it's doing a thing most top-tier news apps do: Pushing breaking news notifications.

After a truck crashed into the Berlin Christmas market today, for instance, Twitter pushed a breaking news alert to some of its users that linked to Twitter's Moments tab, which summarizes the news in tweets. The company did a similar thing when Fidel Castro died last month.

Twitter has been sending these breaking news alerts as part of a larger test notifying users about real-time content appearing on the platform, a Twitter spokesperson confirmed. In the past, the company has also sent some users notifications about The Bachelorette, for example.

The company uses an algorithm to decide who gets notified about what topics. And remember, it's a test, so there's a chance it might go away. If you decide you don't like Twitter pushing you these alerts, you can head into the settings section of its app and turn the notifications off.

Uncredited / AP

Apple is in talks with the Indian government to manufacture products in the country. The company is asking the Indian government for financial incentives to make its products in India, two senior government officials told the Wall Street Journal.

The report corroborates what the Press Trust of India, a leading news wire service, published last month: that Apple had written a letter to the federal government in India outlining its plans to seek financial incentives as it strives to gain marketshare in a country where 97% of all smartphones run Android.

Apple did not respond to BuzzFeed News' request for comment.

Apple has been negotiating with the Indian government to open Apple Stores in the country for years but has been unable to do so because of the country's stringent regulations on foreign direct investment.

In June, the government relaxed some of these restrictions and allowed single-brand retailers like Apple to open stores in the country — provided that they purchase at least 30% of their raw materials from Indian vendors after the first three years.

Making its devices in India would help Apple overcome the local-sourcing requirement, making it possible to set up a retail presence in the country. But analysts say the move would also help reduce the retail price of iPhones in the country — India is currently the most expensive country to buy an iPhone in.

"We estimate iPhone prices in the country to drop 12–13% if Apple makes its devices in India," Tarun Pathak, senior analyst at market research agency Counterpoint, told BuzzFeed News. "However, unlike China, India still doesn't offer enough scale to absorb these price cuts and pass on the complete savings to consumers, so we'll have to wait and watch."

India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, has been trying to ramp up technology manufacturing in the country through a high-profile initiative called "Make In India." Other smartphone makers like Samsung, Xiaomi, and OnePlus already assemble their phones in India to keep prices down.

Only about 250 million of the country's 1.2 billion people own a smartphone, which makes it an attractive market for companies like Apple that haven't seen a significant growth in developed countries, where the markets are already saturated.

As per your keyboard.

GIFs aren't just contained in Tumblr posts anymore. Thanks to GIF keyboards that you can download right onto your phone, you don't have to tell someone you want to party — you can show them with a RuPaul GIF.

That can lead to some fun insights. Tenor, the company that makes the GIF keyboard for some of the world’s most popular messaging apps — iMessage, Facebook Messenger, Kik, Twitter, Google Gboard, and the Android’s Touchpal and Kika keyboards — has compiled data on how people used celebrity GIFs to express themselves in 2016.

According to the company, people search for GIFs on their keyboards 200 million times every day. Half of the company's user base, according to CEO David McIntosh, is in North America, around a quarter is in Europe, and the remainder can be found in Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia.

Most GIFs in Tenor's database use emotions or emotional actions as a primary tag — “sad,” “smile,” “ewww” — so using a celebrity GIF usually has a tag that indicates the tone. You can, for instance, search “Steph Curry nervous” for a GIF of the basketball player biting his nails.

McIntosh told BuzzFeed News, "The world is voting with what they search for and share on how the world perceives these [celebrities]."

Here are the celebrities people turned to most in 2016 to express their emotions when words failed and only a GIF would do:

Kobe Bryant: #Smile

This GIF is also tagged with "really," "deal with it," and "forreal."

Tenor / Via tenor.co

LeBron James: #Eww

Gross.

Tenor / Via tenor.co

RuPaul: #Party

San Diego searches for this tag more than any other city every night of the week, according to Tenor.

Tenor / Via tenor.co

View Entire List ›

In a year like 2016, this list might almost restore your faith in the internet…almost… WARNING: This post is obviously NSFW.

The severed toe one Tumblr user mailed her Tumblr friend to make a necklace.

cummy-eyelids.tumblr.com

This whole thing.

Tumblr

This British hero who expressed his opinion by sticking an EU referendum voting card into his foreskin.

stuffinmydick.tumblr.com

View Entire List ›

With the touch of the retweet button, Donald Trump — who has some 17.5 million followers — can program the news cycle. He can amplify formerly unknown accounts, signal what voices he's listening to, and tacitly endorse individuals and ideas, no matter how controversial: Trump, more than any politician or powerful figure with access to a smartphone, understands and uses the now-clichéd "retweets are not endorsements" maxim to his advantage.

To better understand which individuals and institutions the president-elect relies on as social media surrogates, BuzzFeed News compiled a complete list of users Trump has retweeted since he launched his presidential campaign.

We reviewed 26,377 of Trump’s 34,152 tweets, which we received through the Twitter API and developer Brendan Brown, who has archived Trump’s tweets beyond what is accessible via the API (a stream of data that includes information like tweet text, time, and date). We filtered that data down to the 2,760 hyperlinks tweeted by Trump’s personal Twitter account since he announced his candidacy in June 2015 up until December 15 of this year.

By programmatically expanding the links, we were able to narrow them down to the links he tweeted from Twitter (retweets show up as links from twitter.com when downloaded as data), filtered out the ones that were media tweets, and were left with all the manual, regular, and quote tweets Trump had sent through his account. Fourteen of the accounts that Trump has retweeted are no longer active. Among those 14, five accounts — White GenocideTM, babo_siren, Campaign_Trump, patrioticpepe, and TMoody — were suspended (Twitter suspends accounts when users violate its rules, most commonly if the account spams people, may have been hacked, or is engaging in abusive behavior).

Analysis of the accounts Trump has retweeted reveals several distinct patterns:

Trump appears willing to retweet almost anyone. Unlike most mainstream politicians, who carefully select the accounts they'll amplify, Trump is comfortable retweeting a truly diverse array of accounts. Just last month, the President-elect retweeted a 16-year-old from California as evidence to support a Twitter feud with CNN. He does not discriminate based on number of followers (he retweeted an account with just two followers), number of tweets (he retweeted the first tweet from a woman who, to date, has only tweeted five times), or the contents of someone's account bio (he retweeted one user whose bio at the time was: "Mexico, get ready to receive your finest citizens back! Rapists, Thieves & Perverts").

But he is most likely to boost the signal from his inner circle and friendly members of the press. The accounts he retweets the most were those of campaign advisers and some chosen members of the press, including his social media lead, Dan Scavino (21 retweets); his son Eric Trump (5); Fox News' Greta Van Susteren (4); MSNBC host Joe Scarborough (4); former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (3); Lifezette editor and conservative pundit Laura Ingraham (3); and Bloomberg Politics' Mark Halperin (2).

The president-elect, despite his repeated claims of a deeply biased mainstream media, retweets a high number of legacy media outlets. Among his most tweeted news accounts: Fox News (7 retweets), Fox and Friends (6), ABC (3), CNN (3), and Morning Joe (2). In nearly every instance, the retweeted accounts shared news items or memes about polls that favored Trump (many from the primaries), or negative articles about Hillary Clinton — many of them aggregations of WikiLeaks emails. Trump also appears to be eager to promote positive news about him from pop culture and entertainment accounts, as evidenced by his retweeting Saturday Night Live's account three times.

On occasion, Trump will retweet a user from the other side of the aisle. This tends to happen under two circumstances:

1) When an account says something positive about him (in one instance, Trump retweeted former Obama Senior Advisor Dan Pfeiffer, who suggested Trump understood the internet better than most Democrats):

2) To attempt to attack his opponents — as he did here last June with Hillary Clinton:

He has retweeted accounts with clear ties to the alt-right on numerous occasions. Trump recently told the New York Times he disavowed the movement and suggested he didn't "want to energize the group." However, throughout the 2016 campaign, Trump retweeted three separate users with the words "alt-right" in their bios. He retweeted "WhiteGenocideTM," and four with "nationalist" in their bios. One account that the president-elect retweeted (a bot, it turns out) had the phrase "#GoebbelsMindset" in the bio — a reference to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister in Hitler's Germany.

Other items of note include:

— 151 of the 294 individual accounts Trump retweeted during the campaign mention the word "Trump" in the bio or account display name.

— 22 accounts have the Make America Great Again hashtag, #MAGA, in theirs.

— 14 accounts have the word "deplorable" in the bio or account display name.

— 9 accounts have the word "veteran" in the bio or account display name.

— 2 accounts have a frog emoji in the bio or account display name, presumably a reference to Pepe.

But there's no better way to get a peek into Trump's Twitter mindset than to explore the accounts he's retweeted for yourself. Below, we've included every account he's retweeted, in order of the number of times Trump has RT'd the account (Of note: the bios and follower counts are current as of when BuzzFeed News scraped the data on December 7th, 2016, and may not necessarily reflect the bio or follower accounts on the day Trump retweeted them). There's also a full graphic at the end of the list.

KEY:

ACCOUNT DISPLAY NAME (FOLLOWERS): ACCOUNT BIO.

21 Retweets:

Dan Scavino Jr (241,484 followers): June 2015 - Current: Director of Social Media & Senior Advisor to President-elect Donald J. Trump #Transition2017 • #TrumpTrain Conductor

18 Retweets:

Official Team Trump (372,885 followers): Welcome To The Official #TeamTrump Account. Together, We WILL #MakeAmericaGreatAgain! #AmericaFirst

7 Retweets:

Fox News (12,068,826 followers): America’s Strongest Primetime Lineup Anywhere! Follow America's #1 cable news network, delivering you breaking news, insightful analysis, and must-see videos.

6 Retweets:

FOX & Friends (700,152 followers): America's #1 cable morning news show

5 Retweets:

Eric Trump (725,051 followers): EVP of Development & Acquisitions, The Trump Organization. Founder of EricTrumpFDN benefiting StJude Children's Research Hospital. Husband to LaraLeaTrump

4 Retweets:

Joe Scarborough (653,550 followers): We can love completely without complete understanding.

Greta Van Susteren (1,109,570 followers): Retweets are just retweets; RT does not mean I agree or disagree....I am merely retweeting;check out video reports https://t.co/BpGqSgCJU9

3 Retweets:

GENE (7,535 followers): blocked by rosie followed by marcuslemonis boygeorge & scottBaio Legal Italian Immigrant. Proud US Citizen,World Traveler With 25 Years of Business Dealings

Newt Gingrich (1,784,072 followers): Husband, father, grandfather, citizen, small businessman, author, former Speaker of the House.

Laura Ingraham (1,118,943): Mom, Editor-in-Chief of LifeZette. Host, The Laura Ingraham Show, 9 to Noon ET. Listen live, join Laura365 to listen 24/7. Fox News. https://t.co/Wu93dy29HT

ABC News (8,248,722 followers): See the whole picture with ABC News. Join us on Facebook: https://t.co/ewMNZ54axm

Saturday Night Live (1,749,560): The official Twitter handle for Saturday Night Live. Saturdays at 11:30/10:30c! #SNL

GOP (1,056,143 followers): Updates from the Republican National Committee #LeadRight2016

CNN (30,043,735 followers): It’s our job to #GoThere and tell the most difficult stories. Come with us!

2 Retweets:

Trump 4 Women (14,198 followers): SEE TheTRUMPetts #1 OFFICIAL TRUMP TRAIN Vid #TeamTRUMP HIT SONGWRITERS =USMC / LEO VETS

Don Vito (23,804 followers): American Patriot #MakeAmericaGreatAgain #AmericaFirst

TheAmericanLifeStyle (3,616 followers): Our American journey Start Now. •blest• #TeamTrump #TrumpPence16 #MAGA DonaldJTrumpJr IvankaTrump EricTrump TiffanyATrump

Deplorable Vlad (8,582 followers): Waterboarding's too good for them. I'm staking my vote on TRUMP!

Diamond and Silk® (197,218 followers): #STUMP4TRUMPBABY #CHOOCHOOBABY #DITCHANDSWITCHNOW #STUMP4TRUMPGIRLS #TheUnitedStatesNotTheDividedStates

Trump Phenomenon (2,863 followers): Trump Landslide 2016

Willie Robertson (2,441,160 followers): President of Duck and Buck Commander. Personality on both, Duck Dynasty and Buck Commander Protected by Under Armour.

Morning Joe (280,073 followers): Live tweet during the show! Links to must-read op-eds and other features. Feed managed by MJ staff. Retweets not necessarily endorsements.

Gravis Marketing (2,823 followers): Gravis Marketing is a communications company, specializing in public opinion polls, public relations, political strategy, and research.

Roni Seale (6,210 followers): But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.
Matthew 19:26 (KJV)

Piers Morgan (5,292,866 followers): ''One day you're the cock of the walk, the next a feather duster.'

Mark Halperin (253,218 followers): Managing editor, Bloomberg Politics; host, With All Due Respect; correspondent/EP, SHO_TheCircus; co-author, Game Change & Double Down

Safety (3,215,464 followers): Helping you stay safe on Twitter.

NRA (4,13,722 followers): National Rifle Association of America #NRA

Emily Miller (58,635 followers): Senior Political Correspondent OANN. Armed. Wannabe Surfer. Author of Emily Gets Her Gun. https://t.co/kuOGeQfYgc

Ivanka Trump (2,498,905 followers): Wife, mother, entrepreneur. EVP, Trump Org. Founder, https://t.co/qWTVy424t8. Author, Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success (out in March)

Joseph Monaco (2,567 followers): I HATE racists! Proud to be followed by Bill Mitchell Mitchellvii I'm strongly supporting Mr. Trump for President! #TrumpPence16 #NYPD #FDNY #TrumpTrain #MAGA

Tom Winter (12,664 followers): NBC News Investigations reporter based in NYC focusing on Police, Courts, Corruption, Financial Fraud, and Homeland Security stories across the Eastern U.S.

Jason Bergkamp (59,251 followers): #keksec | #NS | Nationalist ✠ | 0.2% Chosen and proud | An Anglo's worst adversary | #GoebbelsMindset

Katrina Pierson (242,737 followers): Senior Advisor Transition2017 & Former realDonaldTrump Natl Campaign Spokeswoman #MakeAmericaGreatAgain #Transition2017 #MAGA

ABC News Politics (306,398 followers): Following ABC News' political team with tweets by: aabramson evanmcmurry and nickirossoll

Mark Cuban (6,040,253 followers): #DallasStrong

1 Retweet:

Richard Hernandez (979 followers): Formerly NVGOP. Conservative. Originalist. Prior intern at Kramerica Industries. Tweets are my own. Temeculan.

Trump2016Media (3,528 followers): My #Trump2016 Website is Updated Daily: 1000+ Interviews & Rallys, Articles, News, Media realDonaldTrump #TrumpTrain #MakeAmericaGreatAgain

Electra Goldwell (284 followers): I want God to make America Great again!

Amy Colley Tyson (403 followers): Follower of Christ, Wife, Mother, Family Nurse Practitioner, Former Miss Tennessee USA 2005, Supporter of H. Res. 752 and Animal Hope and Wellness Foundation

Donald Trump Florida (5,231 followers): Donald J. Trump for President (Florida - Official)

MariaRandisiErnandez (989 followers): Special Education Teacher &(Child Advocate).Interests:ELVIS, Hollywood,Music, Politics,Travel, Working Out,#TrumpStrong #MAGA#TrumpTrain
*NO LISTS or B Blocked

RealBill (47 followers): [No bio listed.]

Politics Today (54,257 followers): || CONSERVATIVE NEWS NETWORK|| News/Politics/Opinion - Reporter/Pundit #PoliticsToday Articles/Commentary Facebook: https://t.co/7wFggE8CL2 #Fact

Montana4Trump (1,452 followers): God Bless America. Conservative Catholic mother-daughter team Tweeted by: realDonaldTrump, mercedesschlapp, MattSchlapp, ktmcfarland.

USA For Trump 2016 (80,568 followers): Official USA for Trump 2016 Follow our new President Trump News Page TrumpsNewsDaily for great Trump news articles about his presidency!

Political Polls (46,266 followers): We are a non-partisan group dedicated to keep you informed with recent political polls from trusted polling companies and predictions from reputable pundits.

Antonio Valencia (18 followers): [No bio listed.]

Karen Posey (15 followers): [No bio listed.]

JohnnyBoy (2 followers): [No bio listed.]

Corey R. Lewandowski (175,221 followers): CNN Political Commentator and former Campaign Manager for Donald J. Trump for President. #MakeAmericaGreatAgain #Trump2016

Eustace Bagge (291 followers): As seen on Fortune, Time, CSPAN. Aspiring Frogtwitterati.

Citizen Dale (19024 followers): Ind Engineer & business owner. Captain-Trumptbird Calling Team We've made over 80,000 calls for Donald J Trump! Producer of the Monster Vote video for Trump!

Deplorable C Lewis (1,223 followers): I VOTED for DONALD TRUMP FOR PRESIDENT If you support DONALD SPREAD THE TRUMP MESSAGE. #Trump45 #POTUS45 #DrainTheSwamp

Deplorable MP95B (15,705 followers): US Army MP Veteran (No Combat) firm believer in US Constitution & 2A. NRA Lifetime Member. Strong Trump supporter. #MakeAmericaGreatAgain #Trump2016 #NRA #FL

RSBN TV (38,820 followers): Right Side Broadcasting Network. Following realdonaldtrump wherever he goes. #1 source for live political event coverage.

DiCristo Trump Won (4,833 followers): Love For God & Country. Make America Great Again! American Revolution Part Deus! TRUMP! Nov8 win gave us fighting chance! we have to beat Elites! #MAGA

Polling Hub (44 followers): Polling averages for the 2016 U.S. presidential primaries. Accurate and up to date, we're the most detailed poll aggregator tracking the 2016 presidential race.

Deplorable-Sweetie (22,432 followers): #Trumpette Put Americans first! #Trump2016 ˚\(*❛‿❛)/˚ MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! I will fight for MY PEOPLE. #Nationalist No rapefugees or illegals! #TrumpStrong

Italians For Trump (57,540 followers): We are ITALIAN-AMERICANS who proudly support realDonaldTrump our President-elect of the USA! #Italians4Trump #DrainTheSwamp #MAGA #PEOTUS #IoVotoNo

NEPA for TRUMP (26,889 followers): Official realDonaldTrump Northeastern Pennsylvania #TeamTrumpPA #Trump2016 #MakeAmericaGreatAgain #TeamTrump #AmericaFirst #ImWithYou #TrumpTrain #TrumpPence16

TrumpCoastOfSC (8,678 followers): Retweets & quoted tweets do not equal endorsement or agreement. Follow me also at https://t.co/bkXkkAj4cU

Deplorable Distler (1,247 followers): Donald J Trump is Americas last chance. LET FREEDOM RING!!

Bryan Ranzetta (260 followers): when kids look at me I say this is because I didn't eat my vegetables

Elsa Aldeguer (1752 followers): Proud Latina Trump supporter from Los Angeles California God bless America and our New President Donald J Trump

Valdosta Monkey (116 followers): Wild monkey roaming the City of Valdosta. Always down for Netflix and peel. Lets Make America Great Again.

What was 2016? A dumpster fire? A hot mess? 2012's revenge?

2016 was full of contradictions. We suffered the deaths David Bowie, Prince, and Harambe. There was plenty of fun too: the Rio Olympics and Pokémon Go happened this year. We also had the US election. More than anything else, 2016 was consumed by the election. Most people didn't have words for it. So many people used GIFs to process the chaos of the year.

Tenor, the company that makes the GIF keyboard for some of the world’s most popular messaging apps — iMessage, Facebook Messenger, Kik, Twitter, Google Gboard, and the Android’s Touchpal and Kika keyboards — has compiled data on how people responded to big events in 2016. Half of the company's user base, according to CEO David McIntosh, is in North America, around a quarter is in Europe, and the remainder is in Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia.

Strap in to find out how everyone reacted to this doozy of a year:

Celebrity deaths:

The year started out on a super uplifting note with the deaths of David Bowie, Alan Rickman, and, later, Prince. That meant that people were sharing sad GIFs way more than happy ones.

We were #crying

Tenor

And #sad

Tenor

We were even talking about #sex less

Tenor

Then came the summer, which was an anxious time

#nervous spiked

Tenor

We were sweltering, especially in the Southwest

It was one of the hottest summers on record in the US. #Melting was v popular

Tenor

It all came to a head on June 19

Tenor

A lot of people were losing their damn minds

#FreakingOut

Tenor

But also...celebrating?

#Victory

Tenor / Via tenor.co

The combination of the NBA finals and the "Battle of the Bastards" episode of Game of Thrones may have had something to do with the anxiety and triumph in the USA.

One event in particular made the summer crazy: Brexit

Tenor

The USA wanted to smack some sense into the UK.

#slap

Tenor

And the British overwhelmingly wanted to barf

#throwup

Tenor

At least there were GIFs to help people process the panic

#RunAway spiked in the US and gave us this parakeet action movie masterpiece.

Tenor

2016 wasn't all death and political mayhem, though. Pokémon Go came out and gave us something to collectively obsess over:

Tenor

The week after the wildly popular game came out, Pokémon GIFs accounted for about 7% of all shares on its keyboards, according to Tenor.

Tenor

But then back to the mess. In September, Brangelina was no more:

When Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie announced their divorce in September, people reacted with GIFs of Brad and Angie, but they were mostly interested in one other person: Jennifer Aniston. Tenor wrote in a blog post: "Searches for Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston collectively jumped more than 90 times the norm. Interestingly, searches for Aniston outpaced searches for Brad and Angelina combined — by more than 300%."

Tenor

And, of course, the grandaddy of all 2016, the fire to our dumpster: The Election.

#Crying spiked hard on November 8.

Tenor / Via tenor.co

The tears and sadness were out of control.

Tenor

Thank goodness for Thanksgiving — at least that lightened the national mood a little.

But after it was about crying, it was about hugs:

Tenor

People were consoling each other. That's nice.

Tenor

And that's a wrap! See you never, 2016!

Tenor / Via tenor.co

Anadolu Agency / Getty Images

The Obama administration today released a report on the role automation and artificial intelligence will play in the future of the US economy — namely, what will happen to workers as more and more jobs are automated out of existence. It's a follow-up to a previous report, 'Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence', that was released by the administration in October.

This new report advocates for two policies the administration has pushed for consistently throughout Obama's presidency: More investment in STEM education, and a stronger social safety net. The former means making sure training for high-skill jobs starts in early childhood and continues throughout college and beyond; the latter means strengthening unemployment insurance, introducing wage insurance, and modernizing tax policy in order to protect the low-skilled workers who are most likely to lose their source of income as a result of automation.

But what's new in this report, according to Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Jason Furman, is the focus on the benefits artificial intelligence could bring to high-skilled workers. Per the report:

AI technology itself has opened up new markets and new opportunities for progress in critical areas such as health, education, energy, economic inclusion, social welfare, transportation, and the environment. Substantial innovation in AI, robotics, and related technology areas has taken place over the last decade, but the United States will need a much faster pace of innovation in these areas to significantly advance productivity growth going forward.

The report offers as examples of areas where investment in AI could be particularly useful is in building a defense system against cyberattacks, as well as in detecting fraud in the financial industry.

But, the report goes on to say, any investment in technology or growth in the AI industry will have to be accompanied by an increase in diversity of the workforce that's building it. Currently, "the lack of gender and racial diversity in the AI-specific workforce mirrors the significant and problematic lack of diversity in the technology industry and the field of computer science more generally." That's a problem for a number of reasons, including that more diversity generally means better problem-solving and faster rates of innovation, the report says.

Another problem in AI that has to be solved is algorithmic bias, which, according to this report, is already a risk in the credit and insurance industries, as well as in recruiting. The report warns that the use of algorithms in the hiring process, for example, could "unfairly exclude new potential talent."

Uber is launching two new features today: Now, instead of entering an address, you can select a friend's name from your contact list, and your driver will take you wherever your friend is. And along the way, you can Snapchat your friend information about your ride.

How it works: First, you have to give Uber access to your contacts; then you'd enter a friend's name as the destination. Uber will ping that friend, asking to access the GPS on their phone to confirm the destination, and once they accept, you'll be on your way.

Important note: Uber won't follow the friend as they move around. One they confirm their location, it's a static destination. The friend you set as your destination also has to answer Uber within 30 minutes.

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The company told BuzzFeed News that it hopes to help passengers eliminate the back-and-forth texting about the exact address of a meeting place.

And the Snapchat collaboration is meant to make the journey more fun for riders, according to Uber.

While you're riding, you'll be able to send your friends snaps right from the Uber app. You can choose from one of three filters: your estimated time of arrival, ride type (Uber Pool, UberX, Uber Black, UberXL), or a "mystery filter," which will surprise riders with either a trophy cup saying "Five Star Rider," a daytime/nighttime filter, or a steering wheel. If you're feeling ambitious, you can use these filters alongside other Snapchat filters like the dog face.

When asked about sharing sensitive information like location on Snapchat, Uber said it's disclosing no personal data beyond what's required for the filter — ETA, vehicle type, and destination.

The ride-hail company has collaborations with Yelp, the public transportation app Transit, and FourSquare in the works.

These additions will augment the Uber Feed, a feature introduced in Uber's latest app update.

Stillfx / Getty Images

Ads for clothes, concerts, and flights to exotic destinations litter Facebook and Twitter. Soon, though, you may see a lot more ads for something more serious — prescription pills.

That is, if drug makers can avoid antagonizing the FDA.

From now until early January, the drug-regulating agency is collecting public feedback on how tweets promoting therapies should disclose their side effects, one step in the agency’s long-running attempt to regulate advertising on social media. The move follows Facebook beginning discussions with the FDA about ramping up efforts to populate the News Feed with drug ads.

Social media could help Big Pharma pinpoint more customers than traditional advertising. At the same time, the highly regulated drug industry faces unique challenges in trying to get their messages out in tweets and Facebook posts.

Pharmaceutical firms, which spent $6 billion on ads in 2015, are drawn to platforms like Twitter and Facebook for the same reasons as everyone else with something to sell: their data allows businesses to reach highly specific audiences. Think, for example, of Viagra ads aimed only at men over 50.

“To be able to target to very precisely who’s going to see those ads means that the industry would waste a lot less money, I suppose, and be able to see a better return on investment,” John Mack, who publishes the newsletter Pharma Marketing News, told BuzzFeed News.

Facebook and Twitter aren’t the only online networks that pharmaceutical companies are eyeing. Ad agency AbelsonTaylor recently praised Pinterest’s potential to reach patients, noting that, for example, its users are mostly women, and women make most health care decisions in their households. At least eight major pharma firms have Pinterest accounts, by Mack’s tally.

Still, traditional ads remain appealing because they have time-honored — and regulator-approved — ways to disclose drugs’ risks. Voiceovers on TV commercials breathlessly read side effects, and magazine ads print them in small fonts. But Facebook posts and tweets have much less room, and can be hard to distinguish from personal endorsements.

Kim Kardashian's now-deleted Instagram to promote a morning sickness drug, without the required safety information.

Instagram

Their casual nature can breed bizarre situations like the FDA coming down on a Kim Kardashian selfie. In August, she Instagrammed a picture of herself with Duchesnay’s morning-sickness drug, which she was paid to promote, without mentioning its potential side effects, although she did link to a site with that information.

Kardashian deleted the photo after the FDA sent a warning letter to Duchesnay, and then reposted it with the side effects, from drowsiness to allergies.

“From a regulatory perspective, it’s a lot of pressure to think about fitting all that information into a four-inch mobile screen,” Danielle Salowski, industry manager for Facebook’s health team, told BuzzFeed News.

The social network has been beefing up that team, which has been around for about a year and a half, in an effort to bring in more pharmaceutical dollars. Salowski, who joined Facebook in May after working in ad sales at Twitter, said her team is a mix of pharma experts, digital industry veterans, and longtime employees.

They’ve been trying out creative ad formats. This fall, Bayer bought its first Facebook ad for a multiple sclerosis drug, which presented safety information in an auto-scrolling line of text, rather than a long paragraph. The scrolling feature had appeared in other Facebook ads, but not previously for pharmaceutical ads, according to Facebook. “Bayer chose Facebook because the multiple sclerosis community is actively involved in Facebook,” Bayer spokesperson Rose Talarico told BuzzFeed News by email. “We recognized an opportunity to reach them where they already were with information that was potentially relevant to them.”

Facebook keeps the FDA updated on the types of ads that pharmaceutical companies can buy, according to a Facebook spokesperson. But clients, not Facebook employees, are in charge of ensuring that their ads obey regulations, Salowski said.

Beyond Bayer, some companies promote their products on Facebook pages — some obviously branded, others less so. Allergan does this for dry-eye disease medication and birth control, and AstraZeneca has a page for cholesterol-lowering drugs.

Allergan's sponsored Facebook page for its dry-eye disease drug.

Via Facebook: RESTASIS

One unique feature of Facebook — and social media at large — is the ability to leave comments. Commenting can help people feel more attached to a brand and bring their friends into the conversation. But, as Mack pointed out, horror stories about bad side effects or endorsements of drugs for unapproved conditions could be nightmares for pharmaceutical companies. Salowski said that Facebook lets brands turn off comments on posts and pages.

Liking a brand's Facebook page also potentially increases the chances that your friends will see it or related ads in their feeds. That feature could lead to inadvertent privacy violations if, say, you don’t want people to know you’re "liking" antidepressants. At the same time, Facebook allows people to adjust their settings so that friends won’t see ads based on their page likes.

Tweets, which are even shorter than Facebook posts, pose their own challenges. Last month, the FDA said it intends to study if it’s appropriate for a promotional tweet for a prescription drug to include a link to side effect information. It’s the latest chapter in the agency’s slow adjustment to advertising in a 140-character world. In 2014, it put out draft guidance for how pharmaceutical companies could use social media, but didn’t explicitly address whether links to information about risks were allowed.

Viral, targeted ads aren’t inherently dangerous, said Ameet Sarpatwari, an instructor at Harvard Medical School who studies pharmaceutical marketing. But he’d like to see social media companies make clear the potential dangers of medical products.

For example, he suggested, Twitter could label drug advertisements as such, instead of just “Promoted Tweets.” He also endorses links to side effect information, accompanied by language that underlines their importance, like “read about the risks here” (rather than a neutral phrase like “click here to learn more”). And he wants the platforms to allow researchers to study whether these steps are effective.

Sarapatwari’s concerns about social media ads reflect broader concerns about direct-to-consumer drug ads, which are only allowed in the United States and New Zealand. They can be incorrect or one-sided, so “what you get is a continual influx of information about how these products are going to be better and you should take them,” he said.

And on social media, he said, hype can go viral.

“We want to facilitate the flow of information,” he said. “But we don’t want to also allow something that is true, but misleading, to be able to influence decision-making on something of such a magnitude that it can impact health.”

LINK: Big Pharma Is Sponsoring A Flu Map On The Weather Channel

LINK: What Our Tweets And Google Searches Say About Our Health

Indian Minister of Law and Justice and Ministry of Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad (L) shares a light moment with co-founder and CEO of Uber Travis Kalanick ahead of a meeting in New Delhi on December 15, 2016.

Afp / AFP / Getty Images

India’s federal government has released guidelines to regulate the country’s taxi industry, which means that ride-hailing apps like Uber and its homegrown Indian rival Ola, are finally legal in the country.

The new guidelines were framed by the country's Ministry of Road, Transport and Highways, and are available online as a 37-page document. Although the guidelines are nationwide, it is up to each state to implement them, which means that the companies could still push back and lobby against certain guidelines in the document.

Among other things, the new guidelines say that ride-hailing services which use apps will need to have their algorithms which calculate distance and fare audited for accuracy by the country's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.

They also recommend capping surge pricing at three times the minimum fare during "peak hours", and four times between midnight and 5 am — although they leave it to individual states to decide what the final multiplier to cap the maximum fare should be.

The guidelines also touch upon protecting consumers' personal data by mandating ride-hail services to include a "firewall" for data security, and explicitly giving riders the option of sharing their data with the app or not. Uber recently introduced a controversial update on iOS that tracks users' locations even when they aren't using the app, something that privacy advocates have slammed as "a fairly aggressive use of a customer’s data."

"This is an important milestone in the development of ride-sharing in India, and one that will help the industry better serve riders, drivers and cities in the years ahead," said Uber India's President Amit Jain in a statement to BuzzFeed News. "While there are concerns on price caps and price floors, the framework will allow the industry to continue to flourish. We look forward to working closely with our existing partners at the state level as these guidelines are put into practice."

Uber declined to respond to BuzzFeed News' specific questions about getting its algorithm audited and the company's concerns about price caps. Ola did not immediately return BuzzFeed News' requests for comment.

India's lack of taxi industry regulations so far has led to ride-hailing services operating in a legal gray zone, battling it out with federal and state authorities, and facing stiff resistance from local taxi and auto-rickshaw unions. In August, the Delhi High Court issued a notice to Uber and Ola to stop surge pricing in Delhi.

"These guidelines are quite liberal and give ride-hailing companies a lot of freedom," said Jaspal Singh, a partner at Valoriser Consultants, an urban transportation and market research agency that provides consulting services to taxi companies in India. "I think that the government is finally looking at ride-hailing services as an alternative to India's dismal public transport systems, especially in bigger cities."

The guidelines, however, do not address predatory pricing, something that Singh says could be a concern for companies that don't have enough capital to subsidise rides like Uber and Ola do. They also don't define what "peak hours" are, which means that companies are free to raise prices during any time of the day they see fit.

India is the largest battleground for Uber outside the US, after it merged its operations in China with rival Didi earlier this year. Both Uber and Ola have ramped up their policy presence in the country and lobby aggressively to influence public policy around transportation.

Last week, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick visited the country to meet key government officials, including President Pranab Mukherjee.

The wireless earbuds sync to iOS devices with ease – but there’s a lot of room for improvement.

When it unveiled the headphone jack-less iPhone 7, Apple announced an all-new wireless solution to go with it: cordless earbuds called AirPods that come with Siri and a slew of sensors packed inside. After an unusual month-and-a-half-long delay to “fine-tune” sound performance and battery life, the new earbuds are finally available (although there’s currently a six-week wait). But you may want to hold off even longer.

I’ve been testing final production AirPods for about a week and pre-production AirPods since September. The pods don’t fall out nearly as easily as one might expect of an earbud-on-a-stick that dangles precariously from one’s ear, and I was equally impressed by the AirPods’ unique wireless technology that eliminates the fussiness of Bluetooth. But Siri-only volume control and the AirPods’ one-size-fits-all form factor aren’t ideal – and show that there’s a lot of room for improvement.

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Here's what's working.

The AirPods are small, lightweight, and hyper portable.

The main benefit of wireless earbuds is their portability. No cord means no tangled mess and no bulk. The AirPods aren’t exactly discreet (more on this later), but they are lighter than other wireless buds I’ve tried (Samsung’s Gear IconX, Bragi’s Dash, and the upcoming Headphone).

The AirPods package feels as light as a pack of Tic Tacs, and its smooth, dental floss–sized case slips easily into tight pant pockets. Together, the AirPods weigh just 0.28 ounces, which is about the weight of a quarter, while the charging case is 1.34 ounces — so altogether about as much as a single Kit Kat bar. In your ear, you’ll feel the hard plastic-ness of the AirPod, but you won’t ever feel bogged down by its weight.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

They do a great job of staying in your ear.

I did my least favorite form of cardio for an hour to capture this treadmill timelapse. The AirPods stayed in my ears the entire time.

I really tried to get these buds to come out: I biked to work with one of them in, I headbanged to Slayer, and I tried shaking them out of my ears (even upside down!). Nada.

Movement won’t dislodge the AirPods, but as soon as there’s some external interference, they immediately lose their mythical staying power. The stem is susceptible to getting caught on things like clothing, hair, and helmets. I took off my sweater and an AirPod went flying. I tucked my long-ish hair behind my ear and the same thing happened. The helmet strap didn’t remove the AirPod from my ear, but it did jostle it around, which is unnerving when you’re biking on the very crowded streets of San Francisco.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

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Uber

Uber has suspended its nascent self-driving vehicle program in California after the state's regulators revoked the company's car registrations.

The company began testing self-driving vehicles in San Francisco earlier this month. Within hours of the program's launch, the California Department of Motor Vehicles ordered the company to take the cars off the road until it obtained a permit from the agency. The DMV also threatened Uber with legal action if it didn't pull the vehicles.

One of Uber's self-driving vehicles was also caught running a red light on the first day of the program.

The ride hailing company said the program was suspended Wednesday after the DMV revoked registrations for its self-driving cars.

"We’re now looking at where we can redeploy these cars but remain 100 percent committed to California and will be redoubling our efforts to develop workable statewide rules," Uber said in a statement.

The DMV said the agency revoked the registrations for 16 vehicles that "were improperly issued for these vehicles because they were not properly marked as test vehicles."

California adopted testing regulations for self-driving vehicles two years ago, and the DMV's statement added that "Uber is welcome to test its autonomous technology in California like everybody else, through the issuance of a testing permit that can take less than 72 hours to issue after a completed application is submitted."

The company is also testing autonomous vehicles — which still have a human driver onboard — in Pittsburgh.

Other companies, including Tesla and Google, have already obtained DMV permits to test self-driving vehicles in California.

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LINK: DMV Threatens Legal Action After Uber Rolls Out Self-Driving Cars In SF

LINK: Here’s A Video Of A Self-Driving Uber Running A Red Light

Leslie Root usually stays with friends when she visits Washington, DC, but for her most recent trip, she wanted something more adult. So two weeks before she was scheduled to attend a conference, the UC Berkeley grad student rented an Airbnb in a high-rise building on Connecticut Avenue.

But as soon as the place was booked, Root got a message from her host that’s probably familiar to regular users of Airbnb: The host said that she wouldn’t be there for the duration of the trip, and that Root should ask for the key at the front desk when she arrived. “I’ll leave an envelope,” Root remembered her host saying in the message, “but don’t mention Airbnb.”

“It was like, ‘Ugh, god, am I really paying to do this?’”

Right away, Root started to worry — why would a security guard give her keys to an apartment when the owner wasn’t home? And how could she pass herself off as an old friend of her host’s when the two had never met? Said Root, “It was like, ‘Ugh, god, am I really paying to do this?’”

Hosts ask guests to hide the fact that they’re using Airbnb all the time. It happened to a woman named Lisa Reilly on a vacation to Spain, a travel blogger named Alex Garcia during a trip to Europe, and a New York entrepreneur named Siddharth Saxena, whose San Francisco host explained the request for secrecy by saying, “Airbnb is controversial.” A web search turns up around a dozen listings in cities including Kobe, Hong Kong, San Diego, and LA that say “don’t mention Airbnb” right in the public posting.

"These experiences are rare," Airbnb spokesperson Nick Papas told BuzzFeed News. "And as the number of Airbnb hosts and guests continues to rise, we are working hard to help educate everyone about the benefits of home sharing."

After almost nine years, regulators have had time to catch up with Airbnb. Strict rules around short-term renting are enforced in a handful of cities worldwide, including New York, Santa Monica, and Berlin. Countless landlords and homeowners' associations have, at this point, written rules against it into lease agreements and contracts. Clearly, for some hosts, the risk is worth it. But for their guests — who booked their stays on a slick website built by a $30 billion company whose selling point is ease of use — the experience can be downright awkward.

And that’s a problem for the company. Like any startup, Airbnb is successful when it's seamless — and tenants who rent their apartments without permission are, to use a Silicon Valley term of art, adding friction. With listings in 190 countries and a recent influx of half a billion dollars in capital (and hundreds of millions more potentially on the way, per Reuters), Airbnb isn’t exactly hurting — but there are few other companies that, at nearly a decade old, sell a consumer experience that sometimes requires those consumers to act like it isn’t happening.

Root’s trip to DC ultimately went smoothly, but not all covert Airbnb guests have the same luck. A California couple’s Thanksgiving trip to the East Coast “turned into the nightmare before Christmas,” according to the New York Post, when they were booted from a building that didn’t permit the Airbnb rental they were supposed to stay in. (In the end, Airbnb paid for their hotel.)

Sherwin Belkin is a lawyer in New York City whose firm represents thousands of landlords, many of whom have played the cat-and-mouse game with tenants they suspect of secretly renting their homes to tourists. He said guests who fail to follow their hosts' instructions to keep mum about Airbnb often end up “caught in this limboland” of Airbnb, with money spent but nowhere to sleep. “They come to the building and don't quite adhere to the rules of 'Let's keep this on the down low.' They tell management, 'Oh, I rented this apartment on Airbnb, can I have the keys to go in?'” Belkin told BuzzFeed News. “And then they're told, 'Well, actually, no. This is illegal.'”

Of course, most guests don’t get caught and most hosts don’t get evicted, but the experience of sneaking around can be uncomfortable. A programmer named Josh told BuzzFeed News that, after a new roommate skipped town and rented his room on Airbnb against building policy, Josh was forced to pretend the guest was an old friend of his from college to avoid eviction. Another tech worker, this one named Adam, was asked not to mention Airbnb to neighbors during a business trip his employer paid for, only to have his cover blown when he ran into a co-worker in the hallway. In another instance, a traveling tech CEO booked a room in San Francisco, and then received this threatening note from his host: “The important thing is that my apartment does NOT allow airbnb, so if they notice, I cannot host you anymore and I will be evicted as well.” And a retirement-age couple recently booked an apartment while visiting their daughter in LA, only to receive a video tutorial and slideshow from their host that included instructions on avoiding detection.

The name of the building has been redacted to protect the identity of the guests.

New York recently passed the strictest anti-Airbnb laws in the US — if the host isn’t present during the guest’s stay, the likelihood is very high that the listing is illegal, and the host could be fined up to $7,500. A judge in Toronto recently ruled that building management companies have the right to ban condo owners from renting their properties on Airbnb, while in Chicago, 900 apartment buildings already have bans in place.

In San Francisco, where Airbnb is sometimes legal, doormen are also on the lookout for secret Airbnb guests, according to `David Wasserman, a California-based landlord attorney. “If someone comes in and they say, 'We're guests of this unit' and through some questioning it becomes apparent that these are Airbnb guests, they turn them away,” Wasserman said.

Other property managers hire interns who spend their days scanning Airbnb for illicit listings, or use one of a number of web-scraping sites with names like Sublet Spy and Sublet Alert. Some take a more direct approach. "We increasingly have our buildings under camera surveillance,” said Wasserman.

Rafat Ali, CEO of travel site Skift, is personally familiar with the “don’t mention Airbnb” phenomenon — during his two-month honeymoon, Ali rented his apartment in a Manhattan doorman building to an Airbnb guest. “I told her, 'Say you are Rafat's friend,'” he said. “I think it happens often."

"They're going to have to clean up the system."

Though they're common, Ali doesn't think surreptitious listings are a threat to Airbnb's business model, because the brand is somewhat insulated from the impact of a guest's negative experience with a given host. "What percent of people who book through Airbnb hold Airbnb responsible for the experience?" Ali asked. "If I had a bad experience with Airbnb once, am I going to just stop using it because I'm going to blame Airbnb completely? Or am I just going to blame the one place for misrepresenting what they were?"

But Ali said Airbnb will have to demonstrate a willingness to play by the rules if it wants to mature from a dazzlingly successful San Francisco startup into a publicly traded behemoth of the travel industry. "Professionalizing more of their services at the sacrifice of some of their inventory is the way to go," Ali said. "They're going to have to clean up the system."

To that end, the company encourages hosts to talk to their landlords about Airbnb. It’s currently offering a pilot program through which it negotiates Airbnb-friendly lease agreements between tenants and landlords that include compromises over issues like the frequency of booking and how much of the host’s profit should go to the building’s owner. A survey by the National Multifamily Housing Council recently found that around a third of apartment firms in the US would be open to working out such deals with tenants.

Airbnb has also removed thousands of illegal listings in New York and San Francisco and built a feature that allows people who don’t even use the platform to submit complaints about neighbors they suspect are hosts.

“More and more landlords and tenants understand that home sharing can work for everyone and we're eager to build on this momentum,” said Papas.

But in the meantime, one weird experience can change a customer’s feelings about traveling via Airbnb.

Heath was on a trip to San Francisco when his Airbnb hosts asked him to pretend they were away house-sitting in Sonoma and to tell the neighbors, if they asked, that he was their nephew.

“They showed me the place while walking me through all of these details several times,” Heath said. “‘Okay, remember, you’re our nephew. You’re just passing through. We are in Sonoma,’ and instructed me to be quiet when I opened the front door so I didn’t rouse any suspicion.”

Heath is a self-proclaimed bad liar, and the request made him nervous, but it was too late into a short trip to cancel the booking. “It’s a terrible user experience to be told to lie,” he said. Eventually, after a yearlong break, Heath went back to using Airbnb, and he says it’s been fine so far, but “it kind of left a sour taste in my mouth about Airbnb for a while. I didn't want to travel and feel like I had to abide by some weird, dark code.”

All the apps, hacks, habits, and products that made our lives a little better in 2016.

Here at BuzzFeed Tech, we're trying new stuff constantly. Companies send us products unsolicited; co-workers and friends and far-flung relatives corner us at parties to implore us to write about whatever thing they just discovered; our inboxes runneth over with PR pitches about the latest and greatest. But only a tiny fraction of that stuff ever makes it into our daily routines and changes the way we live our lives. That's what this list is — all the things that made us happier, safer, saner, more productive, and more connected in 2016, and that can maybe make you feel the same next year.

Organizing my apps by color

I think it's really cool that, if you put your bank app and your personal savings app into a folder on your iPhone, iOS will automatically name that folder "Finance." However, my digital life isn't really easily organized into categories like "Finance," "Health," "News," or "Games," and anyway, when I'm looking for, say, Instagram, I don't want to have to remember if it's under "Social" or "Photos." My big breakthrough this year was realizing that, actually, when I think Find Instagram, the first thing my brain thinks is rainbow. Just like when I think Find Twitter I think blue, or when I think Find Google Maps I think green. And so I organized my apps into folders by color, which sounds neurotic, but is actually just intuitive. Now Lyft, Airbnb, and Pocket are all saved in a folder titled "💕💕💕💕," while Zipcar, Nextdoor, and WhatsApp are in a folder titled "🍏🍏🍏🍏." Sometimes other people notice this system when they glance at my phone and look at me like I'm crazy, but I once met an Apple designer who does it too, so I'm pretty sure I'm right. Go ahead. Try it. —Caroline O'Donovan

Water-friendly phones

I love that the default for most flagship phones (iPhone, Galaxy S7, and flaming Note 7) except for the Pixel is that they will survive toilets, pools, river floats, etc., without bulky cases. Phones have been water-resistant in Japan forever (over a decade??), and it's ABOUT TIME the rest of the world catches up. —Nicole Nguyen

I traveled more this year — for work and for pleasure — than I have in any previous year of my life, which means I also took a lot more pictures than ever before. The result is a formidable, deeply disorganized library comprising stray moments of my year. Sometimes, when I'm looking to kill a few minutes or if I'm feeling nostalgic for something, I'll pad through the little patchwork of colorful thumbnails and watch the days and weeks and months rush past under my thumb. I'll open up a few of the best photos and reminisce. It's a nice, tidy exercise of selective memory.

Late last year, though, Apple rolled out its Live Photos feature, and ever since it's unexpectedly changed the way I relive all of the weird, wonderful, dumb, and mundane moments of 2016. For the uninitiated, Live Photos is a nearly invisible feature that, when toggled, keeps your camera rolling before and after you snap the shutter on your picture, creating a little three-second video with sound; press on your photo and it animates almost like a GIF. It's one of the many throwaway bells and whistles that accompany new phone software and hardware updates — a little Easter egg designed to make your eyes widen a touch and give you the general impression that you're living just ever so slightly in the future.

I enabled the feature unwittingly late last year, and as a result my photo library has been transformed into a hypnotizing, moving archive of every memory I've seen fit to try to capture. Now my library is rich with new context — a photo of an acrobatic basket fisherman on Myanmar's Inle Lake is forever preserved with the sound of lapping water against our skinny little engine boat. With a touch of a finger, a photo of the park in fall at sunset reveals the orange and yellow leaves shimmering in the wind. The meticulously orchestrated but made-to-look-candid photos of my dog are appended with the moments where she turns away from the camera to drool and scratch herself indiscreetly.

There are unexpectedly poignant moments, too. A photo of my 90-year-old grandmother reflects the slow grace of her movements as she poses for a photo with her infant granddaughter at twilight at a family reunion this summer. Scrolling through moments like these, I can't help but think of the power these photos would have if the loved ones in the frame were to pass away. I think about how magical and heartbreaking and necessary it might feel to watch them come to life again, if only for an instant.

Mostly, though, I'm thankful for how messy they are. So many of my live photos from this year capture the awkward seconds before and after a posed picture or the mundanity of a seemingly insignificant moment at home. They're what might have once been throwaway photos. But now even these dumb, haphazardly shot memories are imbued with meaning. More than anything else, they're a reminder that, unlike most of the still images themselves, life is messy, weird, unexpected, and occasionally beautiful and poignant. —Charlie Warzel

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@blacchyna / Via instagram.com

Blac Chyna is using her vast social media presence to promote a deceptive and wildly expensive student loan forgiveness scheme, telling her 10.6 million Instagram followers they can call a phone number to "get rid" of their student loans "before it's too late and Obama is out of office."

It'll take 5 minutes, she says. "Hurry!!! IT WORKS!"

It doesn't. The Student Relief Center, the company in Chyna's post, is one of hundreds of fly-by-night student loan operators that use social media to target borrowers. Via Facebook and Instagram, most promise to help students have their loans wiped away.

In reality, they charge hefty fees to do what anyone can do for free: sign up for the Education Department's income-based repayment options, which fix student loan payments at a percentage of monthly earnings.

By charging hundreds or thousands of dollars for doing this, the student loan relief schemes extract money from people already struggling with debt. But they can be lucrative for the people promoting them — based on typical rates, Chyna could have been paid as much as $35,000 for her post promoting the scheme, according to Mike Heller, the president and CEO of Talent Resource, a celebrity lifestyle marketing company.

As Americans grapple with more than a trillion dollars of student debt, schemes targeting borrowers looking for a way out have become widespread. "Have you seen ads offering help with your federal student loans that seem too good to be true? They probably are," reads a warning from the Secretary of Education about student debt relief scams.

youtube.com

The fees charged to former students by the company in Blac Chyna's Instagram post — which was not marked as an ad — are astronomical, and carefully disguised. When BuzzFeed News called the Student Relief Center number yesterday, a representative said the company could arrange a "graduated payment plan," where a borrower paying off a $20,000 loan would make two payments of $385, then pay $162.99 a month for 36 months, then begin paying $113 monthly.

But what they didn't say, until further prodding, was that much of that money would go to the middleman, not loan repayments. Baked into the Student Relief Center's plan were well over $2,200 in fees paid to the company, including a charge of $49.99 a month for 36 months, long after any paperwork had been filed with the government.

After the three-year time period, the representative said, the $49.99 monthly fees would become "optional" — though customers would be automatically enrolled in the payments.

Student debt forgiveness schemes like the Student Relief Center have come under increasingly harsh scrutiny in recent years. They charge sky-high fees, at times in violation of state law, for services that often involve little more than submitting free forms to the government. At worst, some companies charge hundreds and even thousands of dollars and then disappear without performing any services at all.

Representatives for Blac Chyna and the Student Relief Center did not respond to a request for comment from BuzzFeed News. The reality TV star's initial Instagram ad was deleted on Wednesday; another ad was posted on Thursday afternoon.

Access to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube has reportedly been blocked in Turkey.

The move comes after a group known as the Aleppo Province of the Islamic State reportedly posted a video Thursday showing two Turkish soldiers being burned alive near Aleppo.

Some Internet users in Turkey say they still have access to the social networks, however, and it's possible they're using VPNs as a workaround.

Turkey's government is known for restricting its citizens' internet access during times of crisis; it most recently throttled access to these sites earlier this week, after a Turkish police officer assassinated Russian Ambassador to Turkey Andrey Karlov in an art gallery in Ankara, claiming to want revenge for the Syrian Civil War.

In July, the UN Human Rights Council passed a non-binding resolution in opposition to the practice of limiting access to the Internet and sites like Facebook and Twitter, a move that Turkey supported at the time.

Google did not confirm reports that YouTube access has been blocked in Turkey, pointing to this site where the search giant reports service disruptions.

Twitter declined to comment on this story via email.

Facebook did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates and follow BuzzFeed News on Twitter.‏

Gustave Courbet, "A Burial At Ornans" (1849)

Via wikiart.org

Not every startup or tech product can succeed. And for these businesses, the venture capital finally ran out this year. Or people weren’t signing up. Or the product didn’t work. There are all kinds of reasons why some of your favorite apps, websites, gadgets, and services didn’t make it to 2017. For startups especially, failure isn’t uncommon; that usually happens 20 months after their last funding round and after they’ve raised $1.3 million, according to CB Insights.

So as Silicon Valley likes to say: Fail fast, fail often, and onto the next great disruption.

Pebble / Via blog.getpebble.com

1. Pebble

Pebble was the first company to make smartwatches mainstream by raising $10 million in 2012, and then $20 million in 2015, on Kickstarter. It sold more than 2 million watches. But it appears to have been ahead of its time. The wearable business in general didn’t take off as hoped, and Pebble struggled to raise money from investors. In December, the startup sold key parts of its business, including software and patents, to Fitbit, one of the few wearable makers still standing. One of the few solaces for early adopters: Fitbit says it won’t kill off Pebble’s services until 2018.

2. SpoonRocket

The on-demand meal and meal-kit business has been hot — take Blue Apron, which is valued at $2 billion and on track to deliver $1 billion in annual sales — but it’s also produced a few casualties. SpoonRocket, which delivered ready-made meals for about $10 under 10 minutes, got started in Y Combinator in 2013 and raised more than $13 million. But customers were left hungry when the startup shut down in May, saying that it couldn’t raise enough money to keep going.

youtube.com

3. Vine

Six seconds sounds short. But that turned out to be just long enough for some of the weirdest, funniest, most creative videos on the internet. We have Vine to thank for “eyebrows on fleek” and the eternal question “What are thoooose?” Vine’s existence as we know it, sadly, was short-lived: Twitter, which bought it for a rumored $30 million right before it officially launched in 2012, said in October it would shut it down to focus on live video instead. There is, however, a potentially happy epilogue: the service may come back to life, albeit in a different form, in 2017. Vine said this month it was working on a pared-down version of the app, Vine Camera, to be available in January.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed

4. Samsung

Some gadgets went up in metaphorical flames this year. Samsung’s flames, on the other hand, were literal. If you hopped on a plane this fall, you couldn’t miss the nationwide ban on the Galaxy Note7, which was at first widely heralded as one of the best smartphones ever made. That praise evaporated as customers discovered that their batteries tended to overheat and explode. Samsung then made the unprecedented decision to recall them all and permanently discontinue the gadget. But that wasn’t the end of the Korean tech giant’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year. It also recalled almost 3 million washing machines whose tops were blowing off and causing injuries, including — ouch — at least one broken jaw. Better luck in 2017?

Via talkshow.im

5. Talkshow

So many messaging apps tried to go up against Facebook and Snapchat in 2016, but the 800-pound gorillas (a collective 1,600-pound gorilla?) made it next to impossible for newcomers to gain traction. One example was Talkshow, developed by a former Twitter head of product, which displayed group messaging threads in public. In April, Mashable called it “the latest viral app the Internet is freaking out about.” By November, the company was calling it quits.

6. Paper

Two years ago, Facebook introduced Paper, a sleek and praised iOS app for reading articles. But Facebook went on to build Instant Articles, which let people read stories directly in the News Feed of Facebook’s original app. This summer, the company shuttered the standalone app, saying that “we’ve tried to take the best aspects of it and incorporate them” into the main app.

Scanadu / Via indiegogo.com

7. Scanadu

The pitch was straight out of Star Trek: a handheld “tricorder” that gave you your vital signs, from blood pressure to temperature, in seconds. Silicon Valley startup Scanadu, founded in 2010, was testing a prototype of its Scout device with the Scripps Translational Science Institute, and had raised $1.5 million from enthusiastic backers on Indiegogo. But in December, it notified customers that next year it will shut down the devices, which went from $149 to $269, to comply with federal regulations. That unexpected turn of events birthed a hashtag: #Scamadu.

Via web.archive.org

8. Washio

It sounded like a great idea for anyone who never learned how to do laundry, didn’t have time, or couldn’t scrounge up enough quarters. Washio launched in 2013 with backing from investors like Nas and Ashton Kutcher, and a brave, bold mission to “demolish laundry.” But despite reportedly dry-cleaning more than 1 million items, and washing and folding 21,000 tons of clothes, the business dried up and shut down in August.

Via blog.sunrise.am

9. Sunrise

Sunrise didn’t do anything wrong. It was a popular and easy-to-use calendar app. But after Microsoft bought it for more than $100 million, it was only a matter of time before it, er … sunset. The standalone app shut down in August, and its functions folded into Outlook’s email app. If that doesn’t cut it for you, here are a bunch of alternatives that are (almost) as good.

10. Shuddle

Busy parents used San Francisco-based Shuddle, which launched in 2014, to transport their kids around town, knowing that the drivers had undergone extensive background checks and could be tracked in real time. But the service abruptly ran out of money, and closed down in April.

Kirill Kudryavtsev / AFP / Getty Images

A database containing the personal information of thousands of Americans who have applied for Russian visas in the United States appears to have been hacked over the holiday weekend.

The person who claims to have breached the computer systems of the Russian Visa Center, who goes by the name Kapustkiy, shared a screenshot of the stolen information with BuzzFeed News. The screenshot contains the names, email addresses and phone numbers of dozens of people. Kapustkiy, who said he is part of a group called New World Hackers that assisted with the breach, claims he has the information tied to thousands more, but will not publicly disclose them. “I want administrators to secure their things better and understand the consequence of a data breach,” he said in a Twitter direct message.

Kapustkiy describes himself as an ethical hacker who finds vulnerabilities in websites. He said he is 17 years old.

BuzzFeed News attempted to contact every person listed in the screenshot. Five people confirmed that they have applied for Russian visas.

John Shoreman, an attorney for the Russian Visa Center, told BuzzFeed News that the personal contact information of thousands of visa center customers was likely exposed. Run by an American company called Invista Travel Logistics, the visa center helps Americans secure necessary travel documents to Russia, including setting up appointments for applicants to meet with Russian consulate officials. Shoreman said the appointment scheduling system was likely targeted.

“The security services are saying that the visa website itself was not hacked, but the calendar may very well be the subject of a hacking,” Shoreman told BuzzFeed News. “ILS shares a calendar of appointments with the consulate office of the Russian embassy and apparently that’s where these 3,000 names came from, it came from a calendar of appointments.”

Shoreman confirmed that at least some of the customers listed in the screenshot are Russian Visa Center customers, but he does not know if all the them are. The American customers swept up in the data breach could also be customers of other organizations.

“Certainly there are customers of ILS on that screenshot, I know that for a fact,” Shoreman said. "The question is are they all customers of ILS or are they people that are either customers of the embassy or customers of other visa expeditors who also have access to the system.”

The Russian Visa Center, which operates in Washington, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Houston will contact all of its customers — numbering in the tens of thousands — in the next 48 hours to notify them of the data breach, Shoreman said. Customers will be advised to change their email passwords and to look out for phishing scams.

According to Shoreman, the Russian Visa Center is also in the process of notifying the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

When reached over the holiday weekend, a spokesperson for the Russian embassy referred BuzzFeed News to the Russian Visa Center.

On the night of the hack, Kapustkiy claims he notified Homeland Security’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team, known as US-CERT, an organization that analyzes and responds to cyber threats. Kapustkiy provided BuzzFeed News with what appears to be a screenshot of a confirmation email from US-CERT. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.