A 140-character tweet (left) and one with 280 characters (right).

Twitter

Twitter’s 140-character limit could soon be toast.

The company is considering nixing its long-defining constraint in favor a new limit: 280 characters.

The change, which Twitter is currently testing globally with a small group, would apply to tweets in every language except Japanese, Chinese, and Korean — which already allow you to say more with fewer characters.

“We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on Twitter, so we're doing something new: we're going to try out a longer limit, 280 characters, in languages impacted by cramming,” Twitter said in a blog post.

The test is sure to provoke a strong reaction among Twitter’s hardcore users, who have a long history of reacting strongly to changes in the service’s fundamentals, such as Twitter’s decision to transform the timeline from reverse chronological order to one that’s algorithmically sorted.

“We understand since many of you have been Tweeting for years, there may be an emotional attachment to 140 characters – we felt it, too. But we tried this, saw the power of what it will do, and fell in love with this new, still brief, constraint,” Twitter said its blog post. “We want to try it out with a small group of people before we make a decision to launch to everyone.”

When Jack Dorsey became Twitter CEO in 2015, he declared a willingness to rethink the entire product to make it more appealing to the masses. "We continue to show a questioning of our fundamentals in order to make the product easier and more accessible to more people," Dorsey said in a July 2015 earnings call. He’s followed through on the promise, adding live video, introducing the algorithmic timeline, changing “faves” to “likes,” creating personalized article recommendations based on Twitter users’ networks, and more. A new character limit would follow the pattern.

Dorsey’s strategy has produced mixed results so far. Since he made the declaration about questioning Twitter’s fundamentals, the company’s stock has lost approximately half its value. But Twitter has added more than 10 million users since then.

The same tweet in different languages

Twitter

In Japan, whose language allows people to convey complex thoughts in a small number of characters, Twitter has outpaced Facebook. The company is clearly seizing upon lessons learned there as it tests these longer tweets. “Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people Tweeting in English, but it is not for those Tweeting in Japanese,” Twitter said. “In all markets, when people don’t have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare, we see more people Tweeting.”

Twitter / Via Twitter: @jneeley78

US Twitter is freaking out about a planned change to the service that will allow for 280-character tweets, like this one from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey:

Are you worried about living in a world where every tweet is that long? Then let me offer you some words of advice, sent from the future — or at least from a place where tweets have always been this long: Japan.

Thanks to the way the Japanese language works, you can sometimes say an entire word with a single character. Think of it like how you can say "pizza" with one emoji. Even if it's not always one word per character, you can definitely say a whole lot more in 140 than you can in English.

Take, for example, this tweet by Misato Nagoya, a lifestyle writer for BuzzFeed Japan:

It's exactly 140 characters, because we've mastered the art of writing things exactly 140 characters long in Japanese too. But here's how you'd translate it to English:

I don't want to go on a trip abroad, don't want a cute pet, don't want an expensive car, don't want fashionable clothes. Not at all. All I want is just to live in a comfortable home, cook by myself, and eat what I wanna eat. That's all. But it is not easy to make these tiny dreams come true. My life sucks.

That tweet is pretty depressing — trust me, Misato is fun in real life! — but it's also 307 characters long. And it's totally normal for Japanese Twitter.

Here's another one from Misato:

Again, exactly 140. (We're good at this.) In English:

If I have baby, I would love to raise with lots of love. BUT after real moms told me how hard it is, I think it is almost impossible for me. Too few kindergartens in the city to find a place to leave my kid. The difficulty of keeping a work-life balance. The high costs of raising kid including education. I am already overwhelmed doing things just for me. How could I take care of my child too? So all I can and should do now is to support moms who are raising children.

That's 471 characters!

But this is just how Twitter is in Japan, and we love it just as much as you do in the US. And we have just as many hilarious memes, weird Twitter subcultures, and massive cultural moments based on tweets as you guys do.

Twitter even seems to recognize that we don't need any more characters here — while they are testing the new 280-character option around the world, they are not offering it in Chinese, Korean, or Japanese, because we've all been living in the long-tweet future since Day 1.

Don't worry — it's fine here in the long-tweet future. You'll love it, or at least you'll only hate it as much as you hate Twitter already.

But it turns out Trump wasn't included in the 280-character test group, meaning that for now he's going to have to keep tweeting just like the rest of the haters and losers. Sad!

Trump in Cleveland in July 2016.

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

The new 280-character limit isn't for everyone. In a blog post, Twitter wrote that "we want to try it out with a small group of people before we make a decision to launch to everyone."

But Biz Stone, a cofounder of Twitter, tweeted Tuesday evening that Trump is not in the 280-character test group. A Twitter spokesperson later confirmed to BuzzFeed News that Trump was not included, explaining that the test group was selected at random.

Case in point: Trump has used Twitter this week to sustain his growing feud with NFL players who kneel during the national anthem before games. Since entering politics and winning the president, Trump has similarly used Twitter to lash out at a dizzying array enemies in both politics and popular culture.

His tweets regularly rack up thousands of retweets and end up screenshot and shared on cable news for days.

Trump also regularly uses Twitter to reveal his geopolitical priorities, often with controversial results.

Twitter / Via Twitter: @realDonaldTrump

On Monday, for example, Trump weighed in on the ongoing crisis in Puerto Rico, as the island grapples with the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. The president's tweets drew some criticism, however, for focusing on Wall Street and the electrical grid.

Trump has also tweeted about the escalating situation in North Korea, referring to dictator Kim Jong Un as "Little Rocket Man" and warning "they won't be around much longer!"

North Korea's foreign minister responded by saying that the tweet amounted to a declaration of war. Asked for comment on Trump's tweet — specifically if it
violates the company's terms of service — a Twitter spokesperson told
BuzzFeed News it "does not comment on individual accounts for privacy
and security reasons."

It's still unclear if the 280-character test will be expanded to all Twitter users — including Trump. So for now, the president will have to keep posting unthreaded tweetstorms about world leaders, natural disasters, and TV ratings.

LINK: Twitter Tests Doubling Its Character Limit To 280

LINK: Twitter Might Increase The Character Limit To 280 And People Responded With 2: "NO"

BuzzFeed News

Today at a surprise event in Seattle, Amazon unveiled five new Echo devices, including two new editions of its now-hallmark product, the voice-enabled Echo speaker

The baseline Echo will cost $100, which is significantly cheaper than the $180 version currently in stores. The company will also be offering a $150 Echo Plus, which is pre-programmed to be compatible with 100 different devices including smart lights and locks.

With its past devices including its Kindle e-reader, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has said that his company's goal is not to make money when the devices are sold, but rather when they're being used. In lowering the price of the Echo, Amazon seems to be taking a similar approach with a device that features its voice-controlled assistant Alexa.

"My kids and their kids will never know a day they couldn’t talk to [Alexa],” said Amazon senior vice president Dave Limp at today's launch event. Limp also revealed that there were more than 5,000 people working on Alexa and Alexa-enabled devices at the Seattle-based company.

The first images of the $100 Echo show what appears to be a shorter, wider cloth-covered cylinder that looks a bit more like a traditional speaker. That might be because the new Echo features updated audio components like a dedicated woofer and tweeter. The speaker will also have upgraded Dolby sound. According to Amazon, the device's voice recognition technology has also been given a second-generation upgrade.

The Echo Plus, is shaped like the previous version of the Echo speaker, and is taller than the new baseline version. When purchased, it will come with a Philips Hue smart bulb.

BuzzFeed News

In addition to its new speakers, Amazon launched a $35 speaker phone, dubbed the Echo Connect, that will allow users to make calls through Alexa with their home phone numbers. There is also a new Echo Button, which can be connected to an Echo via bluetooth and will let users play games, and the Echo Spot, a $130 round device with a video display that can show clock faces or security camera feeds.

The new Echo will be available starting today. And for those looking for a full home experience, the company will also be selling them in 3 packs at a $50 discount.

-With reporting from Mat Honan and Nicole Nguyen

Small Stuff for BuzzFeed News; Getty Images (4); Alamy (2)

The Smarter Lunchrooms Movement, a $22 million federally funded program that pushes healthy-eating strategies in almost 30,000 schools, is partly based on studies that contained flawed — or even missing — data.

The main scientist behind the work, Cornell University professor Brian Wansink, has made headlines for his research into the psychology of eating. His experiments have found, for example, that women who put cereal on their kitchen counters weigh more than those who don’t, and that people will pour more wine if they’re holding the glass than if it's sitting on a table. Over the past two decades he’s written two popular books and more than 100 research papers, and enjoyed widespread media coverage (including on BuzzFeed).

Yet over the past year, Wansink and his “Food and Brand Lab” have come under fire from scientists and statisticians who’ve spotted all sorts of red flags — including data inconsistencies, mathematical impossibilities, errors, duplications, exaggerations, eyebrow-raising interpretations, and instances of self-plagiarism — in 50 of his studies.

Journals have so far retracted three of these papers and corrected at least seven. Now, emails obtained by BuzzFeed News through public information requests reveal for the first time that Wansink and his Cornell colleague David Just are also in the process of correcting yet another study, “Attractive names sustain increased vegetable intake in schools,” published in Preventive Medicine in 2012.

The most recent retraction — a rare move typically seen as a black mark on a scientist’s reputation — happened last Thursday, when JAMA Pediatrics pulled a similar study, also from 2012, titled “Can branding improve school lunches?”

Brian Wansink in 2007.

Stan Honda / AFP / Getty Images

Both studies claimed that children are more likely to choose fruits and vegetables when they’re jazzed up, such as when carrots are called “X-Ray Vision Carrots” and when apples have Sesame Street stickers. The underlying theory is that fun, descriptive branding will not only make an eater more aware of the food, but will “also raise one’s taste expectations,” as the scientists explained in one of the papers.

The studies have been cited more than 75 times by others, according to Web of Science, and were funded by a grant of nearly $99,000 from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Healthy Eating Research program. The foundation told BuzzFeed News it hasn’t awarded him any grants since then.

The two studies have also been touted as evidence for the Smarter Lunchrooms Movement, cofounded by Wansink and Just in 2010. It promotes “simple evidence-based strategies” to encourage students to make healthy choices, participate in federally subsidized lunch programs, and waste less food. The USDA has funded $8.4 million in research grants related to the program to date, according to an agency spokesperson. Since 2014, it’s also awarded nearly $14 million in training grants. Almost 30,000 schools have adopted those techniques, and the government pays each one up to $2,000 for doing so. (The program says it’s also funded by Target and Wansink’s Cornell lab.)

One of the program’s recommendations is that school cafeterias feature a fruit or vegetable of the day and label it with “a creative, descriptive name.” Suggestions include “orange squeezers,” “monkey phones (bananas),” “snappy apples,” “cool-as-a-cucumber slices,” and “sweetie pie sweet potatoes.” Branding food in this way “can increase consumption by over 30%,” according to the program’s website. As proof, the Smarter Lunchrooms Movement cites the JAMA Pediatrics and Preventive Medicine studies, among others.

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The USDA told BuzzFeed News that it has been talking to Cornell’s Center for Behavioral Economics in Child Nutrition Programs (the BEN Center), which administers the Smarter Lunchrooms Movement, about some of the allegedly flawed research. The agency “believes that scientific integrity is important, and that program and policy decisions should be based on strong evidence,” wrote USDA spokesperson Amanda Heitkamp.

“We have discussed these concerns with the BEN Center, and they have plans to address them in consultation with the Cornell University Office of Research Integrity and Assurance,” Heitkamp said. But the evidence behind the Smarter Lunchrooms Movement, she noted, comes from other work as well. “Smarter Lunchroom strategies are based upon widely researched principles of behavioral economics, as well as a strong body of practice that supports their ongoing use.”

A spokesperson for the Smarter Lunchrooms Movement echoed this sentiment, pointing to studies done by non-Cornell researchers that support the program’s strategies.

Cornell and Wansink did not return requests for comment, and Just declined to speak with BuzzFeed News. In previous public comments, Wansink dismissed some of the errors as minor and inconsequential to the studies’ overall conclusions. He also claimed that his studies have been replicated by other researchers. “One reason some of these findings are cited so much is because other researchers find the same types of results,” he told Retraction Watch in February. In March, he told the Chronicle of Higher Education that field studies should be taken with a grain of salt, as opposed to research done in a controlled setting like a laboratory. “Science is messy in a lot of ways,” he said.

But his critics take these problems very seriously, pointing out how rapidly his research has been adopted into the real world.

“It’s not sufficient evidence to roll out interventions in thousands of schools, in my opinion,” said Eric Robinson, a behavioral scientist at the University of Liverpool, who has found that several of Wansink’s studies cited by the Smarter Lunchrooms Movement made the strategies sound more effective than the data showed.

Others are disappointed that Wansink has, by and large, failed to adequately address most of the alleged mistakes — particularly when the entire field of psychological research is being dissected for studies that fail to hold up in repeat experiments.

Tim van der Zee, a graduate student at Leiden University in the Netherlands and one of the first researchers to spot errors in Wansink’s work, said that aside from correcting and sharing data for a handful of the challenged papers, the professor, his coauthors, and Cornell “remain inexplicably hidden in silence.”

“One of the fundamental principles of the scientific method is transparency — to conduct research in a way that can be assessed, verified, and reproduced,” he told BuzzFeed News. “This is not optional — it is imperative.”

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Wansink began drawing scrutiny last November when, in a now-deleted blog post, he praised a grad student for taking the data from a “failed study” of an all-you-can-eat Italian lunch buffet and reanalyzing it multiple times until she came up with interesting results. These findings — that, for example, men overeat when women are around — eventually resulted in a series of published studies about pizza consumption.

To outside scientists, it reeked of statistical manipulation — that the data had been sliced and diced so much that the results were just false positives. It’s a problem that has cropped up again and again in social science research, and that a growing number of scientists are trying to address by replicating studies and calling out errors on social media.

Over the winter, van der Zee saw that Wansink’s blog post was accruing dozens of disapproving comments. He teamed up with two other scientists who were similarly intrigued: Nicholas Brown, also a graduate student in the Netherlands, and Jordan Anaya, a computational biologist in Virginia. At first they exchanged emails with Wansink about apparent errors in four of the pizza papers, van der Zee said. But when he stopped replying to them, they decided to go public with the 150 errors they’d found in the four papers. Then Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University, accused Wansink’s lab of manipulating the data — or using “junk science,” in his words — to dress up their conclusions.

These critiques soon captured journalists’ attention. In early February, Retraction Watch interviewed Wansink about his disputed work, and New York magazine declared that “A Popular Diet-Science Lab Has Been Publishing Really Shoddy Research.”

The next day, Wansink wrote an email to more than 40 friends and collaborators with the subject line “Moving forward after Pizza Gate.” He called the barrage of criticism “cyber-bullying,” and seemed to dismiss the errors, explaining that most stemmed from “missing data, rounding errors, and [some numbers] being off by 1 or 2.”

He told the other scientists that the mistakes didn’t change the conclusions of the four papers, and sought to reassure them that they were on the right side of history.

“For a group of people who are so innovative, so hard-working, and who try so tirelessly to make the world healthier, this could be disheartening,” he wrote. “Fortunately, we have too many other great ideas and solutions that keep our eyes fixed on the horizon in front of us.”

The horizon, as it turned out, was darker than he anticipated, as shown in dozens of emails between Wansink and collaborators who work at public universities, obtained via records requests by BuzzFeed News.

After helping to dissect the pizza papers, Brown turned his sights on the now-retracted “Can branding improve school lunches?”

The study claimed that elementary school students were more likely to choose an apple instead of a cookie if the apple had an Elmo sticker on it. The takeaway: Popular brands and cartoons could successfully promote healthy fare over junk food.

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In a blog post, Brown expressed concern about how the data had been crunched, and confusion about how exactly the experiment had worked. He noted that a bar graph looked much different in an earlier version. And, he pointed out, the scientists had said their findings could help “preliterate” children — which seemed odd, since the children in the study were ages 8 to 11.

In yet more scathing blog posts, Anaya and data scientist James Heathers pointed out mistakes and inconsistencies in the Preventive Medicine study, “Attractive names sustain increased vegetable intake in schools,” which claimed that elementary school students ate more carrots when the vegetables were dubbed “X-ray Vision Carrots.”

Both papers were written by Wansink and Just, as well as Collin Payne, an associate professor of marketing at New Mexico State University. (Payne declined to comment.)

Wansink wrote to his coauthors and a few others who had helped with the papers on Feb. 21: “Back here in Ithaca we’re busy with a bunch of crazy stuff.”

“One of the things we’re facing is people challenging some of our old papers,” Wansink wrote. “What our critics want to do is to show there [sic] are bogus so they can challenge all of the Smarter Lunchrooms policies.”

But there was a problem: He couldn’t find the data for either study. “We can’t seem to find them,” he wrote. “Any chance you have them in any files.”

The following week, Brown blogged about several papers in which Wansink appeared to have plagiarized from his previous work, and New York magazine wrote about it. Wansink wrote an apologetic email to several deans at Cornell, trying to explain the “newest saga.” He admitted that there were duplications, but believed them all to be justified, saying at one point that certain paragraphs were “important enough to be repeated.”

“For someone who’s been a noncontroversial person for 56 years, this has been an upsetting month, and I’m ashamed of the difficulties it has given you, and our great Dyson School, College, and University,” Wansink wrote.

"All the numbers seem to be within one baby carrot of each other."

Stephen Lam / Reuters

Facebook, Twitter and Google officials have been called to testify publicly before the Senate Intelligence Committee on November 1 about Russian attempts to use social media to sway last year’s presidential election after Facebook revealed that a Russian troll operation had purchased more than 3,000 political ads on the platform.

The news, first reported by Recode, was confirmed to BuzzFeed News by a source familiar with the matter.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, which is leading congressional investigations into Russian election interference, has increased its scrutiny of Facebook, in particular, following its disclosure earlier this month that fake accounts and pages on the site linked to a Russian troll farm spent approximately $100,000 on political ads during the presidential race.

A person familiar with the situation said that Facebook is considering the invitation, but has not decided which executives to send to the hearing. Representatives for Google and Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Sen. Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, declined to confirm the invitations to reporters on Wednesday, but said he had spoken to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently. Rep. Adam Schiff, the lead Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said he had also spoken with Zuckerberg.

Burr said Tuesday members want to hear from someone at Facebook during the public hearing who can speak about “what they need to do to identify foreign money that might come in and what procedures, if any, should be put in law to make sure that elections are not intruded by foreign entities."

“Clearly it's the bigger companies that we think might have been used and we're working with them to acquire the type of data that we need to look at a public hearing,” Burr told reporters.

The planned public hearing, during which senators will grill officials from all three companies, comes as Facebook is under fire for allowing advertisers to target anti-Semitic interests and being slow to acknowledge efforts by foreign actors to manipulate the 2016 election using the social media platform. Some Democratic senators are reportedly already working on legislation to require greater ad transparency from Facebook and others.

Facebook announced last week that it would give both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees copies of the more than 3,000 Russia-linked ads. When asked on Tuesday if he had seen the ads, Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the committee, said: "Soon. Really soon. This week soon."

Burr declined to say whether he had viewed the ads, but he said the committee has “traded a lot of documents with Facebook” and that the social media giant has “been incredibly helpful to us.”

Burr added that the committee is in conversation “with everybody in the social platform arena that we think can provide us insight into whether there was any foreign manipulation of their sites.”

“I think their actions just last week indicate that they believe that it's important to get out in front of this and share as much of it as possible," Burr said of Facebook.

Facebook announced last week it would publicly display so-called “dark posts,” which advertisers buy to promote to specific audiences but that remain concealed from the broader public. “We will work with others to create a new standard for transparency in online political ads,” Zuckerberg said in a live video address announcing the move, among others measures the company is taking in an attempt to increase transparency.

Asked if it, too, would reveal dark posts, Twitter told BuzzFeed News it has nothing new to announce.

The plan to hold a open hearing with Facebook, Twitter and Google comes as the panel is expected to begin publicly interviewing select high-profile witnesses in October, including Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s longtime personal lawyer.

Drew Angerer / Getty Images

Donald Trump took to Twitter. Mark Zuckerberg responded on Facebook.

On Wednesday, the Facebook CEO responded to the president's comments that his company "was always anti-Trump" with a bulleted statement that attempted to downplay the notion that the social network influenced the 2016 election for either party.

"The facts suggest the greatest role Facebook played in the 2016 election was different from what most are saying," Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook.

It's been a contentious month for Facebook after the company acknowledged efforts by foreign entities to manipulate the race on its platform by buying targeted ads. Last week, the company said it would have copies of more than 3,000 ads with ties to Russian actors to give to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, with Zuckerberg announcing a new policy with for advertising so-called dark posts. On Wednesday, the company, along with Google and Twitter, were invited to testify in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Nov. 1.

A source close to Facebook confirmed that the company had received the invite, but that it had not decided who to send in front of the committee.

"Trump says Facebook is against him," wrote Zuckerberg. "Liberals say we helped Trump. Both sides are upset about ideas and content they don't like. That's what running a platform for all ideas looks like.

Earlier on Wednesday, Trump wrote in the first of a two-part tweet that Facebook had been opposed to his candidacy: "Facebook was always anti-Trump," he said. "The Networks were always anti-Trump hence,Fake News, @nytimes(apologized) & @WaPo were anti-Trump. Collusion?"

@realDonaldTrump / Twitter / Via Twitter: @realDonaldTrump

In his post, Zuckerberg attempted to outline the positives that his company brought to the election. He noted that "more people had a voice in this election than ever before" because of Facebook and notes that all the candidates had Facebook pages through which they interacted with tens of millions of followers. The post, however, made no mention of the fake news and information that the platform helped to proliferate.

"After the election, I made a comment that I thought the idea misinformation on Facebook changed the outcome of the election was a crazy idea," Zuckerberg wrote. "Calling that crazy was dismissive and I regret it. This is too important an issue to be dismissive."

The Facebook CEO also hinted that he may be in favor of campaign spending reforms for online advertising. "Campaigns spent hundreds of millions advertising online to get their messages out even further. That's 1000x more than any problematic ads we've found," he said.

Since the election, Zuckerberg has stayed out of Trump's orbit. In December, during a meeting of technology leaders at Manhattan's Trump Tower, Facebook opted to send Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg to sit down with the then-president-elect. He also did not attend a similar meeting for technology leaders in June at the White House, with the company reportedly citing "scheduling conflicts" at the time.

Zuckerberg has also largely avoided saying Trump's name in public settings. He discussed "fearful voices calling for building walls" at a keynote for the company's F8 conference in April 2016 and made a veiled criticism at the presidential administration's approach to immigration at Harvard University's May commencement, but did not mention the president's name at either event. Similarly in a Facebook post criticizing the president's decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy, he did not name Trump.

It remains to be seen if Zuckerberg or another representative for Facebook will testify in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee in November.

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Mark Zuckerberg / Facebook / Via Facebook: zuck

Paul Sakuma / AP

Three Facebook users are challenging newly disclosed search warrants for their account information, arguing that the warrants are overbroad and would chill political activists from engaging in constitutionally protected speech online.

Federal prosecutors obtained search warrants in February seeking a broad range of information from Facebook about the three accounts over an approximately 90-day period. A judge initially blocked Facebook from telling users about the warrants at the government’s request, but federal prosecutors this month dropped the secrecy demand after Facebook and civil liberties and electronic privacy groups challenged the gag orders.

Now that the account holders know the government wants their information, they’re going to court.

Lacy MacAuley, one of the account holders, told BuzzFeed News it was a “total shock” to get an email from Facebook about a week and a half ago alerting her to the warrant for her account. She called the warrant, issued by the US attorney's office in Washington, DC, an “absolutely ridiculous invasion of privacy” and a “really dangerous move towards fascism.”

“Jeff Sessions doesn’t need to see my family photos. Jeff Sessions doesn’t need to see my conversations with a romantic partner. Jeff Sessions does not need to see people sending me their private information,” she said.

Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia, the account holders filed papers on Thursday asking a judge to either quash the warrants or, if the judge isn’t willing to go that far, order that an independent “special master” search the records instead of law enforcement officials.

ACLU attorney Scott Michelman told BuzzFeed News that the case is about more than the privacy and constitutional rights of the three Facebook users. At stake is how much leeway prosecutors have in an array of cases to sift through the vast amount of personal information stored on sites like Facebook, he said.

“The warrants at issue authorize precisely the type of fishing expedition that the Fourth Amendment prohibits,” Michelman said. “A huge quantity of information, both personal information about communications with romantic partners, and medical and psychiatric information and family photos, will be released. And equally if not more troubling ... the political associations and political activities of both the users and third parties with whom they communicate, will also be revealed.”

A spokesman for the US attorney’s office in Washington declined to comment.

Thursday’s filings reveal for the first time what was suspected when BuzzFeed News first reported the gag order fight in July — that the February warrants relate to the criminal prosecution of people arrested at protests in Washington, DC, during President Donald Trump’s inauguration. According to the search warrants, which were previously under seal but included in the ACLU’s court papers, prosecutors are seeking any information that relates to alleged rioting on Jan. 20.

Facebook does not object to the account holders' motion to quash the search warrants, according to the ACLU’s court papers.

More than 200 people were arrested in downtown Washington on Jan. 20 and charged with felony rioting and property destruction. According to the government, the alleged riots caused more than $100,000 in property damage. Just under 200 cases are still pending. The defendants will be tried in small groups, with the first trial scheduled to start in November.

As the government and defense lawyers prepare for the first trial, though, prosecutors are still fighting in court over whether and to what extent they can search electronic information related to the protests and the arrests.

In the Facebook case, two of the accounts belong to individuals involved in planning Inauguration Day protests, MacAuley and Legba Carrefour. Neither has been criminally charged in connection with the Jan. 20 arrests. The third account is called disruptj20, and it served as a hub for organizing anti-Trump protests on Jan. 20. According to court papers, the disruptj20 page is owned by Emmelia Talarico, who also is not facing criminal charges.

Prosecutors want to use what’s known as the “two-step” process to access and search the Facebook accounts. Under that protocol, law enforcement would get access to a large cache of records — which may include information outside the scope of the search warrant — and then conduct a targeted search for information that does fall under the warrant to seize.

Prosecutors separately have been fighting in court over a search warrant for information from a website that was used to coordinate anti-Trump protests on Inauguration Day. A judge ruled that prosecutors can use the two-step process in that effort, but only after the judge approves their search procedures, given the free speech-related issues at play. The judge also said that he would require the government to submit for his review a list of records that they believed would fall under the search warrant to seize.

The government and the company that hosts the website, Dreamhost Inc., are still litigating over the search plan proposed by prosecutors.

In the Facebook case, the ACLU isn’t challenging the two-step process as a whole, but is arguing that in cases that implicate political speech, there should be limits on what information prosecutors have access to, how they search it, how they store it, and how long they can keep it. If Facebook complies with the warrants, the records it would produce to the government to search would include users' messages, posts, photos, personal information, and connections with other accounts, as well as information on people who liked or otherwise interacted with the disruptj20 page.

Michelman said that it was difficult to say what combination of safeguards would satisfy his clients, but that it was the government’s burden to come up with a plan that satisfies the Fourth Amendment’s requirement that searches be narrowly tailored to information that the government has probable cause to seize.

“In light of the increasing ubiquity of social media and electronic communication, these types of demands will only increase,” Michelman said. “It’s vital if courts are going to preserve the Fourth Amendment’s role in prohibiting government fishing expeditions, that they impose some constraints on the government’s authority at this stage, before government rummaging through electronic accounts becomes commonplace and accepted practice.”

BuzzFeed News; Alamy

As ad dollars that used to fund journalism pour into the coffers of Facebook and Google, the information business is experiencing a trend familiar to other American industries: The product they produce is now competing with cheaper versions coming from overseas.

Content farmers in the Philippines, Pakistan, Macedonia (of course), and beyond are launching websites and Facebook pages aimed at Americans in niches such as politics, mental health, marijuana, American muscle cars, and more.

Based on Facebook engagement and other metrics, some of these overseas publishers are now beating their American counterparts. In the process they’re building an industry centered on producing and exporting cheap (and sometimes false) information targeted at the US.

“This is like all of the basic stuff happening in economics and politics today,” said Tyson Barker, a political economist with the Aspen Institute Germany who specializes in international economic policy. “It's a globalization trend and you've seen it also in manufacturing and other industries.”

Americans and others in the English-language world are used to buying clothing and other products with labels that say “Made in China” or “Made in Bangladesh.” Thanks to the rise of platforms like Facebook and Google, a growing amount of the information being served up in English is now coming from overseas as, albeit without the same kind of labeling.

Facebook

One surprising area where the impact of this trend is being felt is with Native American news and content.

A few weeks ago, Indian Country Today Media Network, an online and print publisher for Native Americans, announced that it was suspending operations due to the lack of a sustainable business model.

“ICTMN has faced the same challenges that other media outlets have faced,” said a letter from publisher Ray Halbritter. “It is no secret that with the rise of the Internet, traditional publishing outlets have faced unprecedented adversity.”

But while ICTMN had to stop operations, a raft of overseas-based publishers of content about Native Americans continue to forge ahead and experience growth and revenue primarily thanks to Facebook.

TheNativePeople.net, which has two associated Facebook pages with close to half a million fans between them, is run by a man in Kosovo. The website TheIndigenousAmericans.com also pumps out Native American news for visitors coming from its Indigenous People Of America Facebook page, which is approaching 1 million fans, almost twice the number of ICTMN’s. The page has experienced steady growth: It added roughly 200,000 new fans since BuzzFeed News first wrote about it in a December story that identified a slew of Native American publishers based in Kosovo and Vietnam.

A Vietnamese publisher runs WelcomeNative.com and YesWeNative.com, two sites promoted by the Yes We Native Magazine Facebook page, which has more than 350,000 fans. The page says its owner is based in San Francisco, but domain ownership records list the owner as a person named Minh Nhat Tran of Hanoi. Domain owners can list whatever name and location they want in registration records; however, the email address used for both domains has also been listed as the contact for job postings in Vietnam for graphic designers and Facebook page managers, further showing a link to Vietnam. The same person also runs an American news site called USANewToday.com.

Some of the Native American pages and websites earn money from advertising on articles. Many also operate online stores where they sell T-shirts with Native American designs, as well as clothing, mugs, and other items. As reported by BuzzFeed News, these designs are often stolen from actual Native American artists.

“These pages are taking our work and paying for the sponsored posts on Facebook and making tons of money off of us,” said Aaron Silva, the Native American cofounder of The NTVS, a clothing brand in Minnesota.

BuzzFeed News has identified other online publishers in countries including Macedonia, Pakistan, Georgia, Croatia, India, and the Philippines that produce information aimed primarily at US audiences.

“It's clear that those foreign publishers have developed avenues and methods to get their content into the American traffic flow,” said Sarah Thompson, an Indiana woman who operates the Exploiting the Niche Facebook page.

When not homeschooling her children, she hunts down scammers and clickbait artists who target niche information topics. Many of them turn out to be based overseas, she told BuzzFeed News. When asked to name some of the topics where this is the case, she rattled off a list.

“The US military and veterans are popular themes as well as police and police dogs. Anything with animals, animal abuse, wild animals, beautiful nature, flowers, Native Americans, Christianity,” she said. “Really, it could be anything. Any subject I have looked into I have found the corrupt pockets where that community is being exploited.”

Jason Kint, the CEO of Digital Content Next, an alliance of large digital publishers, told BuzzFeed News the current economics of online content often favor people who excel at gaming platforms, rather than media brands doing reporting and original content creation.

“If proper trust frameworks aren't in place to ensure consumer and advertiser trust, then the automation/farming of the content will move to the lowest cost, ethics, laws available,” he said.

Native American publishers aren’t the only ones competing with — and sometimes losing out to — overseas publishers in a niche aimed at people in the US. As previously reported by BuzzFeed News, the town of Veles, Macedonia, is home to dozens of websites targeting American conservatives which often publish fake news. A recent BuzzFeed News analysis of partisan political news websites and Facebook pages revealed that a page run by a 20-year-old in Macedonia outperforms many of the biggest conservative news Facebook pages run by Americans. BuzzFeed News has also found publishers in Kosovo and Georgia that publish (often fake) news crafted for American conservatives.

Facebook

Health is another niche attracting overseas publishers. According to domain ownership records from DomainTools, a man in Pakistan named “Kashif Shahzad” owns over 200 domain names, several of which focus on mental health and related topics, including MedicalHealthRecords.us, HealthTimes.info, and GeneralHealthcare.co. Another of his sites, GreatAmericans.world, focuses on fibromyalgia and is heavily promoted from a Facebook page called US Health Care. He also owns DailyMedicalNews.co, which is promoted by a Facebook page called Depression Awareness with close to half a million fans. BuzzFeed News contacted him at the email address listed in his domain registrations but did not receive a reply.

One way the (often plagiarized) content from this network of sites spreads is to have fake Facebook accounts share it in Facebook groups about health topics. Thompson pointed BuzzFeed News to several accounts that were part of a group of interconnected profiles that consistently share articles from the same health sites into Facebook groups. Some of the accounts are also administrators of these groups, which focus on mental health, fibromyalgia, addiction, and medical marijuana, among other topics. Along with the fake accounts, some groups, such as this one about marijuana, have administrators based in Pakistan.

One suspicious account with the name Rabia Anwar is a member of seven Facebook groups about marijuana and five dedicated to fibromyalgia. The account’s profile features a photo of a woman, but earlier photos posted on its timeline clearly show it originally belonged to a man. (The account info is also set to male.) The profile also prominently presents the photo of a Pakistani actress and her family as if it depicts the person behind the account.

Since August, the account’s public posting activity consists entirely of sharing new articles from the network of health sites run from Pakistan into Facebook groups.

Facebook

Thompson was most alarmed when she identified what she believes are fake Facebook accounts that are active in Facebook groups and present themselves as recovering drug addicts. These accounts repeatedly share content from overseas publishers.

“The thought of these spamming bots infiltrating a support group of recovering addicts made me so mad,” she said. “Some clickbaiter thousands of miles away is violating the trust and privacy these communities afford to each other for mere pennies per click.”

Along with the violation of trust, Thompson is concerned that many overseas publishers in the health vertical simply copy and paste whatever information will grab attention, which can often be false claims about new cures, or misleading health warnings.

“They could be giving them bad information, distracting them from proven treatments with snake oil spam, eroding their trust in their doctor, or even giving them bad information that could harm them,” she said. “It's not a joke, it’s not harmless. The heroin epidemic in the Midwest where I live is really bad. Lots of people are dying.”

Health is also a focus for Macedonian publishers. Wired magazine reported on Aleksandar and Borce Velkovski, two brothers who got rich from HealthyFoodHouse.com, a website filled with health tips and recipes. BuzzFeed News also found dozens of health-focused domain names registered to people in Macedonia.

That country is in fact home to a cottage industry of websites focused on motorcycles, American muscle cars, horses, and other topics.

The glut of English-language publishers in Macedonia is partly thanks to a man named Mirko Ceselkoski. More than a decade ago, he figured out how to make money by running websites about cars and other niche topics aimed at Americans. When he met with BuzzFeed News in July in Skopje, Ceselkoski provided a business card that described him as “The Man Who Helped Donald Trump Win US Elections (me and my students from Veles).”

Ceselkoski claims credit for Trump’s win because many of the young publishers in Veles took a course he offers on how to make money with English-language websites. Ceselkoski charged $425, which is roughly equivalent to the average monthly salary in the country.

“I was instructing my students that they should write news aimed at American people,” Ceselkoski said.

He denies telling students to publish fake news, but does instruct them to copy a few paragraphs from a story that’s performing well on Facebook and create a new story from that. It's the content equivalent of an overseas factory pumping out knockoffs of the latest fashion trend.

ICTMN / The Indigenous American

Plagiarism is a standard tactic of low-quality overseas publishers. All of the content BuzzFeed News reviewed on the health sites run from Pakistan was stolen from other websites. (There was even one story about antidepressants stolen from BuzzFeed.)

The same is true for players in the Native American niche. TheIndigenousAmericans.com recently featured a Q&A with actor Adam Beach. That interview was stolen word-for-word from Indian Country Today Media Network.

The same plagiarism frequently occurs in the world of fake political news, too. As previously detailed by BuzzFeed News, multiple publishers in Macedonia, Kosovo, Bulgaria, and Georgia plagiarize the fake articles published on a group of websites run by a man in Maine. The man, Christopher Blair, calls himself a liberal troll and claims he publishes the fake stories — such as “BREAKING: Hillary Clinton Personally Funded Antifa Terrorists With $7.1 Million Bankroll” — to expose the ignorance of American conservatives. After months of having his content stolen, he managed to get some of their websites and Facebook pages shut down.

“They will copy, paste, and post as many times in a day as they can. They steal content from pages with a lot of shares,” he said.

Sometimes overseas publishers mix their topics to puzzling effect. A website called USMedicalCouncil.com shows new visitors a pop-up message to like the Fibro & Chronic Pain Center Facebook page. That page constantly posts articles connected to health spammers in Pakistan. However, USMedicalCouncil.com recently switched topics and now posts hyperpartisan political stories. One of its most recent is a completely false story alleging incest in the Trump family.

Facebook

TheNativePeople.net, which is run from Kosovo, is just as likely to publish a list of "home remedies" to help with clogged arteries, which itself is an article copied from a health site run by a Macedonian, according to domain registration records.

But not all overseas publishers working in English operate at the lowest end of the value chain. Bored Panda publishes viral content about art, design, and other topics. It frequently works with the original artists to create stories. The company was founded in Lithuania, and that’s where the majority of its staff is based. Owner Tomas Banisauskas did not respond to interview requests from BuzzFeed News, but he did publish a post on Medium titled “How we built a global media business with $5/month.” The $5 in question is the cost of his initial web hosting bill.

“I was laser-focused on profits from day one,” wrote Banisauskas, who studied business at Vilnius University. “The idea was to create content that people would share on social networks, which would bring free traffic back to my website. All this traffic then could be monetised with AdSense banners.”

He said Bored Panda succeeded by focusing on publishing a smaller number of quality posts, rather than churning out a large number each day. This, and what he said was a decision to avoid using clickbait headlines, helped his site avoid a crash in traffic that hit viral sites such as Upworthy when Facebook changed its algorithm, according to Banisauskas.

Bored Panda

BuzzFeed News / Getty Images

On Thursday morning, Twitter Vice President for Public Policy Colin Crowell met with the House and Senate Intelligence committees about the company's potential involvement with Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Among the information Crowell shared was that the company found around 200 accounts that seem to be linked to the same Russian groups that purchased roughly $100,000 of ads on Facebook to sway Americans and create divisions during the 2016 election. Twitter also revealed that of the 450 malicious accounts shared by Facebook, 22 had corresponding Twitter accounts. Many, Twitter, said, had already been shuttered by the network.

The company also shared information on the Russian television and media organization RT after the company was singled out by intelligence agencies for its ties to the Russian government. Twitter told the committees that three RT accounts spent $274,100 in US ads in targeted US markets in 2016. Twitter said that most of these accounts were "directed at followers of mainstream media and primarily promoted RT Tweets regarding news stories."

While Twitter itself notes that there's plenty the company cannot share (due to security and potential exploits by bad actors), a few of the numbers released by the company detail the scale of the problem on Twitter (of which foreign bots are part of). Including:

- "On average, our automated systems catch more than 3.2 million suspicious accounts globally per week — more than double the amount we detected this time last year. "

- Twitter's automated tools "catch about 450,000 suspicious logins per day."

- Twitter notes the prevalence of spam from single suspicious entities, noting that it stopped "more than 5.7 million spammy follows from a single source just last week (9/21/2017)."

- According to Twitter, since "June 2017, we’ve suspended more than 117,000 malicious applications for abusing our API, collectively responsible for more than 1.5 billion low-quality Tweets this year."

But Twitter's disclosures did not impress some lawmakers. After the meeting, Sen. Mark Warner, the lead Democrat on the committee, told reporters the discussion was "deeply disappointing," calling Twitter's presentation "inadequate" in almost every way.

"The presentation that the Twitter team made to the Senate Intel staff today was deeply disappointing," Warner said. "The notion that their work was basically derivative based upon accounts that Facebook had identified showed an enormous lack of understanding from the Twitter team of how serious this issue is, the threat it poses to democratic institutions, and again begs many more questions than they offered. Their response was frankly inadequate on almost every level."

"I'm more than a bit surprised, in light of all the public interest in this subject over the last few weeks, that anyone from the Twitter team would think that the presentation they made to the Senate staff today even began to answer the kind of questions that we had asked," Warner added.

He said the need for Twitter to come before the committee in an open hearing "becomes all that more important" now.

That will likely happen soon. This week, the Senate Intelligence Committee invited Google, Facebook, and Twitter to testify in public on November 1.

iPhone 8 Plus

Mark Lennihan / AP

Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai urged Apple on Thursday to activate the hidden FM radio inside many of its iPhone models, framing the radio functionality as a matter of public safety in the wake of recent disasters that have plagued the US and Puerto Rico.

"It is time for Apple to step up to the plate and put the safety of the American people first," Pai said in a statement. "Apple is the one major phone manufacturer that has resisted doing so. But I hope the company will reconsider its position, given the devastation wrought by Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria."

Samsung, LG, Motorola, and HTC all sell devices with functional FM radios, according to the radio streaming app Nextradio. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has also argued for enabling the FM radio chips present in many smartphones.

In his statement, Pai pointed to a Sept. 14 editorial in the Florida newspaper Sun Sentinel that argued for the same point: "Given our nation’s dependence on cell phones, the smartphone’s FM switch is a public safety issue."

iPhone X

Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP

In response Thursday, Apple said in a statement that its newer models do not support the radio functionality.

"iPhone 7 and iPhone 8 models do not have FM radio chips in them nor do they have antennas designed to support FM signals, so it is not possible to enable FM reception in these products," an Apple spokesperson said.

Apple did not comment on devices that preceded the iPhone 7 and 8 or other models it continues to sell, including the iPhone SE. It's also unclear how easy such an undertaking would be for Apple, and neither side went into specifics about how the company would activate the FM chips.

"Apple cares deeply about the safety of our users, especially during times of crisis and that’s why we have engineered modern safety solutions into our products," it continued. "Users can dial emergency services and access Medical ID card information directly from the Lock Screen, and we enable government emergency notifications, ranging from Weather Advisories to AMBER alerts."

Apple may have kept the FM chip inside its iPhone models deactivated to aid its own music store and streaming service, but as the Sun Sentinel pointed out: "Our app and streaming addictions won’t disappear if we have the option of listening to FM radio. That’s why our earbuds are plugged into an iPhone, not a Walkman."

The FCC chairman has advocated for the activation of the FM chip before. In his statement, he noted that his first public speech as chairman urged cell phone companies to enable the functionality.

John Paczkowski contributed to this report.

Earlier today, some YouTube content creators got pissed. Really pissed.

They were (wrongly, it turns out) under the impression that in order to link to Patreon crowdfunding accounts or other personal websites from inside their videos, YouTube was going to require them to run ads.

But YouTube says it’s not requiring content creators to run ads, it’s only requiring them to join the YouTube Partner Program, which enables the possibility of running ads, but doesn’t require it.

Google says the new rules only apply to future content, not content that’s already been posted to YouTube. The purpose of the change, a spokesperson told BuzzFeed News via email, is to “curb abuse.” Asked what kind of end-link abuse Google is trying to curb, Google pointed to its community guidelines, which encourages users to follow “common-sense rules” and not post pornography, graphic violent content, hate speech, threats, copyright infringement, or content that encourage dangerous behavior. The idea is that, by requiring content creators to join the YouTube Partner Program, YouTube will have greater insight into what outside sites creators are linking to.

But some content creators are skeptical that curbing abuse is Google’s real reason for introducing the new requirement. In the past year, YouTube has taken steps to limit the kinds of content creators can monetize, a move which upset a number of users. That Google is now seizing more control over creators rubs some of them the wrong way.

“People hate YouTube,” said Victoria Rose, who runs gaming website Flying Courier, via DM. “YouTube’s been cutting off/restricting monetization, so people like something new to be mad at.”

As an alternative, content creators can still link to their Patreons (or their Etsy pages or Twitch sites or MySpace profiles) in their videos’ description boxes without becoming partners. They only have to join the program if they want to use the popular “end links” that pop up at the end of videos, and which content creators say are more effective. (Asked why end links are preferred to links in the description box, YouTuber Ian Danskin told BuzzFeed News via DM “Heh, because people actually click them.”)

What's an end link?

YouTubers were so worked up about this change because end links help some YouTube content creators grow their fan bases and make a significant amount of money on crowdfunding sites like Patreon.

If content creators want to use these end links, however, they are now required to join the YouTube Partner Program and turn on monetization. Google says that creators can choose which ads to monetize and have the option of not running ads on any videos.

The new rules also have a small catch: YouTube content creators with fewer than 10,000 total views across their channels were banned from joining the partner program back in April. At the time, Google said it was restricting access to the program in order to prevent copycat channels from making money off of stolen content. But the new rule requiring creators to join the partner program if they want to use end links effectively means that creators with smaller viewerships can’t use the end links at all, because their channels are too small to be allowed in the partner program. It’s a catch-22 that could make it harder for small-timers to grow their audiences anywhere other than YouTube, which could benefit YouTube in the long run.

Square Deal

Debbie Focht relies on Square, a payment processor, to sell her honey and maple syrup products at the weekly farmers market at Muscoot Farm in Katonah, New York. She and her husband Rich own Hummingbird Ranch in Salt Point, New York, and say that Square has helped boost profits at their small business.

Jennifer A. Kingson / Via Jennifer A. Kingson

If you've shopped at a farmers market, gotten your hair cut at a small salon, or taken a golf lesson with an independent pro, chances are you've made a payment through Square, the credit card processing company founded by Jack Dorsey, who also helped start Twitter.

Small businesses love Square because it charges them less than the bigger, bank-owned payment processors, and the little white card-swipes that plug into a smartphone are easier and more convenient than handheld credit card terminals. Square also — through a partnership with a tiny bank in Utah — makes loans to small companies and entrepreneurs banks would turn away.

And this is where things get dicey: As much as small merchants love Square, smaller banks distrust it, particularly now that the company, which is based in San Francisco, has applied to become an industrial loan company (ILC), a controversial type of banking license offered in Utah and a few other states.

Square clearly has big ambitions: Jacqueline D. Reses, the head of Square Capital — its nascent business financing arm — told BuzzFeed News that the company "is uniquely positioned to build a bridge between the financial system and the underserved," specifically in lending and providing software to small businesses.

"We would pursue business lending, and then we would look at deposits and what other banking services we could provide to our sellers," said Reses, who was previously Yahoo's chief development officer and a director at Alibaba Group.

A Square Inc payment processor plugged into an iPad.

Shannon Stapleton / Reuters

For now, since Square doesn't have the license it needs to take deposits or make loans, it is only offering loans to its merchants through Celtic Bank, a small-business bank in Utah that is regulated by the FDIC.

Square is one of three fintech companies that have recently applied for bank charters, and one of two to apply for an ILC. Varo Money, a 1-year-old startup that offers mobile-only banking through an iPhone app, applied for a national bank charter, while Social Finance Inc. — better known as SoFi — which offers student loan refinancing as well as mortgages and personal loans, applied to become an ILC.

Jacqueline Reses, the head of Square Capital, in San Francisco on Oct. 19, 2015, the day she left Yahoo to join Jack Dorsey at Square.

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

And while Square insists it only wants to make small loans to the merchants it serves, banks see this as a backdoor way into their bread-and-butter business of taking deposits and making loans, both to businesses and consumers.

Opposition to ILC applications is one issue that unites bankers with consumer advocacy and reinvestment groups, which tend to be on opposite sides of financial regulatory issues. The ILC charter gives companies most of the privileges of being a bank — the ability to take deposits and make loans — but with much less regulation and with the ability to run commercial businesses on the side, which mainstream banks can't do. (Square, for instance, sells its payment processing system and business software, and even operates a food delivery service.)

Becoming an ILC is "a loophole that is now being exploited," Chris Cole, the executive vice president of the Independent Community Bankers of America, a bank trade group, told BuzzFeed News.

"The owners of these banks can engage in commercial activity if they want, whereas a traditional bank owner, subject to the Bank Holding Act, can only engage in activities that are closely related to banking," he added.

How Square Works

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Indeed, days after Square submitted its ILC application this month, the Independent Community Bankers of America called on the FDIC to put in place a two-year moratorium on ILCs getting deposit insurance.

The ICBA worries that allowing technology companies like SoFi (which recently lost its CEO to a sexual harassment scandal) into the banking system through an ILC would encourage massive companies with a more tenuous relationship with banking to own banks — like Amazon, Alphabet, or Walmart.

The group opposes both Square and SoFi's applications, and its head, Camden Fine, made the conflict with SoFi more personal, tweeting: "SoFi turmoil another reason FDIC shld deny app! Extending deposit safety net to non-bk activities dangerous & not what congress intended!"

Banks have been here before: In 2006, efforts by Walmart and Home Depot to get deposit insurance — and potentially turn all their shoppers into their banking customers — prompted bankers to lobby successfully for a moratorium on the issuance of ILCs by the FDIC. Walmart thought a bank would let it more more effectively process payments, while Home Depot wanted to make loans to finance home improvements.

Then, in 2010, the Dodd-Frank Act put in place another three-year pause for ILCs getting deposit insurance that ran out in 2013.

And Square, with its at least 2 million merchant customers, may look to today's bankers a lot like Walmart did a decade ago. The company has been aggressively soliciting the merchants who use it as a payment processor, offering them small-dollar loans by email.

Take Courtney Foster, who runs a one-chair salon in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan and has used Square to accept payments for years. One day she got an email from Square Capital with an offer of a loan of $1,000 to $1,500, which would be paid back directly out of her payments processed through Square.

She has since borrowed about $3,000 in total from Square using the money (supplied by Celtic Bank) to start her own line of hair products.

Foster had been a Square customer for years before opening her own salon, using its phone dongle to accept payments from private clients. So getting a loan from the company seemed like a logical next step, particularly after her experience with a loan officer at a large bank, who "just laughed me out," she told BuzzFeed News.

But Square approved her loan in a few hours — and all online. "I sat on the bed and tears came out of my eyes," Foster told BuzzFeed News.

Because of its deep financial relationships with its merchants, Square is already under heavy regulatory scrutiny in the states in which it operates, Reses said. Square "has gone through the process on behalf to be almost fully compliant with FDIC guidelines," she added. "At the point where you’re at our scale, we’d rather be directly regulated by the FDIC."

Reses would be the chair of the new bank, which would be run by Lewis Goodwin, a former executive at Green Dot, the giant seller of prepaid debit cards.

The average loan approved by Square is about $6,000, and the company has either advanced or loaned almost $2 billion since 2014. The amount due back is typically 10% to 16% more than the amount loaned out — which is on the low end for similar types of small business finance — with payments coming out of a fixed percentage of the merchant's receipts received through Square. The whole balance is due after 18 months, though Square customers can repay early.

Square sees itself as stepping in to provide loans to small but growing businesses that typically don't have the earnings track record to hear from a bank. "We serve businesses that are otherwise underserved," Reses said. More than half the loans go to women, while about a third go to minority borrowers, she added.

Introduction to Square Capital

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If Square — or SoFi — is approved for an ILC, it will be able to operate nationally as a bank, overseen by federal regulators with the ability to apply for deposit insurance from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

SoFi, which primarily offers loans, wants the Utah banking license because it "would allow us as a nonbank parent to have a captive bank subsidiary, though which we can offer our members deposit accounts," Jim Prosser, a SoFi spokesman, told BuzzFeed News.

While technology companies offering financial services is nothing new — PayPal is a $71 billion public company — they have shied away from becoming full-fledged banks.

While many of the largest tech companies, like Facebook, Alphabet, and Apple — have dipped their toes into providing financial services like payments, it's only been more finance-focused upstarts that have pushed to become banks.

Typically, the well-known companies that try to become ILCs are either non-financial companies that want to offer financial services to their customers — Walmart, Ford, Chrysler, and Home Depot have all applied for ILC status — or financial companies that want to have some traditional banking operations, like Goldman Sachs, which had a Utah ILC banking operation until it was converted into a bank holding company during the financial crisis.

Utah has 16 industrial banks, and most fall into the latter category, while some are retailers that issue their own loans, like BMW. Other companies that operate Utah industrial banks include American Express, USAA, UBS, and Sallie Mae.

But lately there's been an explosion in new nonbank companies, many funded by technology investors that mostly operate online. OnDeck and Square Capital, which both lend to businesses, use Celtic Bank, while Lending Club, which mostly originates personal loans, works with the Utah-chartered Web Bank.

Most customers do not notice. The technology companies handle the underwriting and customer relationship.

"What many people don’t realize is that some of the most innovative products they work with every day on their smartphones or computers all involve banks in the background," said Stephen A. Aschettino, a lawyer and parter at Loeb and Loeb. "That brings complexity and slows down transactions, if those providers can provide them directly and not utilize banks, it opens up innovations and arguably saves transaction costs."

For a company like Square that provides lots of services that are financial, but not strictly related to banking, becoming a national bank would require a wholesale reorientation and reorganization of its business, including having the entire parent company overseen by the Federal Reserve, as opposed to the bank itself being overseen by the FDIC.

"A lot of parent companies do not want to regulated or supervised by the federal reserve," Jim Barth, an Auburn University professor and fellow at the Milken Institute, told BuzzFeed News.

For Square, the variety of other businesses it operates makes getting a national bank charter almost impossible. "All of those businesses would not be relevant and fit within a regime of a bank holding company," Reses said.

There is also the issue of the Community Reinvestment Act, which requires banks to meet the credit needs of all the consumers in the places where it does business —particularly low- and moderate-income consumers. John Taylor, president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, worries that ILCs can get banking charters without the same obligations to make credit widely available — and this position has made him a strange bedfellow of banking lobbies.

The ILC applicants "want to have access to the resources banks have," said Taylor. And to him — and some banks — this raises concerns "about safety and soundness and lack of regulatory oversight that could create malfeasance."

Another fintech company, Varo, is taking a different approach: To meet its goal of becoming a mainstream mobile-only deposit-taking bank, it wants to become a full-on national bank overseen by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve. Varo applied in July for both its charter from the OCC and deposit insurance from the FDIC.

"We founded the company with the idea that we would someday become a national bank," Colin Walsh, Varo's CEO, told BuzzFeed News.

Discover Varo

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Square Is Growing Quickly, But Still Losing Money

Yes, That Is Harriet Tubman On The $20 In Square Cash

Square Makes It Easier For Hourly Workers To Get Money, Get Paid

Square Cash Introduces Novel Way To Ask People For Money

Adnan Abidi / Reuters

Uber Technologies cofounder and former CEO Travis Kalanick announced that he appointed two new board members on Friday night in an unexpected move that may increase his power and sow more discord at the San Francisco-based ride-hailing company.

In a statement, Kalanick named former Xerox chairwoman and CEO Ursula Burns and former Merrill Lynch chairman and CEO John Thain to the board, which previously had nine members. Burns will be the third woman on the board, in addition to Nestlé executive vice president Wan Ling Martello and former media executive Arianna Huffington.

Kalanick's power to unilaterally name these two board members comes from a now-disputed decision from last year, in which the board granted him power to make three appointments as part of a $3.5 billion investment from a Saudi Arabia wealth fund. After he was removed as CEO in June, Kalanick named himself to one of the three seats and reserved the right to appoint the two other positions.

This decision comes as Uber and its investors are negotiating a multi-billion dollar deal with Japanese investment firm SoftBank and follows the company's appointment of Dara Khosrowshahi as its new CEO last month.

"I am appointing these seats now in light of a recent Board proposal to dramatically restructure the Board and significantly alter the company's voting rights," Kalanick said in a statement. "It is therefore essential that the full Board be in place for proper deliberation to occur, especially with such experienced board members as Ursula and John."

According to a source familiar with the situation, Benchmark Capital, a large shareholder and board seat holder, proposed a change in the company's voting structure earlier this week that would eliminate the super-voting power of shares held by early investors and executives like Kalanick. All shares, in the proposal, would carry equal weight in voting matters. The board discussed the matter on Thursday and is expected to vote on the proposal next week.

“The appointments of Ms. Burns and Mr. Thain to Uber’s Board of Directors came as a complete surprise to Uber and its Board," said an Uber spokesperson in a statement. "That is precisely why we are working to put in place world-class governance to ensure that we are building a company every employee and shareholder can be proud of.”

Kalanick's move could be seen as a means of strengthening his position against Benchmark, which led the effort to oust him in June after employee complaints, press reports, and two internal investigations revealed sexual harassment, discrimination, and executive misbehavior at the company. Benchmark also sued Kalanick earlier this year for fraud and argued that his right to appoint new board members should be removed because he allegedly did not inform the board at the time of the issues at the company. Last month, a Delaware judge sent that lawsuit to arbitration.

A spokesperson for Benchmark did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Kalanick had wanted to wait after the court case and arbitration to fill the two board seats, according to a person familiar with his thinking, but accelerated the process once Benchmark introduced its new voting proposal earlier this week and moved to vote on it next week. He had met with a handful of business executives over the last three months since Benchmark initiated its lawsuit just to be prepared to fill the seats if needed.

Though Kalanick had control over delegating the two seats, he was not allowed to use empty seats to cast board votes. That motivated him to go forward with appointing Burns and Thain, a move that that he discussed with some Uber board members in advance, according to the source.

"Ursula & John bring 50+ years of combined executive experience to @Uber's board - helping the company become stronger now & for the future," Kalanick tweeted on Friday night.

Snapchat appears to be working on a global augmented reality art platform.

On Monday, the company posted a 24-hour countdown timer on the website art.snapchat.com that previewed what appeared to be a big upcoming announcement.

But Twitter employee Jonah Grant set his computer's clock into the future....

And the site went live for him:

The site Grant found appeared to display locations where Snapchat users could view what appears to be Jeff Koons artworks in augmented reality, using their phones.

Jonah Grant

A video on the site, since made inaccessible there, showed more detail:

Here's a link to the full video on Twitter.

The site Grant found showed the AR art in Paris:

Jonah Grant

And Sydney:

Jonah Grant

And other locations:

Jonah Grant

The site also had a sign up form for artists interested in working with Snap:

Jonah Grant

Asked to comment by BuzzFeed News, Snapchat declined. Given a chance to dispute the authenticity of the images, Snapchat also declined.

In April, Facebook, which has released a number of features and products that strongly resemble Snapchat, teased an art project for its camera platform that also combines art and augmented reality.

Justin Tallis / AFP / Getty Images

Facebook admitted that 10 million people saw ads that a Russia-linked entity bought on the social network in an attempt to influence the 2016 US presidential election and sow discord in its aftermath. The number was revealed by Facebook in a blog post Monday

In the post, Facebook VP of policy and communications Elliot Schrage said that the majority of the ads were displayed after the election had concluded. "44% of the ads were seen before the US election on November 8, 2016; 56% were seen after the election," he said.

The information provides the public with further detail about Russian efforts to manipulate U.S. politics on Facebook. The company, which has been asked by the Senate Intelligence Committee to testify publicly about such efforts taking place on its platform, appears to be doing everything in its power to show it knows what took place and is ready for similar instances in the future. It's a crisis for Facebook, which faces an implied threat of regulation should its claims of progress not satisfy members of Congress.

Though Facebook's revelation that 10 million people saw the ads was smaller than estimates, which ranged from 25 million to 70 million, it's still a signficant number. Michigan, New Jersey, Virginia, Indiana, Massachusetts, and many more states all have populations under 10 million.

And though reaching 10 million people with ads is only one point in dozens of times people come in contact with campaign messaging during an election — from debates to digital ads to TV commercials — the 2016 U.S. presidential election was won with thin margins, so the ad buy shouldn't be quickly discounted.

There could be more Russia-linked ads that Facebook has not yet discovered, Schrage said. "We’re still looking for abuse and bad actors on our platform — our internal investigation continues."

Some ads were paid for with Russian currency, but Schrage said it wasn't a major red flag. "Currency alone isn’t a good way of identifying suspicious activity, because the overwhelming majority of advertisers who pay in Russian currency, like the overwhelming majority of people who access Facebook from Russia, aren’t doing anything wrong."

Schrage ended the post with a declaration of Facebook's values, continuing a line of Facebook public statements that seek to convince the public that the company is a benevolent administrator of the public dialogue.

"We strongly believe in free and fair elections," Schrage said. "We strongly believe in free speech and robust public debate. We strongly believe free speech and free elections depend upon each other. We’re fast developing both standards and greater safeguards against malicious and illegal interference on our platform. We’re strengthening our advertising policies to minimize and even eliminate abuse. Why? Because we are mindful of the importance and special place political speech occupies in protecting both democracy and civil society."

The statement seemed to be directed at Congress, which later this month and in early November will evaluate whether Facebook's actions are enough to ward off regulation.

In aftermath of Sunday evening’s mass shooting in Las Vegas, visitors to Facebook’s Crisis Response page for the tragedy should have found a cascading feed of community-posted news and information intended to "help people be more informed about a crisis.” Instead, they discovered an algorithmic nightmare — a hodgepodge of randomly surfaced, highly suspect articles from spammy link aggregators and sites like The Gateway Pundit, which has a history of publishing false information. Indeed, at one point Monday morning, the top three news articles on Facebook's Las Vegas Shooting Crisis Response page directed readers to hyperpartisan news or advertising-clogged blog sites trying to profit from the tragedy.

And early Monday morning, Google search queries for "Geary Danley" — a man initially (and falsely) identified as a victim of the shooting — were served Google News links to the notorious message board 4chan, which was openly working to propagate hoaxes that might politicize the tragedy.

Facebook and Google are hardly alone. Twitter — the internet’s beating heart for news — is continually under siege by trolls, automated accounts, and politically motivated fake news peddlers. In the aftermath of Sunday night’s shooting, a number of pro-Trump accounts of unknown origin tried to link the gunman to leftist groups in an apparent attempt to politicize the tragedy and sow divisions. Others hinted at false flags and crisis actors, suggesting that there was a greater conspiracy behind the shooting (Twitter told BuzzFeed News it has since suspended many of these accounts).

And on sites like YouTube, unverified information flowed largely unchecked, with accounts like The End Times News Report impersonating legitimate news sources to circulate conspiracy and rumor.

A few hours later, Facebook and Google issued statements apologizing for promoting such misinformation. “We are working to fix the issue that allowed this to happen in the first place and deeply regret the confusion this caused,” a Facebook spokesperson told CNN. Google issued a similarly pat explanation for featuring a 4Chan troll thread as a “Top Story” inside Google search results for Danley: “This should not have appeared for any queries, and we’ll continue to make algorithmic improvements to prevent this from happening in the future.”

But neither apology acknowledged the darker truth: that despite the corrections, the damage had already been done, misinformation unknowingly shared with thousands via apparently reckless curators. One link surfaced in Facebook’s Crisis Response page from the website alt-right-news.blogspot.com has been shared across Facebook roughly 1,300 times as of this writing, according to the analytics site BuzzSumo. The article’s third paragraph hints at the shooter’s political leanings, but offers no evidence in support of that claim. “This sounds more like the kind of target a Left-wing nutjob would choose than a Right-wing nutjob,” it reads, before going on to spread unconfirmed information about other (since dismissed) suspects in the shooting. A link from the hyperpartisan site, The Gateway Pundit (the same site which misidentified the shooter earlier in the day) as was shared roughly 10,800 times across Facebook, according to BuzzSumo.

This is just the latest example of platforms who've pledged to provide accurate information failing miserably to do so. Despite their endless assurances and apologies and promises to do better, misinformation continues to slip past. When it comes to breaking news, platforms like Facebook and Google tout themselves as willing, competent gatekeepers. But it’s clear they’re simply not up to the task.

Facebook hopes to become a top destination for breaking news, but in pivotal moments it often seems to betray that intention with an ill-conceived product design or a fraught strategic decision. In 2014, it struggled to highlight news about the shooting of Michael Brown and the ensuing Ferguson protests. News coverage of the events went largely unnoticed on the network while instead, News Feeds were jammed with algorithmically pleasing Ice Bucket Challenge videos. And during the 2016 US presidential election, it failed to moderate the fake news, propaganda, and Russian-purchased advertising for which it is now under congressional scrutiny. Meanwhile, it has made no substantive disclosures about the inner workings of its platform.

Google has had its fair share of stumbles around news curation as well, particularly in 2016. Shortly after the US presidential election, Google’s top news hits for the final 2016 election results included a fake news site claiming that Donald Trump won both the popular and electoral votes (he did not win the popular vote). Less than a month later, the company came under fire again for surfacing a Holocaust denier and white supremacist webpage as the top results for the query “The Holocaust."

This year alone, almost every major social network has made a full-throated commitment to rid its platform of misinformation and polarizing content, as well as those who spread it. Google and Facebook have both pledged to eradicate fake news from their ad platforms, cutting off a key revenue stream for those who peddle misinformation. And Google has told news organizations that it has updated its algorithms to better prioritize “authoritative” content and allow users to flag fake news. YouTube has pledged to cut the reach of accounts “that contain inflammatory religious or supremacist content” and Twitter continues to insist that it is making progress on harassment and trolls on its network.

Big Tech’s breaking news problem is an issue of scale — the networks are so vast that they must be policed largely by algorithm — but it's also one of priorities. Platforms like Facebook and Google are businesses driven by an insatiable need to engage and add users and monetize them. Balancing a business mandate like that with issues of free speech and the protection of civil discourse is no easy matter. Curating news seems an almost prosaic task in comparison. And in many ways, it’s antithetical to the nature of platforms like Facebook or YouTube. News is often painful, unpopular, or unwelcome, and that doesn't always align well with algorithmic mechanisms designed to give us what we want (it's worth noting that the curated platforms like Apple News and Snapchat did a far better job today sharing and promoting reliable and vetted information).

And though their words may suggest an unwavering commitment to delivering reliable breaking news, the platforms’ actions frequently undermine those ambitions. Sometimes the companies make these priorities public, like in June 2016 when Facebook announced that it would tweak its News Feed algorithm away from professional news organizations and publishers to show more stories from friends and family members. But other priorities are expressed through engineering decisions made behind closed doors.

Given the massive scale of platforms like Google and Facebook, it’s impossible to expect the platforms to catch everything. But as the Vegas tragedy proved, many of the platform’s slip-ups are simple, egregious oversights. Google, for example, claims the 4chan story appeared in its "Top Stories" widget because it was one of the few pages mentioning "Geary Danley" when today's news broke and it was seeing a lot of traffic. But why didn't Google have guardrails in place to prevent this from happening? 4chan has been a deeply unreliable and toxic news portal for years — why didn't Google have protocols in place to stop the site from appearing in news results? Why treat 4chan as a news source at all?

The same goes for Facebook. The company can't be expected to stop every single scrap of fake news. But in the case of its Crisis Response pages, why not curate news from verified and vetted outlets to ensure that those looking for answers and loved ones in a crisis aren't led astray? These are seemingly simple questions for which the platforms rarely have good answers.

The platforms always promise to do better. Why can't they?

Lam Vo contributed reporting for this piece.

LINK: Here Are All The Hoaxes Being Spread About The Las Vegas Shooting

Eric Risberg / AP

A private report on former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski that was commissioned by Uber and is central to Waymo’s lawsuit against the ride hail behemoth was made public for the first time Monday evening.

The document was part of a public filing made by Google’s parent company Alphabet in its major trade secrets case against Uber. Alphabet is asking the court to delay the trial, currently scheduled for Oct. 10, until later than December.

Uber commissioned the report from cybersecurity forensics firm Stroz Frieberg in March 2016 to provide due diligence into purchase of a self-driving car startup and specifically investigate if any of its technology had been inappropriately taken. That startup, Ottomotto LLC, was founded by former Google engineer Anthony Levandowkski, who is now accused by Alphabet and its autonomous vehicle unit Waymo, of stealing proprietary technology associated with self-driving cars.

“The Stroz Report unequivocally shows that, before it acquired his company, Uber knew Anthony Levandowski had a massive trove of confidential Waymo source code, design files, technical plans and other materials after leaving Google,” said a Waymo spokesperson in a statement. “Knowing all of this, Uber paid $680 million for Mr. Levandowski’s company, protected him from legal action, and installed him as the head of their self-driving vehicle program.

The report, which Waymo submitted late Monday evening, said that Levandowski was aware he held Waymo’s private documents on his personal computer after he quit Google and knowingly had them destroyed. Here’s an excerpt:

"During Stroz Friedberg's interview of Levandowski, he stated that in March 2016, while searching his home to gather all devices for this investigation, he discovered that he possessed Google proprietary information on five disks in his Drobo 50, which was located in a closet he used to store old and unused devices. The proprietary information included source code, design files, laser files, engineering documents, and software related to Google self-driving cars. In his interview with Stroz Friedberg, Levandowski stated that he destroyed the disks at a commercial shredding facility in Oakland, California Levandowski provided Stroz Friedberg with the Drobo 50, but, as expected, it contained no media and there was nothing to analyze."

Waymo said, given the breadth of information contained in the report — and the possibility of unearthing new stolen trade secrets it wasn’t previously aware of — it needs more time before it can adequately present its case in court. Specifically, Waymo said it’s currently sifting through “15,000 potentially relevant emails” and 85 gigabytes of documents, as well as “awaiting production of 118 of Anthony Levandowski’s devices.”

Meanwhile, though Uber initially sought to seal the report, a spokesperson said in a statement to BuzzFeed News that the company is glad the document is now public. “Before Uber acquired Otto, we hired an independent forensics firm to conduct due diligence because we wanted to prevent any Google IP from coming to Uber,” the statement read. “Their report, which we are pleased is finally public, helps explain why — even after 60 hours of inspection of our facilities, source code, documents and computers — no Google material has been found at Uber.”

Earlier this year, Uber fired Levandowski, who could face criminal charges and plans to protect himself by declining to answer questions that might incriminate him when called to testify during this trial.

The carefully worded Stroz report noted that some communications suggest that "details relating to the formation of Ottomotto may have taken place while he was still employed at Google." It also questioned Levandowski's practice of deleting data and communications, especially after he knew that Stroz Friedberg would be conducting its due diligence investigation.

"However, by March 2016, Levandowski was aware that Stroz Friedberg was going to implement a process to preserve, identify, and potentially remediate retained Google material from his devices," the report read. "At that point, the better course would have been to let that process control. In addition, there was an effort by Levandowski and his Ottomotto colleagues to delete texts in real time."

The report also went into Levandowski's attempts to recruit Google engineers to his new startup, detailing both work meetings where he discussed the self driving truck opportunity as well as recreational activities, including a trip to Lake Tahoe, Calif., where the venture was discussed.

Last month, Waymo requested a continuance of the trial to Dec. 5 — a delay US District Judge William Alsup seemed disinclined to allow in a recent hearing — though it's now arguing that even a December court date would be prejudicial. Alsup ruled that the due diligence report could be discussed openly in court during a late September hearing.

Judge Alsup is scheduled to rule on Waymo’s request for a trial delay during a hearing currently scheduled for Tuesday at 11 a.m in San Francisco.

Here's the full report on Anthony Levandowski and Uber's acquisition of Ottomotto that Stroz conducted on Uber's behalf:

Now you can do a poll within Instagram Stories.

Instagram

Here at BuzzFeed, we know that polls are an important way of solving life's mysteries. Whether it's to find out if you stand or sit to wipe after pooping (30% stand, those weirdos) or your opinions on mayo, this is the the stuff we need to know about. We love polls!

Twitter has had polls for a while, and now Instagram is adding them inside the "sticker" section of Stories. Here's how to make one:

After you take a photo or video inside Stories, tap the square sticker icon at the top to open the stickers menu. Then, select "POLL".

Instagram

Then, people can vote by tapping the stickers for your poll:

Instagram

You can see the votes tally as they come in. A WORD OF WARNING: The poll owner can see which choice you voted for, unlike Twitter polls! So don't vote for something embarrassing!

Instagram

Logan Paul, one of the social media influencers who has been posting more to Instagram Stories than to Snapchat.

@loganpaul / Instagram / Via Instagram: @loganpaul

Since Instagram launched Stories in August 2016, some people have noticed a decline in activity on Snapchat. Now, there is data to support that. The marketing firm Mediakix studied the behavior of top influencers who are active on both platforms, and it found that they are posting 33% less to Snapchat and 14% more to Stories.

To get this data, Mediakix tracked 12 influencers, counting the number of posts to Snapchat and Instagram stories they posted each day for two 30-day periods separated by six months. They specifically chose a sample that posted regularly to both platforms, had large followings, and, crucially, had been signed to a Snapchat-specific marketing agency or did sponsored posts on Snapchat in the past.

Twelve influencers is a small sample size, but the pool of social media influencers who do ads with millions of followers isn’t massive. The social media influencers tracked were Logan Paul, Alex Lange, Lele Pons, King Bach, Hannah Stocking, Amanda Cerny, Curtis Lepore, Eh Bee Family, Alexis Ren, Matt Cutshall, Arielle Vanderberg, and Shay Mitchell. It's worth noting that Shay Mitchell is the only one who was verified on Snapchat during this time, and she is also one of 21 celebs who received a stern letter from the FTC about not disclosing sponsored posts on her Instagram.

Mediakix first tracked the influencers' activity for February 2017, then again in August. What it found was that six months later, there was a significant drop in both the combined number and average number of Snapchats posted. Meanwhile, story postings on Instagram had increased.

Mediakix

By August 2017, these influencers were posting over twice as much per day on average to Instagram Stories over Snapchat.

Mediakix

Matt Cutshall, who became a star on Vine and then migrated to Snapchat and Instagram, told Mediakix, “For me, Snapchat has completely fallen off. Their platform has not evolved to make it more user friendly … the only benefit I see using Snapchat is their better filters and ability to face swap.”

Mediakix, which does influencer marketing, did this report to verify what it already suspected. “Prior to Instagram Stories' launch, we used to get regular inquiries for Snapchat sponsorships,” the firm wrote in a blog post. “But that completely dropped off last year once Instagram Stories gained traction.”

The total number of Snapchat posts in April versus August dropped from 1906 to 1275 for all 12 influencers collectively across 30 days. The average number of posts per day per influencer dropped from 9.9 to 3.5. In April, 4 out of the 12 posted more often to Snapchat than Stories; by August this dropped to one out of 12.

This Spring, BuzzFeed News reported that many influencers on Snapchat were displeased by Snapchat’s seeming lack of support for big influencers. Their frustrations ranged from minor slights, like not being invited to visit Snapchat’s Venice, California, headquarters, to bigger issues, including a lack of technical support, no easy way to share feature suggestions, and Snapchat’s unwillingness to offer influencers any sort of analytics that they could to share with advertisers for their sponsored posts. Snapchat had also been very slow to verify anyone who wasn’t a traditional public figure like a pop star or pro athlete – it only started verifying influencers in late August. (Verification helps with discoverability, one of the big challenges for growing a Snapchat audience.)

The disenchantment of Snapchat’s top users calls to mind the downfall of Vine, which ignored its stars, who eventually decamped to YouTube and Instagram, leaving the platform a ghost town. Twitter, which owned Vine, announced last fall it was shutting down the six-second video–looping platform.

Ultimately, this Mediakix report might say more about Instagram than it does about Snapchat. One possibility is that savvy influencers may believe that posting to Stories helps improve their standing in fans’ feeds and will increase engagement on regular posts. Instagram also recently added a “paid partnership with…” tool for influencers doing sponsorships, which is another way that Instagram is more welcoming to a social media star who wants to get paid to do ads on the platform.

What this data means for Snapchat isn’t crystal clear. "The focus has always meant to be for close friends," a representative for Snap told BuzzFeed News. Logan Paul posting less often isn’t necessarily the canary in the coal mine that signals that regular users are leaving Snapchat. Regular people aren’t trying to get paid by brands to post selfies.

And influencers may not have that much of an effect on the success of Snapchat, considering that they’ve never been as big a part of it anyway, compared to Instagram or YouTube. Snapchat has always been more for following your real friends than for watching celebrities and influencers (even verified celebrities are still relatively hard to discover on the app, which is intentional). Compared to Vine, which depended on talented creators to make the app fun for everyone else, most normal people can enjoy Snapchat with their friends without ever knowing Logan Paul exists (lucky them).