Strands of Genius: How NY Times A/B Tests Headlines, Deepfakes & Loans That Hijack Your Phone

plus our thoughts on: Section 230, Community Yoga, The Future of Sports & Stop Asian Hate

Mar 23, 2021

WORKING ON | finishing up the curriculum for our next Experimental Learning Community! (we’ve got 5 spaces left, and we’d love to have YOU!)

LOOKING AHEAD

Feb 21-April 21: Las Terrenas, Dominican Republic
April 21-May 15: TBD

:: WHAT’S NEW & WEEKLY GRATITUDE ::

We’ve got five spaces left for our second cohort of our Experimental Learning Community and would love to have you join! You can apply here for this mastermind-like program. This is a 7-week mastermind-like program designed to connect marketers around the world, through less-traditional learning. We’ll kick off April 13th, and meet on Tuesdays at 10a PT / 1p ET / 6p GMT.

Each session will have you looking at work - and maybe even the world - differently, with prompts and exercises that you can steal and replicate within your organization. If you’re curious about the specifics of each session, you can check out the full schedule here. The program fee is $175, and is available to members of the School of Stolen Genius.

This week, we’re especially thankful for:

a long walk on the beach (either 6.7 miles or 8.4 miles depending on whose iPhone you choose to believe, ha!), crystal clear ocean waters, Isabela - the abandoned apartment complex/village we found, (and serendipitously finding this documentary about it), a lovely Sunday yoga session with Danny, and an equally lovely Monday yoga session with Liz, a stellar phone date with Marion, colorful Papermate flair pens (they are just the best), coconut milk coffee, Titans, The One, sunscreen.

S C H O O L O F S T O L E N G E N I U S >> H I G H L I G H T S

If you’d like to join us, the first five people* to respond to this email will snag a pass for Wednesday’s session. If you don’t want to take your chances, you can purchase a single pass for yoga or The Future of Sport or enroll to experience all the benefits of the School of Stolen Genius.

*These passes are available so that our readers can experience The School of Stolen Genius; If you’ve already claimed a one-off pass, you’re not eligible for this offer. We may not be able to respond to every email, however we will notify all attendees by end of day today with login details.

:: THE LINKS ::

HOW THE NEW YORK TIMES A/B TESTS THEIR HEADLINES

The New York Times has been open about the fact that they A/B test headlines (writing that half their readers will see one headline, the other half will see another, and then after 30 minutes a decision is made.) Tom Cleveland, who is an engineer at Stripe, wanted to know more. So he wrote a script that scrapes the NYT homepage, pulling out headlines, associating them with articles, and then puts them in a database. He found that the headlines that are A/B tested are 80% more likely to rank on their “Most Popular” list. Oh, and he found that while, “the NYT might be more restrained than BuzzFeed, we should keep in mind that it’s not a neutral observer. As the examples above show, A/B tested headlines paint a picture that’s a lot more dramatic than the reality. Frequent NYT readers will end up thinking the world is scarier and more shocking than it really is.” This is the first part of a series that I’ll most definitely be keeping my eyes on.(TJCX Substack)

DEEPFAKES (TOM CRUISE, SASSY JUSTICE, ZOOM & MORE)

Have you seen the Tom Cruise deepfakes? Were you fooled? Ever since I saw them, I’ve been wondering how they were made and how quickly we would see deepfakes taking over the internet. The good news? Each Tom Cruise deepfake required “weeks of work” along with a super talented impersonator/actor. Right now, it’s not as easy as the click of a button. But, who knows how long that will last… Xpression (currently in beta) uses real time facial matching and AI to allow you to inhabit photos live on Zoom, so you can be the Mona Lisa in your next meeting. (It doesn’t look nearly as clean, but it’s not too shabby.) Oh, and if you’re a South Park fan, Chris Ume, the creator of the Tom Cruise deepfakes worked with Trey Parker and Matt Stone on a series called Sassy Justice, which had Faris and I in giggles. It’s South Park style humor though, so consider yourself warned! (The Verge, YouTube, Xpression)

LOANS THAT HIJACK YOUR PHONE

Predatory lending is being taken to new heights in India, where the average Indian needs to work 63 days to afford even a low-cost smartphone. Now, vendors are selling smartphones to people who install an un-deletable app that monitors them and their repayment. Datacultr is one of these apps, which logs data on everything the user does and then ‘nudges’ them towards repayment. The first time you miss a payment, your wallpaper is changed to a persistent reminder to pay. (This technique means ~50% of users pay within 3 days, and ~70% in 7 days.) If the payments continue to be missed, Datacultr determine which apps will be shut down for individual users, based on frequency of use. On one hand, it’s an interesting model for loans — but I don’t love that it’s associated with high interest rates. (Rest of World — Thanks to Katie Dreke for turning us onto this site!)

Strands of Genius is currently read by 12,000 subscribers. Support us by sponsoring an issue, becoming a member of The School of Stolen Genius, or encouraging friends or colleagues to subscribe.

:: WHAT WE’RE THINKING ABOUT: SECTION 230 ::

Section 230 (from here on in, I’ll refer to it as S230) is the law that protects websites like Facebook or YouTube from being treated as publishers. It means that if a user on one of these sites posts something illegal, the website itself can’t be held accountable (exceptions including copyright violations, sexual material, and violations of criminal law.) And it’s kind of a big deal. Jeff Kosseff wrote a book about it called The Twenty-Six Words That Created The Internet.

Without it, we probably wouldn’t have social media as we know it, but even sites that have comment sections would be included in its protection. Technically, S230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996, says that any “interactive computer service” can’t be treated as a publisher of third-party content. From Cornell Law School’s website, “The term “interactive computer service” means any information service, system, or access software provider that provides or enables computer access by multiple users to a computer server, including specifically a service or system that provides access to the Internet and such systems operated or services offered by libraries or educational institutions.”

The problem is that S230 is tied up with, well, a lot. Conservative lawmakers argue that S230 allows for banning of individuals, while liberal lawmakers and activists argue that S230 lets platforms knowingly allow nonconsensual sexual activity, hate speech and harassment. Because both sides seem to have problems with it (albeit for different reasons), there’s some thinking that reform to S230 might actually happen.

Back in September 2020, the Justice Department proposed changes that would hold these platforms accountable for unlawfully censoring speech, while also opening them up to civil lawsuits related to child sex abuse and terrorism. In January, when interviewed by the New York Times, Biden proposed revoking S230 completely.

Of course, the first amendment still protects speech, including the speech that happens online. It’s not S230 that protects people who publish misinformation — whether about presidential candidates or vaccines. And it’s not S230 that protects people who write racist remarks.

As Adi Robertson writes for The Verge, “Courts have interpreted the First Amendment as a broad shield against the government banning or punishing speech. Section 230 can’t overrule those protections to make companies remove offensive but legal content… Changing Section 230 would affect (for better or worse) how sites handle potential libel, child sexual abuse material, or illegal gun sales. But for hateful content, disinformation, and tough-to-define offenses like inciting violence, the question isn’t when people can sue Facebook. It’s whether the American conception of free speech itself needs to change. And that’s a much riskier, more complicated proposition.”

It’s hard to know what to do, because the legislation is so broad and encompasses so much. Patreon is an online funding platform for artists, musicians, and other creators. More than 6 million patrons support 200,000+ creators. And while they say they would still do their best to support creators if S230 was abolished, they may not be able to support as many creators.

Lauren Crenshaw, Head of Policy at Patreon, said “Section 230 matters to Patreon every single day because we are a platform that has hundreds of thousands of creators, that has millions of patrons that are communicating with each other and the creators, and creators that are creating new works on a daily basis. If we had to proactively take steps to identify and monitor, validate, and verify that content prior to posting, it would be incredibly difficult for that platform to exist.”

But there’s the counter point too… Take the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Yiota Souras, SVP of General Counsel for NCMEC writes, “Section 230 denies victims the ability to bring a lawsuit if they have been exploited in certain ways through or on a particular platform. And because social media companies have that immunity, it reduces the potential that companies will do the most they can to make sure child exploitation content is not posted, not distributed, and is taken down right away, because there is really no legal incentive or for them to take those extra steps.”

What do the tech companies think? Facebook has certainly led the call for more regulation, while Twitter seems less into it. [According to Bloomberg, Facebook ran ads saying “We want updated internet regulations to set clear guidelines for addressing today’s toughest challenges.”]

So what happens if congress reforms S230 and holds companies liable for content posted by users? One possibility is that much, much more moderation will be required. And, if we require endless moderation… well, the only people who can afford that are the big guns already, meaning the little guys are screwed before they even begin. (And social media moderation is not an easy job.)

It sounds like one of the biggest problems with S230 is the breadth. And perhaps the solution then, is in specificity — looking at problems like hate speech, and misinformation and trying to figure out solutions individually rather than those that are all encompassing.

As The Verge asks, in their super awesome 8-minute video on S230:
can good intentions translate into good results?

:: AND NOW… STOP ASIAN HATE::

A beautifully moving and heartbreaking poem from Sherry Cola.

If we can ever be of help to you, even outside of a formal engagement, please don’t hesitate to let us know.

rockON,
faris & rosie & ashley | your friends over at geniussteals.co

@faris is always tweeting
@rosieyakob hangs out on instagram
@ashley also writes for deaf, tattooed & employed

Know someone who could use some inspiration in their inbox? Send ‘em our way!

It's called Genius Steals because we believe ideas are new combinations and that nothing can come from nothing. But copying is lazy. We believe the best way to innovate is to look at the best of that which came before and combine those elements into new solutions.

Co-Founders Faris & Rosie are award-winning strategists and creative directors, writers, consultants and public speakers who have been living on the road/runway since March 2013, working with companies all over the world. Our Director of Operations is nomadic like us, our accounting team is based out of Washington, our company is registered in Tennessee, and our collaborators are all over the world. Being nomadic allows us to go wherever clients need us to be, and to be inspired by the world in between.

Hit reply and let’s talk about how we might be able to work together :)

Strands of Genius