Splice is the transformation of media in Asia.

From this week

Platforms

Facebook’s paralysis and negligence in tackling hate speech keep coming up in conversations.

Reuters — which has two of its journalists in prison in Myanmar for reporting on the country’s genocide — put out a special report on Facebook’s hate speech problem in the country. Facebook doesn’t have an employee in this country. Speech moderation is outsourced to Accenture in Kuala Lumpur in a secretive project called “Honey Badger”. But it’s not clear how many Burmese speakers are on the job. People working on the project sign a one-year renewable contract, and agree to never divulge that Facebook is the client. This is what Reuters found out about the project.

Reuters

Facebook put out a list of what it’s doing in Myanmar.

It covers everything from hate speech detection to accelerating the use of Unicode as a standard font in the country (where many phones are still using the proprietary Zawgyi font). Alarmingly, it only has 60 “Myanmar language experts” reviewing content — which Facebook says will rise to at least 100 by the end of the year. “The weight of this work, and its impact on the people of Myanmar, is felt across the company.”

Facebook

Facebook’s head of news partnerships Campbell Brown made some off-the-record comments to Australian media executives about traffic referrals that stirred the hornet’s nest.

The Australian, breaking professional protocol in publishing details of that session, quoted her as allegedly saying, “We are not interested in talking to you about your traffic and referrals any more. That is the old world and there is no going back”. Of course, this isn’t new to many publishers who’ve seen their referrals dwindle in the past year. But it’s another reminder to everyone: Facebook is in the business of Facebook. If you’re in publishing and you’re still counting on Facebook’s referral traffic to keep your traffic numbers up, you’re delusional.

Nieman Lab

Facebook won a deal to broadcast all La Liga matches for the next three seasons on the platform in South Asia for free.

The rights cover Facebook viewers in India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Maldives, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan. No mention of financials, but Sony Pictures, which was the last rights holder, reportedly paid about $32 million to La Liga between 2014 and 2018.

Reuters

There was plenty of chatter about chatbots on Facebook Messenger just a couple years ago.

Everyone rushed to build them because Zuckerberg said it was the future. Today, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Business Insider, HuffPo, and Mic have all discontinued their chatbots. Referrals are poor, and hey, no one wants to talk to a machine that’s just regurgitating an RSS feed. Interesting idea, poorly implemented, lacking utility.

Digiday

Twitter slapped Alex Jones on the wrist for trying to incite hate.

Jones tweeted a link to a video calling on his supporters to get their “battle rifles” ready for a fight against media and others. Twitter gave Jones and his Infowars account a 7-day time out — no tweeting, no retweeting for you in the corner. So don’t worry, he’ll be back again with a few more ideas on how to incite violence. Twitter, will someone have to die before you realize that this is not a joke?

New York Times

zra Klein interviewed Zeynep Tufekci, a New York Times columnist and a professor at the University of North Carolina, about radicalization on the net.

Why do extreme ideas spread so quickly on the platforms? Tufekci has perhaps the clearest articulation of why this happens. Worth a listen. In fact, I’m going to listen to it again.

Art 19

There’s a thriving business in creating fake traffic on YouTube.

It’s not as dodgy as it sounds — in fact, it’s in the open. The problem is YouTube can’t stop it. As publishers are starved of the social referrals they crave, how many are resorting to buying, or accepting, fake numbers?

New York Times

Transformations

Australia’s Fairfax posted an annual loss of A$63.8 million — probably its last results before Nine’s takeover of the company.

This is a sharp change from the previous year when the company reported a A$83.9 million net profit. The loss stemmed from write downs in Australian Community Media and the New Zealand digital news site Stuff.

Mumbrella

Don’t think that all NYT subscribers are subscribing for the news.

Many are there for the recipes and crosswords.

Axios

The New York Times homepage redesign is really exciting.

For the NYT, to design is to redesign — the apps, podcasts, and sections have consistently realigned to their audiences. Now, finally, it’s the turn of the homepage. The excitement doesn’t come for the usual reasons (hint: it’s not ‘cleaner’ (which is all people seem to say these days when we talk about design), and neither does it have great new typefaces or edgy graphics).

Fast Company

Design

How do you redesign The Wall Street Journal’s 126 newsletters?

1. You cull them by a third. 2. You nudge your readers to subscribe with a prompt. 3. You update market info — in real time. 4. You let people hit reply. People like that whole responding thing. 5. Test readers’ resistance to your paywall. 6. You test a new email platform that plays to your strengths. 7. You add whimsy. At the end of it all, a newsletter is a conversation, and it takes more than machine learning to keep that going. All aboard for whimsy, I say.

Nieman Lab

Snapchat’s redesign bombed, and it cost them 2% of its users in one quarter.

Good design is good business, and good design is listening to the people who use it: your users. Anybody who doesn’t see that in 2018 needs to wake up. I mean, 1.2 million users worldwide actually signed a petition asking Snap to reconsider. They did, but they’re still reeling from the hit they took.

The Verge

The product design process can be notoriously difficult.

This is mostly because it’s often seen as an artistic moment of genius broken down into deliverables to a client waiting for results in a process with unstructured feedback. This is also known as herding cats. But we tend to forget that most effective product design works to fix a business problem in a collaborative manner that establishes goals, relies on prototyping, user feedback, and testing. How this product designer explores and tests his own journey is a lesson in process and how we work with it.

UX Design

Notables

Australia’s public transport minister did something unusual last week.

She banned Sky News from screens in Melbourne’s train stations for airing an interview with a convicted racist. “Hatred and racism have no place on our screens or in our community.”

The Age