As a recap, the game we’re talking about here is the Rocksteady Studios version that gives you a first-person view of what it’s like to be Gotham’s caped crusader, not the Telltale edition. You’ll scour your surroundings for clues to solve crimes and fight villains using each system’s hand-held controller. In addition to giving players the joy of being in Batman’s shoes, the game is also an exciting peek at what future VR games could be like.

We don’t know how much the game will cost yet, but it will likely be in the same range as the $20 PSVR version.

Facebook’s launch of Stories may be the social network’s big news of the week, but some Facebook users have spotted another addition, and are thoroughly confused. A “rocket ship” icon has popped up in the app of select users worldwide, adjacent to the News Feed button. Its appearance is prompting a lot of users to wonder, “what on earth is this thing?”

The button may be either at the top of the screen or the bottom, depending on whether the user is on iOS or Android.

What has Facebook done now? 😤 I already really dislike that marketplace crap. Now what’s this rocket icon thing??? pic.twitter.com/l0obKojCJH

— Amanda Clinton (@Amanda_Clinton) March 4, 2017

As it turns out, the rocket ship icon is just the latest in Facebook’s ongoing experiments in presenting an alternate News Feed to users – one that consists of posts, articles, photos and videos from sources you haven’t followed, like Facebook Pages or posts news media organizations, for example.

While you might not be actively tracking these sources, Facebook believes it’s content that you’ll like. The items displayed in the “rocket ship” feed come from Pages that are similar to those you’ve already liked, as well as those that are popular with your friends – like a video that many people in your network are watching, for instance.

This is not a new experiment – Facebook was recently spotted testing an alternative News Feed, but was using a different icon (a small square) at the time. That test was also limited to Android beta users, according to reports. A similar earlier test on iOS actually labeled the second feed with the word “Explore.”

The new experiment with the rocket ship, however, is appearing in the mobile version of Facebook across both iOS and Android platforms, including those who have not opted into a beta.

Despite Facebook’s advanced algorithms designed to keep users engaged and endlessly scrolling – and its understanding of what a user has liked, watched, and clicked – the company has not heavily focused its efforts on helping users connect more broadly with interests through recommended content. Instead, today’s News Feed is filled with content a user has explicitly liked, whether that’s friends’ posts or updates from Pages users are following.

But Facebook has always wanted to have a better angle into people’s interests – especially as other networks (like Twitter) have made it easier to follow news and topics, and not just people, brands, and businesses.

Wtf is that rocket icon in the latest Facebook app

— maidcat 🏳️‍🌈 (@shdwcat) March 22, 2017

I’m normally not tech stupid- but i have no idea what the “rocket” icon means at the bottom of Facebook on my phone.

— Scott Thomas (@only_me_ScottoT) March 6, 2017

In 2012, Facebook introduced “interests lists” to organize its News Feed by topic, but this never saw mainstream adoption. In 2014, the social network experimented again with interests, via its mobile app Rooms, which offered users a means of discussing various topics. But that app eventually failed. 

An alternative News Feed-like stream of information could be another way of tackling interests, but popping it into the app without an explanation is clearly confusing to those who have new feature.

The expanded test is underway now in markets worldwide, we understand. The rocket ship icon itself is fairly new, based on a number of tweets most of which were either posted this month or the last.

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the global test in a statement, saying “We are testing a complementary feed of popular articles, videos, and photos, customized for each person based on content that might be interesting to them. We’ve heard from people that they want an easy way to explore new content they haven’t connected with yet.”

Facebook will reveal at its F8 conference a new class of group bots that work inside Messenger group chats. These group bots can keep users informed about real-time news such as a sports game’s progress, e-commerce deliveries and more, according to three sources familiar with the development of the feature.

Facebook is already working with top chatbot makers to prepare for the launch. Facebook will open up APIs to allow more developers to start building group bots, too. When asked for comment, a Facebook spokesperson said “we don’t comment on rumors or speculation,” but my sources confirm this is coming.

For example, a Messenger group of football fans could add a sports bot to their thread, where it could report score changes, big plays and other news from the game. An e-commerce group bot could keep a group of coworkers informed about the status of their lunch delivery, letting them know that the order is being prepared and when it arrives.

Facebook Messenger already features sports news bots from media property theScore and the NBA’s Sacramento Kings, plus food-delivery bots like those from Domino’s. Soon they could be equipped to keep a whole group for friends in the know.

The group bots launch could address two big problems with the Messenger bot platform Facebook launched last year at F8 that TechCrunch previously reported was coming.

First, the group bots will act more like news tickers instead of trying to pretend to be a human discussion partner. They’re not really “chatbots” as much as they are “information bots” as people won’t be having the same back-and-forth conversations as they do with one-on-one chatbots.

Unripened AI technology and poor understanding of questions led many users to be disappointed with Facebook’s chatbots. Facebook’s head of Messenger David Marcus admitted at TechCrunch Disrupt that “The problem was it got really overhyped, very, very quickly. The basic capabilities we provided at the time weren’t good enough to basically replace traditional app interfaces and experiences.”

Since these group bots won’t be the sole conversation partner, there will be less pressure on them to act human, and more opportunity for them to service a specific utility.

Second, their existence in group chats will provide a viral growth mechanism for bots, which don’t have easy discovery channels already.

Currently, users have to type a bot’s name into Messenger’s search box to start a conversation with one. There’s no native way to browse for bots, so businesses have to either get the bot’s exact name drilled into people’s heads through marketing or get them to initiate a conversation with a bot through a Facebook News Feed ad. That’s led to the emergence of little-known third-party browsing options like Botlist.

With group bots, one user could add a bot to a thread, thereby exposing its existence to other friends in the group. Both particular bots and the whole bots platform could see a rise in recognition and audience, which might attract higher-profile developers and brands to build them.

It’s still unclear how exactly users will find and add bots to threads. Facebook doesn’t have a bot store or suggester, but perhaps more bot discovery options will be part of the slew of announcements slated for Facebook’s big yearly F8 development conference on April 18th and 19th in San Jose. We’ll be there to confirm today’s scoop and provide analysis of the rest of the news Facebook reveals.

While truly conversational AI will eventually rise to proficiency, Facebook is smart to refocus on group bot technology that can reliably solve real needs today.

Featured Image: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

Heavy with fake news guilt, Facebook is rolling out new social channel benchmarking for publishers in the CrowdTangle tool it acquired and made free last year.

CrowdTangle Intelligence lets news outlets compare their different accounts’ performance on up to five social accounts within any one social app, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Reddit. Publishers can then see which accounts got the most likes, comments, shares, new followers or posts over different date ranges and content types. For example, BuzzFeed could see which of its Facebook accounts, like BuzzFeed News, Tasty and Nifty, got the most followers in a month.

The tool is designed to “help publishers understand overall trends and more easily analyze what content is working and what’s not.” Thanks to charts and graphs, CrowdTangle Intelligence simplifies doing high-level reports and discovering trends to inform their publishing strategy.

If Facebook can improve the quality of what publishers share on its social networks, it will reap the benefits of better engagement. Assisting them on other social channels just makes the tool more valuable. Meanwhile, Facebook is trying to do whatever it can to make up for the way it let fake news spread uninhibited during the election, and how it’s absorbed a ton of the ad spend that used to go directly to news publishers. That’s why Facebook launched its big Journalism Project.

While directly dealing with fake news and its overt power over journalism is complicated, the best Facebook can do is try to lend a hand to publishers and readers in other ways.

A billion and a half photos find their way onto Facebook every single day and the company is racing to understand them and their moving counterparts with the hope of increasing engagement. And while machine learning is undoubtedly the map to the treasure, Facebook and it’s competitors are still trying to work out how to deal with the spoils once they find them. Facebook AI Similarity Search (FAISS), released as an open source library last month, began as an internal research project to address bottlenecks slowing the process of identifying similar content once a user’s preferences are understood. Under the leadership of Yann LeCun, Facebook’s AI Research (FAIR) lab is making it possible for everyone to more quickly relate needles within a haystack.

On its own, training a machine learning model is already an incredibly intensive computational process. But a funny thing happens when machine learning models comb over videos, pictures and text  — new information gets created! FAISS is able to efficiently search across billions of dimensions of data to identify similar content.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Jeff Johnson, one of the three FAIR researchers working on the project, emphasized that FAISS isn’t so much a fundamental AI advancement as a fundamental AI enabling technique.

Imagine you wanted to perform object recognition on a public video that a user shared to understand its contents so you could serve up a relevant ad. First you’d have to train and run that algorithm on the video, coming up with a bunch of new data.

From that, let’s say you discover that your target user is a big fan of trucks, the outdoors and adventure. This is helpful, but it’s still hard to say what advertisement you should display — A rugged tent? An ATV? A Ford F-150?

To figure this out, you would want to create a vector representation of the video you analyzed and compare it to your corpus of advertisements with the intent of finding the most similar video. This process would require a similarity search, whereby vectors are compared in multi-dimensional space.

In this representation of a similarity search, the blue vector is the query. The distance between the “arrows” reflects their relative similarity.

In real life, the property of being an adventurous outdoorsy fan of trucks could constitute hundreds or even thousands of dimensions of information. Multiply this by the number of different videos you’re searching across and you can see why the library you implement for similarity search is important.

“At Facebook we have massive amounts of computing power and data and the question is how we can best take advantage of that by combining old and new techniques,” posited Johnson.

Facebook reports that Implementing k-nearest neighbor across GPUs resulted in an 8.5x improvement in processing time. Within the previously explained vector space, nearest neighbor algorithms let us identify the most closely related vectors.

More efficient similarity search opens up possibilities for recommendation engines and  personal assistants alike. Facebook M, its own intelligent assistant, relies on having humans in the loop to assist users. Facebook considers “M” to be a test bed to experiment with the relationship between humans and AI. LeCun noted that there are a number of domains within M where FAISS could be useful.

“An intelligent virtual assistant looking for an answer would need to look through a very long list,” LeCun explained to me. “Finding nearest neighbors is a very important functionality.”

Improved similarity search could support memory networks to help keep track of context and basic factual knowledge, LeCun continued. Short term memory contrasts with learned skills like finding the optimal solution to a puzzle. In the future, a machine might be able to watch a video or read a story and then answer critical follow up questions about it.

More broadly, FAISS could support more dynamic content on the platform. LeCun noted that news and memes change every day and better methods of searching content could drive better user experiences.

A billion and a half new photos a day presents Facebook with a billion and a half opportunities to better understand its users. Each and every fleeting chance at boosting engagement is dependent on being able to quickly and accurately sift through content and that means more than just tethering GPUs.

Featured Image: Bryce Durbin

Facebook is taking a swing at Twitch while also one-upping its mobile live streaming video competitors. Today, all users can go Live directly from Facebook’s desktop website via their webcam, stream through professional equipment and software hooked up to a desktop and broadcast gameplay from their computer.

Previously, Facebook had only allowed Pages to stream from their desktop, not users, and only had limited gameplay streaming partnerships with game developers like Blizzard. There will now be a Live button on the desktop status update composer.

The ability to use streaming hardware and software to broadcast straight to the News Feed could allow creators to add on-screen graphics, titles and overlays to make their streams more fancy and polished. Here’s a step by step guide to how connecting hardware or software to Facebook Live works.

Opening up on desktop takes Facebook Live beyond Twitter and Periscope’s options, and brings it into competition with longer-running services like YouTube, Ustream and Livestream, as well as startups like YouNow. Facebook tells me it foresees desktop streaming to be useful for activities like Q&As and vlogging where holding your phone in your hand might be shaky and annoying for both creators and viewers.

Facebook’s aggressive push into live streaming indicates its goal of owning the verb “Live,” and being the place people broadcast when there’s something worth sharing. While Periscope launched first in April 2015, Facebook quickly moved to roll out Live and add a Live API for broadcasting from professional equipment. Periscope only added an API yesterday. Now with the desktop launch, Facebook is looking to be a ubiquitous broadcasting tool.

While the content on Live might not be great yet, and there’s been some troubling broadcasts of violence that Facebook promises it’s working to prevent, it’s still early for the medium. If Facebook can lock-down the content type now, it could enjoy years of broadcasts that give it exclusive content to attract users to the News Feed and space to run lucrative video ad breaks. While mobile is always Facebook’s focus, adding desktop streaming means you can broadcast however you like.

In its biggest change in a decade, Facebook is evolving from text and link-focused sharing to the visual communication format its admits “Snapchat has really pioneered”.

Starting today, all users will soon have access to the new Facebook Camera feature that lets them overlay special effects on photos and videos. They can then share this content to a Snapchat clone called Facebook Stories that appears above News Feed on mobile and works similarly to Instagram’s 24-hour ephemeral slideshows. Users may also share these posts to News Feed, individual friends through the new Facebook Direct private visual messages that disappear once digested, or any combination.

“As people mostly post photos and videos, Stories is the way they’re going to want to do it” says Facebook Camera product manager Connor Hayes, noting Facebook’s shift away from text status updates after ten years as its primary sharing option. “Obviously we’ve seen this doing very well in other apps. Snapchat has really pioneered this” explained Hayes, less shy to mention the competitor by name than some other Facebook executives.

But really it was the rapid ascent of Instagram Stories to 150 million daily users that he says inspired Facebook to start testing its own Stories in January, and keep expanding it to 12 countries before today’s rollout. Surprisingly, Hayes says Facebook Stories is “additive”, not detracting from News Feed sharing or usage of its other Stories products. “We’ve tested in markets with Instagram Stories and Messenger Day, and we’ve seen this as accretive. They end up posting more and they like using the Stories format across apps.”

That’s the worst news for Snapchat and best news for Facebook since the world’s biggest social network adopted the strategy of copying the competitor that refused its acquisition offer.

If Facebook Stories clearly cannibalized News Feed sharing and consumption, it would have to demolish its most popular and lucrative feature to make way for the future where the camera is the new keyboard. And if users saw Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp’s Stories features as uncool clones or redundant as a set, it might have had to limit its attack on Snapchat to just one of its core apps.

Instead, Facebook can charge in full-speed, attacking Snap from every angle without much penalty to its existing business. And with its enormous engineering and design teams, plus billions in profit each quarter, it can throw more resources at Camera, Stories, and Direct visual messaging than Snap can. That product development strength is in on display with today’s launch, and apparent from Facebook’s insistence on showing reporters forthcoming special effects that one-up Snapchat’s iconic lenses.

Until now, Facebook was just running missile tests and fighting skirmishes on the frontier. Today Facebook declares total war on Snapchat.

Storytelling For Everyone

“The way people have been prompted to share for ten years, it’s very text-centric” Hayes describes. “Even when you look at the way we’ve done this on mobile, you can see half of the screen is still taken up by a place for you to type text.”

“Our new camera puts visual content at the heart of the Facebook experience” says Kristen Spilman, Facebook’s director of art and animation. “So it feels natural for the camera to do more of the talking.”

Facebook has been casually pursuing visual communication for years, but got serious about it back in August when it started testing the first version of Facebook Camera during the 2016 Olympics. It went so far as to replace half the News Feed home screen with an open camera window. But while Snapchat opens straight to the camera, Spilman says “people were not comfortable with how drastic some of the change was”. It can be pretty jarring to suddenly see your own face on screen, so Facebook decided to hide the camera but let you open it with a swipe. Hayes says Facebook would consider opening to the camera “if over time we find this becomes the primary use case.”

Facebook wants to make Camera and Stories accessible to the wide range of demographics that use it everyday, not just the teens that gravitate to Snapchat. “We learned from Instagram that Stories as a format is actually great for all types of people”, says Hayes. “We think it’s going to be adopted by people regardless of age.”

Courting the international market was also a priority for Facebook. It’s built text-overlay filters using local slang for around 10 different top markets, like the US and Canada. In Ireland users can slap the words “Gas” or “Some Craic” on their posts, which might confuse those abroad but mean “astonishing” and “having a good time” in the country.

This is how Facebook plans to recruit users to Stories that Snapchat has forgotten. While the LA startup has focused almost entirely on US teens, Facebook designed its version to appeal to teens everywhere and be intuitive enough for older users Snap shunned with its esoteric interface.

How to use Facebook Stories, Camera, and Direct

Facebook’s obvious but somewhat cluttered design puts its new products readily accessible from the home screen rather than buried in tabs.

Stories

Just like with Instagram Stories, you’ll immediately notice the circular Stories bubbles in a row above the News Feed, showing the profile pics of friends who’ve posted, ranked by relevancy rather than reverse chronologically like Snapchat. This solves the problem that you didn’t necessarily add all your friends to see their Stories. Even though your boss or distant acquaintances might post, you’ll see your closest friends first, which makes sure you get the maximum value no matter how long you spend watching.

One big problem with Facebook Stories is that they’re visible to all your friends and for now you can’t change that. That interferes with the more casual, off-the-cuff, goofy, personal style of content people typically post to Stories, which they might not want their boss or family to see. Facebook should build a privacy feature for hiding your Story from certain people. At least you won’t see Stories from anyone you unfollowed on Facebook, like annoying old buddies or exes you want to avoid.

As you watch the chronological slideshows of photos and videos you can tap to fast-forward a frame or swipe to skip to the next friend, each of which can see who watched their Story in what order. Relevancy-sorting also empowers auto-advance so all your friends’ Stories play in a row, unlike Snapchat which makes you clumsily create a manual playlist of which to watch.

A text and image reply bar appears overlaid on Stories so you can quickly type or shoot a response that gets sent over Direct. These replies only live as long as the 24-hour disappearing content, so friends will have to check them quick or miss them entirely. The readily visible reply bar might slightly obstruct the view, but should greatly increase reply frequency.

For now, Facebook Stories can’t be viewed by your public followers, so the product is effectively pushing social media influencers to do their broadcasting on Instagram Stories where verified profiles get special features. There’s also no Pages or businesses allowed on Stories for now, or ads inserted between Stories. However, Spilman says once Facebook is sure users love Stories, “We’ll considering broadening to brands and businesses.” Injecting ads could give Facebook a new supply of ad inventory just as it expects to run out of News Feed ad space — something that’s worried Wall Street in recent earnings reports.

Camera

A quick swipe right from the feed reveals the Facebook Camera where you can tap to shoot a photo or hold to record video. After you jazz it up to your liking, you can either post to your Story, to the News Feed, to specific friends via Direct, or any mix of these. The option to blast a Camera post to all of them could be spammy, but sometimes you might want to share the best scene from your Story to News Feed. Facebook even encourages Camera post to News Feed by making them full-bleed thanks to overlaid profile pics and  Like/comment buttons.

Along with shooting new stuff, you can upload from your camera roll with no restrictions or borders on old content. You’ll only see letter boxing if content was shot on a device with a different aspect ratio. Videos have a max length of 40 seconds, much longer than Snapchat’s 10 and Instagram’s 15. That means you can share longer videos you’ve recorded or downloaded, like viral clips.

Facebook’s Camera offers most of the creative tools you’d expect plus a lot more.

What’s in Facebook Camera:

• Drawing with resizable marker and chalk brushes


• Emoji stickers


• Colored captions


• Animated selfie lenses and masks


• Environmental effects like highlight lines and fun house mirrors


• Reactive filters that respond to movement like lava lamp colors


• Iterative filters that surprise you with new effects if you get more people in frame


• Fine art style transfers that make your images look like line drawings or impressionist paintings


• Professional artist filters like Hattie Stewart’s doodle bombs and Doug Copeland’s psychedelia


• Licensed filters from six movie studios, including a Minions filter


• Cause-supporting filters like rainbows for gay pride


• Geotagged location filters for certain places


• Country-specific filters for around 10 initial markets

What’s missing:

• Simple Instagram-style color filters for boosting exposure or contrast (Snapchat, Instagram)


• 3D stickers for pinning text, emoji, or drawings to objects in a video (Snapchat)


• Playback effects for slow-mo and fast-forward (Snapchat)


• FaceSwap (Snapchat)


• User- and business-submitted filters (Snapchat)


• Caption background colors for easy reading (Instagram)


• Location tags for turning any place name into a stylized sticker (Instagram)


• Mentions for tagging friends (Instagram)


• Computer-generated filters that turn any text into frames (Messenger)


• Who’s Up For? filters for inviting friends to hang out (Messenger)

Rather than hiding special effects behind an unintuitive tap like Snapchat, a column of dots denotes that you can vertically swipe through suggested special effects like ones for a current holiday or your city. There’s also a whole tray of 50 to 70 categorized effects showing the most popular ones, those you’ve recently used, selfie masks, style and color filters, and overlaid illustration frames.

Facebook refused to detail any financial details of its licensed filters like the Minions movie effect. It could try to pull sponsorship revenue from these like Snapchat, or just curate ones people will actually want and offer them free like Facebook already does with branded stickers.

When Facebook gathered reporters in San Francisco yesterday to demo the product, it clearly wanted us to think of it as going a step beyond Snapchat’s offering. That’s why it showed off high-tech effects that aren’t available yet. One, for example, adds Mario-esque music and throws 8-bit sunglasses on each additional person who comes into frame, with a bonus effect if you can get five people on camera together.

The next big opportunity here for Facebook is turning Camera into a platform. As I wrote last year, Facebook can’t possibly dream up every possible special effect people might want. Snapchat already allows filter submissions and payments in exchange for temporary geoflters. By allowing users and AR developers to submit filters. Facebook could make its camera’s breadth infinite. Though Facebook was cagey, the team admitted “that is a long-term vision for the platform.”

Overall, Facebook Camera feels extremely powerful and polished, with effects popping up fast and a sensible way of organizing them all. It doesn’t require you to know secret tricks or techniques, which can be fun for the teen in-crowd but alienating to olds. Whether or not you use Stories, Facebook Camera should help you express yourself more vividly.

Direct

While Facebook split chat off its main app a few years ago and forced people to download Messenger, Direct brings private communication back to the main app. Anything you shoot or upload through Facebook Camera can be sent to specific friends who’ll receive it in their Facebook app’s Direct inbox. You just can’t start with a text. These messages last at least until they’re viewed, and will remain visible until the conversation stops. So if you’re rapidly replying back and forth with text or images about a Direct message it will stay alive, but it goes away once you cease to banter.

Facebook tells me after content disappears from your Story or Direct messages, it completely deletes the content off its servers. The only exception is if it’s flagged by someone for violating Facebook’s community standards, in which case it’s kept until the investigation concludes. Though it might seem a bit redundant with Messenger also having its own camera, Hayes says “it’s not out intention to build up Direct as a Messenger replacement.”

The New News Feed

Whenever you move 1.8 billion people’s furniture, some are going to get pissed. Loyal Snapchat users or those who’s friends primarily live on Instagram might see Stories as making Facebook too cluttered, bloated, or redundant. But there are still at least a billion people who would probably enjoy Stories that aren’t using them every day yet. These are Facebook’s core targets with today’s launches.

Now people have Stories for each way they might want to share. Instagram Stories is for artful photography. Messenger Day is for igniting conversations and inviting friends to hang out. WhatsApp Status is for minimalist visual communication. And Facebook Stories is for showing you day-to-day life to the widest audience. Though subtle, those differences are likely why Facebook doesn’t offer any cross-posting options, making creators do the labor of re-uploading everywhere if they want to reach all their networks.

Don’t expect Stories in Facebook’s apps to suddenly stamp out Snapchat. Facebook’s best hope is that US teens who are addicted to Snapchat end up using its Stories too. But Snapchat’s neglect of international markets and older age demographics left the door open for Facebook. Now with its aggressive invasion of the Stories space, it may claim those segments before Snapchat ever gets a chance, blocking the upstart’s growth.

In the long-run, we remember the tech companies that provide value at scale, not just who invented things. We remember Netscape as an innovator, but that doesn’t make Google Chrome a clone. Facebook was willing to swallow its pride to protect its future. Maybe if Yahoo or BlackBerry were willing to pivot like this, they’d still be in power.

Facebook is testing an enhanced local search feature that could see the social network creeping in on Google Maps, Foursquare and Yelp territory, TechCrunch learned and Facebook confirmed. Facebook users are now able to surface recommendations of nearby places – like “dinner nearby” or “bars nearby,” for example  – by entering a query in Facebook’s search box on the web or mobile. This returns a box in Facebook’s search results that include a list of relevant businesses, along with their ratings on Facebook, a map, as well as which friends of yours have visited or like the places in question.

A spokesperson for Facebook confirmed the feature saying, “We’re testing a new way to discover where to go and what to do around you.”

The company declined to share other information about the addition, including how long the test has been in progress. It’s possible some users have had this option for a much longer time, but others are only now gaining access or don’t have it at all, as is standard with Facebook’s tests.

The feature itself isn’t immediately obvious because the place suggestions aren’t always the first search result. On the web, the map and list of recommendations often show up as you scroll a bit further down, below the results for posts from Groups, links, posts from friends, and Facebook Pages.

But on mobile, the results are much closer to the top, if not the first item. (It varied depending on the query, in tests.)

The suggestions themselves are in a small box in the search results that includes a pink pin drop icon next to the heading, like “Shopping & Retail Nearby” or “Pizza Places Nearby” or whatever else you may have searched. Facebook is also prompting these searches via auto-complete suggestions from the search box.

It’s unclear how Facebook determines which results to show you in the small box, as it’s seemingly not number of reviews, rating, or proximity to your current location that determines which places are shown first. Nor is it social data  – for instance, a place visited by over a dozen friends was returned below one visited by just a few.

Beneath these initial suggestions, you can click “See all” to be taken to a fuller list.

In addition to standard information like the business’s name, address, phone number, and photos, Facebook displays how many people have rated the business, its star rating, pricing (as measured by one to four dollar signs), whether it’s open now, plus the above-mentioned social data about your friends’ visits and likes.

Facebook is also using technology to parse users’ reviews in order to highlight what the business in question is known for, or what people talk about in their reviews.

For example, a bakery’s review might say that “people talk about friendly service, vegan donuts and iced latte.” (Nope, Facebook’s tech doesn’t have a grip on proper grammar just yet.)

Plus, the business listings may have a call-to-action, as they do on their Page – like “Sign Up,” “Shop Now” or “Call Now,” for example.

On the web version of the feature, you can filter the search results by price, places that are currently open, or other social metrics, like “visited by friends” or “good for groups.” Restaurants can also be narrowed down by cuisine (pizza, sushi, Chinese, etc.). And you can “Like” the business on both web and mobile.

Facebook is clearly taking advantage of its wealth of data on businesses and social metrics to build out this feature – an inevitable next step for the business, given the obvious opportunity for search ads.

This is hardly the first time that Facebook has dabbled with serving up local business info, however.

Way back in 2012, Facebook launched Nearby, following its acquisition of Foursquare competitor Gowalla. That feature did much of the same thing, and still exists in its present form from the “More” menu on mobile. The integration of “Nearby” suggestions in the search results seems more like an iteration on this earlier feature. But it adds functionality – like the calls-to-action and the algorithmically-parsed customer reviews – which makes it a bit more functional.

Above: Facebook Nearby, circa 2012

What’s interesting is that, despite everything Facebook knows about its users, the suggestions were not ranked as well as they could be. For instance, just because a lot of my fellow parents have hosted kids’ birthdays at Chuck E. Cheese, that doesn’t warrant the restaurant from getting top billing in a list of suggested pizza places. It also pushed a lacrosse uniform shop and the teen-focused Hot Topic to the top of its suggestions for “Women’s Clothing Stores Nearby.” Uh, no.

Above: various filters in the Nearby feature in search

Either Facebook isn’t fully tapping into its data to make these suggestions, or its data alone is falling short. If the latter, it could use another infusion – like the data from Foursquare.

Facebook had skipped over Foursquare years ago in favor of Gowalla. But today’s Foursquare is more powerful than the social check-in app of the past. Its database of locations is integrated into over 100,000 apps (including Snapchat), it offers businesses useful analytical data on foot traffic, it partnered with Nielsen to map digital ads in order to connect them to real-world traffic and sales, and it just rolled out a push notification-based recommendation engine to developers.

It’s not hard to imagine how well these features would fit into Facebook given how closely they’re aligned with Facebook’s own goals. But Foursquare’s trouble with finding an exit has always been about its price and valuation.

In the meantime, Facebook’s existing “Nearby” feature and this new local search addition pale compared with what Foursquare, Yelp or Google today offer consumers. It’s handy, I suppose, if you happen to be on Facebook, but it’s not worth launching Facebook for this alone when better options exist.

Additional reporting: Josh Constine

(Image credit, dinner nearby, h/t: Jose Gutierrez) 

Facebook has finally capped off its strategy of cloning Snapchat’s USP by slotting a camera-first, ephemeral multimedia sharing feature into its entire social sharing estate.

Today it’s flicked the official switch on a global rollout of the feature in the main Facebook app, where these disappearing Stories are pinned to contacts above the News Feed — thereby making them almost impossible to ignore, especially given their fleeting lifespan.

Earlier this month the social sharing giant added a similar visual sharing feature to its Messenger app — triggering complaints that it was messing with the user experience.

It did the same, in February, with its messaging platform, WhatsApp, and also annoyed users by trying to replace a text status feature (which it’s since restored).

The Facebook Snapchat cloning strategy kicked off in August 2016 when the company debuted the disappearing Stories format on its photo and video sharing platform Instagram, clearly the most natural home for the clone.

And Instagram Stories has since apparently managed to dent Snapchat’s growth, which was clearly a core strategic aim for Facebook.

That and creating vastly more video inventory across Facebook’s portfolio of social apps — into which it can inject more lucrative video ads.

Training users to share the kind of content where ads can natively blend is really what Stories is all about.

All video, all video ads

None of this should be surprising. The company has previously publicly suggested its entire platform will be “all video” in the coming years.

It’s also taken user-hostile design decisions such as removing the ability to send text messages from its main Facebook app. (And the aforementioned attempted rubbing out of text statuses in WhatsApp).

So, basically, if you want to spam all your Facebook friends with a video of yourself wearing an animal selfie lens, Facebook will happily put all its tech at your disposal. But if you wish to swap a few words with people in your Facebook network, Facebook actively discourages that by requiring you switch to its Messenger app to do so. It’s very clear where the company’s priorities lie.

Yet it remains to be seen whether Facebook users in general are going to be flocking in droves to engage in the kind of throwaway visual sharing Stories encourages — with the format effectively asking them to repackage private lives into what amounts to a self-promoting public ‘ad format’, complete with stickers, silly effects and so on.

Thing is, for several years Facebook has had a problem with users posting fewer personal updates. This too is not surprising, given the network has something of an identity crisis these days. It’s certainly a far cry from the original concept of linking university friends across a campus.

Instagram is obviously the more natural home for people with a love of visual sharing generally (including those who want to build public followings for what they share). While WhatsApp/Messenger are for communicating privately with friends and/or in more bounded groups. So the question arises, who is Facebook for?

The people in the average Facebook network may well include a number of uni friends but also various family members, workmates across different jobs, folks you once met at a party, friends of friends, old school friends, professional connections and even random strangers.

Such an assortment of ‘connections’ likely does not constitute either a close-knit group of friends nor a unified group of people with shared interests. The only loosely linking factor is they all (maybe) met you at least once in your life.

Nor are Facebook friends likely to be a uniformly active network. I see huge variation in terms of content sharing in my own network, for example.

It will undoubtedly take a certain type of person to want to blanket broadcast Stories across such a varied and variously segmented network. (Stories can be shared with specific Facebook friends only, but the default push for the format is clearly to encourage sharing with all.)

The mask slips

Anecdotally, a very small subset of my own Facebook connections also appear to account for the vast majority of personal updates still being shared. (Doubtless exacerbated by the algorithmic effect of the Facebook News Feed promoting posts that get more engagement).

Could I imagine these most actively sharing Facebook users sharing Facebook Stories? Perhaps a few of them — so an even smaller subset.

But the handful of users I see who are still regularly sharing personal stuff on Facebook appear to be doing so either to spark debate on a particular issue/topic; to entertain and/or garner public attention/likes; or to ask for (and in so doing share) information/advice with a group — functions that all feel secondary as far as Stories is concerned, given the emphasis here is squarely on visual entertainment.

I may be wrong but it’s very hard to imagine serious or substantial topics being debated via Stories, what with all the selfie lenses, movie masks, and visual effects Facebook is touting…

Stories can also be posted to the Facebook News Feed. So there is at least the possibility that someone could use the format to try to garner comments in the usual way, by turning it into a standard piece of public Facebook content.

But I can’t imagine how such a promotional format could sensitively touch on some of the topics I’ve seen discussed across Facebook in recent years, including very difficult issues like child abuse, depression and marriage breakdown. A selfie lens really isn’t going to fit.

Group chat will get a bit less chaotic with the global rollout of two Facebook Messenger features it was previously testing in Vietnam.

Users can now @mention friends in a group chat to send them a special notification to reply to your message so they don’t miss it in a noisy thread. You just type @, then the person’s name or in-thread nickname, and the name will be highlighted and that person will get an alert.

Meanwhile, Facebook is bringing its News Feed Reactions to Messenger so you can reply by attaching a love, smile, wow, sad, angry, thumbs-up or thumbs-down emoji to a specific message. This way you’ll be able to simply express agreement, disagreement or an emotion about a particular message, even if a bunch of other messages have come in since.

Tap and hold on a message to pull up the Reactions menu and select one. Everyone will see a counter of different reactions on the message, and you can tap that counter to see exactly who reacted how. Reactions work in one-on-one chats, too.

The “Thumbs-down” Reaction could be interpreted as Facebook’s first real “Dislike button.” However, Facebook calls it a “No” Reaction and told me that since people often use Messenger for coordinating logistics, it wanted to add easy ways to vote for or against a proposed plan.

TechCrunch first spotted and reported on a test of Messenger Reactions early this month, and also saw that users in Vietnam were trying out mentions. Reactions works very similar to iOS 10’s iMessage’s Tapback reactions launched in September, and Slack’s more expansive and long-standing emoji reaction selector.

Messenger Reactions work the same as iMessage’s Tapback reactions that launched last year

Doubling down on group chat is smart for Messenger at a time when it’s been criticized for injecting social media content broadcasting into the communication app via Snapchat Stories clone Messenger Day. Messenger actually started as a group chat app called Beluga before Facebook acquired it. With mentions and Reactions, Facebook could use its better group chat experience than SMS to win users from the status quo.

Facebook is introducing a new ad format that should help retailers showcase their products.

The last big addition to Facebook’s ad lineup came last year, with the launch of Canvas, a fast-loading, rich media ad. Like Canvas, a collection is created specifically for mobile, and seems designed to win users over in the Facebook app — before directing them to the advertiser’s mobile website.

Facebook monetization director Maz Sharafi told me the goal with the collection format is “to really build a great new shopping experience for people and to help marketers really drive discovery and sales in mobile.” Collections are also designed to be easy for merchants to set up, with Facebook doing the heavy lifting of choosing the right products to showcase from the merchants’ broader catalog.

Sharafi added that collections take advantage of a number of broader trends: The growth of mobile commerce and video, plus the increasing importance of fast performance on smartphones.

So the ad shows up in users’ News Feeds — it leads with a video or image, followed by four product images below. If someone taps on the ad, it opens up a broader catalog of up to 50 different products. Then if they tap on a specific product, they’ll go to the advertiser’s website or app to make the purchase.

Sharafi said that while the advertiser can choose the initial four products that show up in a collection, the rest are automatically selected by Facebook, based on the merchant’s preferences and on user targeting, aiming to create an experience that’s “as relevant as possible for the consumer.”

Facebook is also announcing a change to the way advertisers can measure their results. For units like collections and Canvas, it won’t just tell advertisers when someone clicks an ad — it will also measure outbound clicks, namely when someone clicks out of the ad to the business’ website. This will also be available to advertisers on Instagram.

The race is on to attract as much expertise in artificial intelligence as possible at tech companies large and small, and more than a few Silicon Valley giants are looking inward to convert tech talent they already possess into the AI resources they increasingly need. Facebook has its own AI course, which is oversubscribed, according to a new report by Wired, and which is led by one of the leading AI researchers in the world.

Facebook’s Larry Zitnick, who is a key leader at the social networking company’s Artificial Intelligence Research Lab, as well as a Microsoft Research and CMU Robotics alum, teaches a class on deep learning for Facebook employees that draws over-capacity crowds. Zitnick’s course sparks strong competition among engineers who already rank among the best in the world, each vying to come to grips with and excel at a field outside of their original purview, but one that few fail to recognize is the hottest in tech.

On the other hand, AI and deep learning increasingly touch all aspects of the technology business, so experts with understanding of where the overlap might prove most useful in their own original discipline are also going to be very much in demand. There are external efforts underway to help create more of these polyglot deep learning pros, including at online educational firms like Udacity, but new talent isn’t rolling in fast enough from outside sources, traditional and non-traditional alike.

Facebook also offers an AI immersion program, which embed prospects within the work it’s doing in the field. The goal, again, is to spread expertise across the company, and thread deep learning know-how into the organization’s very DNA. Expect this to be the rule for big tech company behavior for the foreseeable future.

Featured Image: Getty Images/Yuri Khristich/Hemera (modified by TechCrunch)

Earlier this month, TechCrunch reported Facebook was rolling out a new feature called “Town Hall,” which would allow the social network’s users to easily locate, follow and contact their local, state and federal government representatives. The company today confirmed the feature is available to all U.S. users on desktop and mobile, and will now include News Feed integration. Along with this news, Facebook also announced it’s launching local election reminders for the first time, to encourage users to vote in state, county, and municipal elections.

The changes follow Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent penning of a nearly 6,000-word manifesto where he discussed a number of ambitions for the social network in the days ahead. One of these was focused on using the network to increase civic engagement – a tacit acknowledgement of the role Facebook plays in today’s political landscape.

Following the U.S. presidential elections, the company was accused of helping Donald Trump win, by doing nothing to prevent the spread of fake news and disinformation across its network. Its algorithms which show users more of what they like to keep people in the app longer were also blamed for keeping people in “bubbles” where they believe that everyone thinks the same way they do, increasing polarization.

Zuckerberg initially downplayed the concerns over the spread of “fake news” on Facebook by saying that the network was a technology platform, not a media company. He later changed his position on this, and the company has since begun rolling out a variety of fact-checking measures to combat fake news.

In the letter, Zuckerberg also said he wanted Facebook to focus on increasing civic engagement in a world where “participation in voting sometimes includes less than half our population.”

With the addition of “Town Hall,” Facebook took a step towards this goal. The feature makes it simpler for users to know who represents them in government, and reach out through whichever means the politician lists on their Facebook page.

The feature was recently made available in the “More” menu on mobile and on desktop to a subset of users.

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When you launch it, you would be presented with a list of reps at the local, state and federal level, and you could click to visit their Facebook page or send them a message, call them, or email.

Not all reps offer their contact information via Facebook, however. And Facebook doesn’t yet pull in the missing phone numbers or emails from off-site sources, like official government websites, for example.

The company tell us that’s something it wants to address in time, though.

Today, Town Hall is available to all U.S. Facebook users and some of its features will now be integrated in the News Feed.

If you like or comment on a post made by one of your elected officials, a new feature below the comments will invite you to call, message or email the rep. After doing so, users will then be prompted to share a post saying that they contacted the rep, as a means of encouraging their friends to do the same.

Facebook says that this Contact Your Rep post is not shown to everyone, but only to those who are also already engaging with an elected official’s post, through a like or comment.

But Facebook likely made this decision in an effort to keep its News Feed from becoming too politicized. It could anger those who would interpret these shares as Facebook itself directing them to take a specific political action.

Additionally, Facebook says it will now offer Election Reminders for local elections.

The company has already been running reminders at the top of the News Feed for national elections since 2008 – something it says has increased voter turnout. Here, Facebook cited its own internal research and a study in the Nature journal, which had found that its 2010 message impacted real-world turnout by 340,000 votes.

To make this feature possible, Facebook had to upgrade its civic data infrastructure to automate the reminders for thousands of elections across the U.S., it says.

The new, local election reminders will appear for all state, county, and municipal elections in the U.S. in areas with a population of over 10,000 people, and will include both primaries and general elections.

All three features are publicly available as of today on web and mobile.

Image credit, top: Marcbela (Marc N. Belanger) (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons; others: Facebook

Post updated to clarify when items appear in feed. 

Facebook Messenger wants to be an offline social gathering tool, not just an online chat app. Today it’s adding a new Live Location feature that lets you share your real-time location on a map for an hour within a private direct or group message thread. The recipients can then see an estimate of how long it would take you to reach them by car.

“Live Location is super helpful when trying to coordinate with friends, telling people how close you are when you’re on your way to an appointment or even sharing where you are with your roommate when you’re on your way home at night” writes the feature’s product manager Selena Wang. It’s rolling out for all iOS and Android Messenger users today. Messenger could now challenge location apps like Foursquare Swarm and meetup apps like Down To Lunch.

Live Location is Facebook’s second big attempt at maps in Messenger after its first one blew up into a privacy scandal and was scrapped in 2015. Many users were sharing their momentary exact location with each message, which a Harvard student found could be scraped into a Marauder’s Map through a Chrome extension he built showing exactly where a friend had been. Facebook rescinded the student’s internship offer, made him take the extension down, and switched to only letting users send their one time current or future location.

That static location feature is still available, but now there’s Live Location too. This time, though, you can’t leave it on by default. Head of Messenger David Marcus posted that “Many of us make plans on Messenger that involve finding each other, or letting friends and loved ones know we’re on the way. Sharing your location will also help some of you feel safer on the way home.”

To use Live Location:

1. Inside a message thread, tap the Location button or find it in the More menu


2. On the map, tap the blue bar to start sharing your Live Location


3. The recipients will see your exact current location on a map for 60 minutes, and an ETA by car for you to reach them


4. A clock in the corner of the map counts down until your location sharing expires, and you can hit Stop Sharing at any time

Of course, battery life is a big issue with location features since GPS can drain your device’s energy quickly. But Facebook tells me it feels confident that Live Location uses a standard amount of battery, and Marcus writes “We put a lot of time and effort into . . . minimizing battery consumption to the point you wouldn’t even have to think about it.” Though it’s still worth keeping an eye on it.

Alongside the Active Now status indicators and Messenger Day’s “Who’s up for?” filters, Messenger is becoming a much more full-featured utility for getting together with friends. That could give it an advantage over strict chat products and dedicated visual communication apps.

Offline gathering is a still a largely unsolved problem. It’s tough to know who’s available to hang out and close enough for that to be convenient. To win in this space, a product needs social graph ubiquity, location sharing, to be a place users already check frequently, and to have a messaging component for planning. Swarm, Down To Lunch, and a graveyard of other apps have always missed a critical piece.

But as I wrote last year, Messenger could succeed since it piggybacks on Facebook identity and is already where people are organizing meetups. For all our fancy apps, we still need a way to fight the loneliness and get face to face in person. Remember, though. Now if you say “on my way”, you better not be lying while still home in your pajamas.

Yesterday UK government ministers once again called for social media companies to do more to combat terrorism. “There should be no place for terrorists to hide,” said Home Secretary Amber Rudd, speaking on the BBC’s Andrew Marr program.

Rudd’s comments followed the terrorist attack In London last week, in which lone attacker Khalid Masood drove a car into pedestrians walking over Westminster bridge before stabbing a policeman to death outside parliament.

Press reports of the police investigation have suggested Masood used the WhatsApp messaging app minutes before commencing the attack last Wednesday.

“We need to make sure that organisations like WhatsApp, and there are plenty of others like that, don’t provide a secret place for terrorists to communicate with each other,” Rudd told Marr. “It used to be that people would steam open envelopes or just listen in on phones when they wanted to find out what people were doing, legally, through warranty.

“But on this situation we need to make sure that our intelligence services have the ability to get into situations like encrypted WhatsApp.”

Rudd’s comments echo an earlier statement, made in January 2015, by then Prime Minister David Cameron, who argued there should not be any means of communication that “in extremis” cannot be read by the intelligence agencies.

Cameron’s comments followed the January 2015 terror attacks in Paris in which islamic extremist gunmen killed staff of the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine and shoppers at a Jewish supermarket.

Safe to say, it’s become standard procedure for politicians to point the finger of blame at technology companies when a terror attack occurs — most obviously as this allows governments to spread the blame for counterterrorism failures.

Facebook, for instance, was criticized after a 2014 report by the UK Intelligence and Security Committee into the 2013 killing of solider Lee Rigby by two extremists who had very much been on the intelligence services’ radar. Yet the parliamentary ISC concluded the only “decisive” possibility for preventing the attack required the Internet company to have pro-actively identified and reported the threat — a suggestion that effectively outsources responsibility for counterterrorism to the commercial sector.

Writing in a national newspaper yesterday Rudd also called for social media companies to do more to tackle terrorism online. “We need the help of social media ­companies: the Googles, the Twitters, the Facebooks, of this world,” she wrote. “And the smaller ones, too — ­platforms like Telegram, WordPress and Justpaste.it.”

Rudd also said Google, Facebook and Twitter had been summoned to a meeting to discuss action over extremism, as well as suggesting the government is considering including new proposals to make Internet giants take down hate videos quicker in a forthcoming counterterrorism strategy — which would appear to mirror a push in Germany. The government there proposed a new law earlier this month to require social media firms to remove illegal hate speech faster.

So, whatever else it is, a terror attack is a politically opportune moment for governments to apply massively visible public pressure onto a sector known for engineering workarounds to extant regulation — as a power play to try to eke out greater cooperation going forward.

And US tech platform giants have long been under the public counterterrorism cosh in the UK — with the then head of intelligence agency GCHQ arguing, back in 2014, that their platforms had become the “command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals”, and calling for “a new deal between democratic governments and the technology companies in the area of protecting our citizens”.

“They cannot get away with saying… “

As is typically the case when governments talk about encryption, Rudd’s comments to Marr are contradictory — so on the one hand she’s making the apparently timeless call for tech firms to break encryption and backdoor their services. Yet when pressed on the specifics she also appears to claim she’s not calling for that at all, telling Marr: “We don’t want to open up, we don’t want to go into the cloud and do all sorts of things like that, but we do want [technology companies] to recognise that they have a responsibility to engage with government, to engage with law enforcement agencies when there is a terrorist situation.

“We would do it all through the carefully thought through, legally covered arrangements. But they cannot get away with saying ‘we are in a different situation’ — they are not.”

So, really, the core of her demand is closer co-operation between tech firms and government. And the not so subtle subtext is: ‘we’d prefer you didn’t use end-to-end encryption by default’.

After all, what better way to workaround e2e encryption than to pressurize companies not to pro-actively push its use in the first place… (So even if one potential target’s messages are robustly encrypted, the agencies could hope to find one of their contacts whose messages are still accessible.)

Rudd comment on encryption isn’t about Investigatory Powers Act. It’s politics, leveraging pressure to make default settings unencrypted.

— Eric King (@e3i5) March 27, 2017

A key factor informing this political power play is undoubtedly the huge popularity of some of the technology services being targeted. Messaging app WhatApp has more than a billion active users, for example.

Banning popular tech services would not only likely be technically futile, but any attempt to outlaw mainstream networks would be tantamount to political suicide — hence governments feeling the need to wage a hearts and minds PR war every time there’s another terrorist outrage. The mission is to try to put tech firms on the back foot by turning public opinion against them. (Oftentimes, a goal aided and abetted by sections of the mainstream UK media, it must be said.)

In recent years, some tech companies with very large user-bases have also been shown to make high profile stances championing user privacy — which inexorable sets them on a collision course with governments’ national security priorities.

Consider how Apple and WhatsApp have recently challenged law enforcement authorities’ demands to weaken their security system and/or access encrypted data, for instance.

Apple most visibly in the case of the San Bernardino terrorist’s locked iPhone — where the Cupertino company resisted a demand by the FBI that it write a new version of its OS to weaken the security of the device so it could be unlocked. (In the event, the FBI paid a third party organization for a hacking tool that apparently enabled it to unlock the device.)

While WhatsApp — aside from the fact the messaging giant has rolled out end-to-end encryption across its entire platform, thereby vastly lowering the barrier to entry to the tech for mainstream consumers — has continued resisting police demands for encrypted data, such as in Brazil, where the service has been blocked several times as a result, on judges’ orders.

Meanwhile, in the UK, the legislative push in recent years has been to expand the investigatory capabilities of domestic intelligence agencies — with counterterrorism the broad-brush justification for this push to normalize mass surveillance.

The current government rubberstamped the hugely controversial Investigatory Powers Act at the back end of last year — which puts intrusive powers that had been used previously, without necessary being avowed to parliament and authorized via an antiquated legislative patchwork, on a firmer legal footing — including cementing a series of so-called “bulk” (i.e. non-targeted) powers at the heart of the UK surveillance state, such as the ability to hack into multiple devices/services under a single warrant.

So the really big irony of Rudd’s comments is that the government has already afforded itself swingeing investigatory powers — even including the ability to require companies to decrypt data, limit the use of end-to-end encryption and backdoor services on warranted request. (And that before you even consider how much intel can profitably be gleaned by intelligence agencies looking at metadata — which end-to-end encryption does not lock behind an impenetrable wall.)

Which begs the question why Rudd is seemingly asking tech companies for something her government has already legislated to be able to demand.

” …stop this stuff even being put up”

Part of this might be down to intelligence agencies being worried that it’s getting harder (and/or more resource intensive) for them to prioritize subjects of interest because the more widespread use of end-to-end encryption means they can’t as easily access and read messages of potential suspects. Instead they might have to directly hack an individual’s device, for instance, which they have legal powers to do should they obtain the necessary warrant.

And it’s undoubtedly true that agencies’ use of bulk collection methods means they are systematically amassing more and more data which needs to be sifted through to identify possible targets.

So the UK government might be testing the water to make a fresh case on the agencies’ behalf — to push for quashing the rise of e2e encryption. (And it’s clear that at least some sections of the Conservative party do not have the faintest idea of how encryption works.) But, well, good luck with that!

Public debate about triaging threats might be even harder than public debate around investigative capabilities. [which was pretty hard!]

— Eric King (@e3i5) March 27, 2017

Either way, this is certainly a PR war. And — perhaps most likely — one in which the UK government is jockeying for position to slap social media companies with additional extremist-countering measures, as Rudd has hinted are in the works.

Something that, while controversial, is likely to be less so than trying to ban certain popular apps outright, or forcibly outlaw the use of end-to-end encryption.

On taking action against extremist content online, Rudd told Marr the best people to solve the problem are those “who understand the technology, who understand the necessary hashtags to stop this stuff even being put up”. Which suggests the government is considering asking for more pre-emptive screening and blocking of content. Ergo, some form of keyword censoring.

One possible scenario might be that when a user tries to post a tweet containing a blacklisted keyword they are blocked from doing so until the offending keyword is removed.

Security researcher, and former Facebook employee, Alec Muffett wasted no time branding this hashtag concept “chilling” censorship…

Ignore the “necessary”; the Home Secretary is literally calling for certain hashtags or words to elicit censorship/blocking on social media: pic.twitter.com/4ISt0Fr5Br

— Alec Muffett (@AlecMuffett) March 27, 2017

But mainstream users might well be a lot more supportive of proactive and visible action to try to suppress the spread of extremist material online (however misguided such an approach might be). The fact Rudd is even talking in these terms suggests the government thinks it’s a PR battle they could win.

We reached out to Google, Facebook and Twitter to ask for a response to Rudd’s comments. Google declined to comment, and Twitter had not responded to our questions at the time of writing.

Facebook provided a WhatsApp statement, in which a spokesperson said the company is “horrified by the attack carried out in London earlier this week and are cooperating with law enforcement as they continue their investigations”. But did not immediately provide a Facebook-specific response to being summoned by the UK government for discussions about tackling online extremism.

The company has recently been facing renewed criticism in the UK for how it handles complaints relating to child safety. As well as ongoing concerns in multiple countries about how fake news spreads across its platform. On the latter issue, it’s been working with third party fact checking organizations to flag disputed content in certain regions. While on the issue of illegal hate speech in Germany Facebook has said it is increasing the number of people working on reviewing content in the country, and claims to be “committed to working with the government and our partners to address this societal issue”.

It seems highly likely the social media giant will soon have a fresh set of political demands on its plate. And that ‘humanitarian manifesto‘ Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg penned in February, in which he publicly grappled with some of the societal concerns the platform is sparking, is already looking in need of an update.