After “nearly missing” the mobile revolution, Facebook saved itself in 2011 by making a company-wide pivot away from desktop and toward mobile use of its products. Now, as the “social network on which Facebook built its empire is reaching a plateau” with slowing user growth on its core social network, Facebook is facing another era of pivoting. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has already announced a shift toward more private, encrypted, or ephemeral messaging services like its WhatsApp and Instagram apps, but the future of Facebook may also lie in other bets: virtual and augmented reality. As Kurt Wagner writes, “Facebook’s core social network isn’t going away anytime soon, but there’s a good chance — probably a great chance — that the way you use Facebook’s products in 10 years will look and feel very different from the way you use them today.”
[Kurt Wagner / Recode]
Recode Daily: Facebook can’t afford to miss the next big thing.
Plus: Apple restricts screen-time monitoring apps, some Uber drivers don’t know how much they make, and another mass shooting follows an internet playbook.
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Apple has been removing apps that fight app addiction. The company has “removed or restricted at least 11 of the 17 most downloaded screen-time and parental-control apps,” according to analysis from the New York Times together with app-data firm Sensor Tower. Many of these app makers are saying Apple’s sudden restrictions have devastated their businesses, and that the changes came soon after Apple built its own competing screen-time tracker. Apple has stood by their decision, saying that it comes down to a user privacy issue. The company has said they’ve only restricted apps that “abuse” the device’s mobile device management system. Philip W. Schiller, Apple’s SVP of worldwide marketing, wrote that Apple “acted extremely responsibly in this matter, helping to protect our children from technologies that could be used to violate their privacy and security.”
[Jack Nicas / The New York Times]
Some Uber drivers don’t know what they make, according to a new study from Georgetown University. The report, put out by the university’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, released a two-year report on the working conditions of 40 Uber drivers in the Washington, DC, area. It found that while most Uber drivers knew the overall percentage the company takes from fares, over a third didn’t know how Uber determined the amount they make on a single trip. Other findings showed that 33 percent of drivers “took on debt relating to the job” and 30 percent “reported physical assaults or safety concerns.” Still, 50 percent of drivers would recommend it to a friend and 45 percent planned to keep working for the company for at least six months.
[Alison Griswold / Oversharing]
Mass shootings are increasingly being broadcast and cultivated on the internet. On Saturday, one person died at a shooting at the Chabad of Poway synagogue outside San Diego, after a 19-year-old man with an assault weapon stormed the house of worship. Just hours before the attack, a user who identified as the shooter posted a manifesto on far-right message board site 8chan. It’s not the first time recently that a mass shooter has found an audience for horror online. The shooter behind the recent Christchurch mosque massacre in March posted a similar post before he killed 49. As Charlie Warzel writes, “[l]ike the Christchurch massacre, the Poway shooting is not only tailored for the internet but also sickeningly standardized.” Warzel makes a case that mass shootings like these have become a kind of “sickening meme,” making the internet “an amplification system for an ideology of white supremacy that only recently was relegated to the shadows.”
[Charlie Warzel / New York Times]
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Correction: A previous version of this post incorrectly stated the death toll at the recent synagogue shooting in Poway. One person died in the shooting.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
