Image: Protocol
The Facebook devil is in the Facebook details

Good morning! This Thursday, Facebook's poor record on civil rights, Microsoft's improvements on video calls, and why the elevator might be key to getting back to the office.
Follow-up from yesterday: I included the wrong link for the Scooter Championships video. (Thanks to everyone who let me know!) Here's the right link. Crazy, right?
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Rather than take attention away from climate change, Al Gore said the pandemic has increased it:
After Microsoft killed Mixer, Ninja is a free-agent gamer again, and he's testing a new platform:
President Trump suggested that a TikTok ban would be a good way to punish China:
Facebook released the results of a two-year civil rights audit yesterday, led by former ACLU director Laura Murphy, Issie Lapowksy wrote on Protocol. The report concluded that, over several recent posts in which President Trump shared misleading information, "civil rights expertise was not sought and applied to the degree it should have been, and the resulting decisions were devastating."
The introduction to the report was especially telling. "When I first started on this project, there was no commitment to publish reports and top management was not actively engaged," Murphy wrote. Facebook commissioned this report, and previous ones, but seemed to have little interest in how it went. To Sandberg's credit in particular, Murphy said, that did eventually change, but it was a struggle to make Facebook leadership care about something as fundamental and important as civil rights.
All of which is a windup to what is increasingly my grand unified theory about Facebook: It's so big that it doesn't know how to focus on any group smaller than "everyone on Facebook."
Facebook's power is concentrated in the hands of a few people, and those few people spend their time thinking about Facebook as a whole. In the same way Google doesn't like to make products that can't reach a billion people, Facebook doesn't like to make policies that won't matter to 2.6 billion users. (Which is deeply ironic for a company built on super-specific ad targeting, but I digress.) But the only thing unifying everyone on Facebook is that they're on Facebook. And that's a problem.
Facebook's approach to civil rights is "too reactive and piecemeal," Murphy said, which is also a good way to describe Facebook's approach to everything. It's not like it can't do things:
But Facebook mostly doesn't do things, at least not without sustained public pressure. In the last few days, I think NAACP president Derrick Johnson summed it up better than anybody. "None of this is hard, especially for one of the world's most innovative companies whose founder coined the term move fast and break things," he said after a meeting with Facebook on Tuesday about hate speech and racism. "Mark Zuckerberg, you aren't breaking things, you are breaking people."
Most people are deeply tired of video chat. That's anecdotally obvious, but it's also backed up by a study Microsoft's been running with brain sensors since even before the pandemic. The not-so-surprising upshot: It's harder to concentrate on a video call than in an in-person meeting. Somewhere around 25 minutes in, staring at a grid of faces just gets to be too much.
So Microsoft designed a solution, which it thinks is a less stressful way to video chat.
Stronger Care ... from anywhere, to anywhere
At Philips, we're pioneering stronger care networks with technologies we've spent decades innovating. With connected care solutions from telehealth to at-home monitoring, today's healthcare workers can face today's greatest challenges with smarter virtual tools. See how our telehealth technologies help doctors and nurses deliver care from anywhere, to anywhere.
Michael Colacino thinks the whole remote-work thing is a little overblown. Of course, he would think that: He's the president of SquareFoot, a commercial real estate company that helps companies find their offices. But he's convinced that the office isn't dead yet. "People just want to be together," he said.
As companies start to rethink their floorplans and office setups, Colacino said a bunch of things are going to have to change:
One thing that will be more complicated than anyone realizes? Elevators, he says. Sure, you can tell everyone that it's only four people per car, but Colacino said he's found that most people already find the wait for the elevator interminable. Besides, "what are you going to do, have armed elevator concierges?"
Twitter is hiring a team for "a subscription platform" that it's calling Gryphon. No details on what that means, really. My initial thought was "Twitter for Business!" but it could also be something more like YouTube and Twitch subscriptions, giving people the option to subscribe to individual accounts. We'll see.
Paul Grewal is the new chief legal officer at Coinbase. He joins from Facebook, where he was VP and deputy general counsel. As crypto gets more mainstream, it's not surprising that it's going to face a number of thorny legal questions.
Speaking of Coinbase: Mohammad Almalkawi is leaving the company and joining Clubhouse. He was previously Coinbase's engineering lead, and has worked at Twitter, Microsoft and elsewhere.
Imagine "Survivor," but instead of trying to make your way on a deserted island in the middle of nowhere, you're sitting in front of a computer, and your goal is to build a virtual "Survivor" set in an hour. That, I think is roughly the setup for "The Sims Spark'd," a show premiering next week on TBS. The whole thing seems like both an overpriced ad for The Sims 4 and a really terrible idea, but if you're into watching people do Sims-related challenges as they try to win $100,000, then you're in luck. Personally, I'd be way more excited if this was a take on Rollercoaster Tycoon. But maybe that's for next season.
Stronger Care ... from anywhere, to anywhere
At Philips, we're pioneering stronger care networks with technologies we've spent decades innovating. With connected care solutions from telehealth to at-home monitoring, today's healthcare workers can face today's greatest challenges with smarter virtual tools. See how our telehealth technologies help doctors and nurses deliver care from anywhere, to anywhere.
Today's Source Code was written by David Pierce. Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to david@protocol.com, or our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Enjoy your day, see you tomorrow.
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