Mocking Congress Won’t Make It Tech Literate

Well, it’s going to be hard to regulate Facebook when politicians know less about how social media works than their grandkids do.

That was one of the biggest takeaways of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance on April 10 before both the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, and Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee to discuss data privacy and Russian disinformation. And this is especially so when ignorance on the political side allows the chairman and chief executive officer of Facebook to look like a helpful and earnest young’un who just wants senior citizens to be comfortable in the oh-so-confusing and complicated digital age.

Sadly, these illustrative headlines aren’t clickbait:

“‘Senator, I Think We Already Do’: Zuckerberg’s Interrogation Turns into Tech Support” (Vanity Fair)
“Lawmakers seem confused about what Facebook does — and how to fix it” (Vox)
“A Bunch of Senators Just Showed They Have No Idea How Facebook Works. They Want to Regulate It Anyway” (Reason)
Much of the conversation during the hearing was disappointing political theater, because the inquiry itself had a terrible structure. Design, in technology and procedure alike, can confer power to some and take it from others. So, what happens when you give a group of senators less than five minutes each to ask questions in the course of a single day and every reason to personally grandstand with little incentive to interrogate collaboratively and build upon one another’s concerns? Apart from outlier superstars, like California Senator Kamala Harris’s round of questioning — voilà — a preordained result with “no room for follow-ups, no chance for big discoveries and many frustratingly half-developed ideas.”

The scorecard has been well documented, and the record clearly reflects who did what and who should have done more. But what we should give further thought to are the powerful public reactions people felt while the drama unfolded and the conflicts they experienced about how to express them.

There has been plenty of powerful and insightful reporting and shared opinion on Zuckerberg’s testimony, and the credible sources I’ve been reading aren’t pulling punches in demanding accountability. Crucially, none have resorted to mockery.

It was a different story on Twitter, though, when people were reacting to the hearing in real time. There was serious debate over whether it’s appropriate for reporters to shame members of Congress for knowing so little about technology.

(I’m not going to insert tweets or hyperlinks to them. Yes, I know it’s a commonplace practice and a simple way of illustrating your point. But cherry-picking tweets risks distortion by taking them out of context — violating their contextual integrity. And doing so without asking the authors for permission threatens their privacy by obscurity. So I’m just going to contextualize the remarks expressed there. If you want to do your own fact-checking, you can search Twitter. In my opinion, the added transaction cost, small as it is, makes all the ethical difference.)

Team Civility
There are good reasons to support the folks who were upset over politicians not knowing enough about technology, but who insisted, nevertheless, that the concerns be expressed politely. Conversations about moral failings are themselves morally appraisable since they are first and foremost about people. Arguably, even if members of Congress deserve to be strongly rebuked for being unprepared civil servants, they still are worthy of being corrected in a manner that conveys a modicum of respect, because they aren’t just politicians, but human beings, too.

From this perspective, members of Congress are inherently fallible, just like the rest of us, and worthy of the modest protections that civil discourse offers. Indeed, it could be argued that during a time where trolling and closed-minded outrage is tearing the country apart, it’s imperative to treat the people we disagree with and are disappointed by with a level of decorum to avoid further degrading the public sphere.

This position also has practical support. Nobody likes to be mocked. And so, mocking politicians is a surefire way to give them an excuse to tune out and continue on with their bad behavior.

And let’s not forget that the hearing was taking place for the whole country to watch. Perhaps some of the seemingly ignorant remarks should be viewed in a more charitable way. Clearly, lots of people are unsure about aspects of how Facebook works. The company’s black-boxed algorithms, constantly shifting policies, and questionable terms of service keep so many of us in the dark. Perhaps getting Zuckerberg to publicly explain things that some of us find remedial actually helped improve other people’s digital literacy.

Legal Considerations
Focusing too intently on what politicians don’t know about technology can distract us from other important matters. Danielle Citron, the Morton & Sophia Macht professor of law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law,, told me that, yes, mocking lawmakers for lacking technical expertise might underscore that they and their staff writing the questions are not knowledgeable enough to move the debate forward.

“On the other hand, there were some effective points raised, so ‘talking tech’ may be overrated. I was personally stunned at lawmakers’ demonstrated lack of ignorance of the law and legal concepts. Even Ted Cruz, who served as Texas solicitor general, had little to no understanding of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act,” said Citron. “He suggested that Section 230 was adopted in order to ensure that online services acted like neutral public fora. That is the opposite of what Congress was endeavoring to do — to encourage private actors to block or filter content. And lawmakers took Mark Zuckerberg to task for their own failure to write the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA) to cover 13 to 16-year-olds. I was not disappointed by their lack of tech savvy but, instead, their legal ignorance.”
The problem of politicians playing fast and loose with the law is just the tip of the iceberg when comes to regulating technology. The loss of institutions like the Office of Technology Assessment has been profound and can’t be made up for by expecting members of Congress to develop expertise in technology. Outputs generated by complex algorithms might very well be beyond the scope of scrutiny by human experts. And, as has been widely remarked, innovation moves quickly, while law is designed to be a slower institution, steeped in tradition and governed by careful deliberation. Outdated conceptions of technology limit the judicial imagination and persist through worn-out metaphors that negatively impact legal reasoning in matters increasingly important to us now, such as robots, cyberspace, and privacy.

The Limits of Politeness
But back to how we express our outrage. The alternative position, that members of Congress should be thoroughly lambasted, also has merits. For starters, members of Congress are public officials and arguably should be held to different standards of discourse than nonpublic figures, who aren’t responsible for matters relating to the public good in the same way. Perhaps discourse ethics is contextual and shouldn’t be applied in cookie-cutter fashion.

“[Politicians] have a duty … to be acquainted with the basic operations of the most powerful forces and institutions that are shaping our nation.”
Think about Alec Baldwin’s satirical depictions of the president on “Saturday Night Live.” You can be a fan without believing it’s acceptable to make fun of everyone. To treat Baldwin’s political commentary the same as presidential candidate Donald Trump mocking a reporter with a disability would be to commit the fallacy of false equivalence.

As a related example, I want to tell you about one of the most memorable experiences that I’ve had as a college professor. One day, an engineering major began his in-class criticism of an assigned article — which was written by a respected professional philosopher — by saying something like, “In this idiotic essay, the author claims…” I questioned whether this was an appropriate way to frame the rejoinder, asking “Wouldn’t it be better to convey your disagreement in a more congenial way, so that if the author were ever presented with your concerns, he would be inclined to take them seriously?”

The answer I received left me nearly speechless. The student explained that during critiques, his engineering professors would convey what he was doing wrong in harsh terms that depicted both the doer and deed in an unflattering light. Instead of finding this treatment insulting or wishing that the fault-finding was more delicately put, the student was inspired by the lack of filter. He more or less said that if the professors had blunted their views with nicer rhetoric, he wouldn’t be constantly sensitized to the gravity of mistakes in his field and would instead be more motivated to work hard to avoid making them. Since the stakes could amount to nothing less than life and death when he graduated, he was sincerely grateful.

The position that mockery is justified can be furthered bolstered by an additional consideration related to the high stakes of failing to regulate Facebook in the right way. Facebook has been repeatedly criticized for its conduct throughout the years, and yet its user base keeps growing. Indeed, Facebook’s stock rose during the hearing, which can be interpreted as a sign that Zuckerberg, not regulators, won the day. (Fortunately, Facebook’s campaign contributions “didn’t necessarily correlate to the hostility of questions asked by the legislators,” as this would be another reason to despair for democracy.)

Thus, it could be said that being polite runs the risk of failing to convey a level of moral outrage that’s appropriate to the situation. Using toned-down rhetoric risks becoming a complicit force that helps normalize the status quo and all of its problems.

I spoke with Shannon Vallor, the William J. Rewak, S.J. professor in the department of philosophy at Santa Clara University, about the situation, since she wrote the definitive book about the relation between technology and virtue.

Vallor thinks we shouldn’t have to resort to public shaming to get our representatives to fulfill their duties, but that it fits into a pattern as constructive channels of civic discourse are shutting down.

“Mockery is not the most constructive response to that failure; in an ideal community of virtuous citizens, we would reproach one another in a less cruel fashion. However, we must admit that our democracy has, in the last few decades, fallen further and further away from the ideals of civic virtue. Our representatives have become increasingly immune to reasoned public critique; many now avoid town hall meetings with their critics, foster public distrust of media voices, and generally fail to engage in any substantive discussion of how well or poorly Congress is doing its job.

“So, with so many of our representatives ignoring the norms and virtues of responsible leadership and civic discourse, it is perhaps understandable that the quality of criticism they receive becomes more crude, desperate, and less constructive.”

We need a new movement for constructive civic debate, Vallor said, and maybe a new kind of public servant as well.

“While we shouldn’t expect our elected representatives to all share a deep knowledge of technical and scientific matters, they all do have a duty to their constituents to be acquainted with the basic operations of the most powerful forces and institutions that are shaping our nation,” Vallor said.

“Especially when they are tasked with regulating those forces and institutions to the degree necessary to protect the public interest.”

Perhaps putting Zuckerberg in the hot seat allowed the U.S. version of democracy on trial more than Facebook. Zuckerberg says he won’t face the music overseas in front of a U.K. parliamentary committee, but what we saw this week raises difficult questions about our lawmakers and ourselves.

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Adobe is Developing Photoshop for Your Voice

When Adobe Photoshop first debuted, it looked like magic. The ability to seamlessly alter photos gave graphic designers a life-changing tool, but it wasn’t long before users started to use the product for more nefarious purposes. As recently as last year, for example, a photo of NFL player Michael Bennett of the Seattle Seahawks appearing to be holding a burning flag in the team’s locker room went viral, even though it had merely been Photoshopped.

By now, Photoshop (and “Photoshopping,” it’s adapted verb version) has become shorthand for speaking about any manipulated photo. The way the term has woven itself into our everyday language demonstrates how widespread our understanding that images can be easily digitally manipulated has become. People are often willing to point out and accept that a photo has been altered. (Though, as the Bennett photo demonstrates, there are still exceptions to the rule, and many who are still fooled.)

What happens when Photoshop (or programs like it) becomes so advanced that it’s nearly impossible to spot a fake? What if there wasn’t a way to easily point out that something had been doctored or substantially altered because only a minority of people knew the manipulation was even possible? This is the case with Adobe VoCo, a program that allows users to edit voices — and not just the pitch or speed, but also what someone has said. Beyond just rearranging words in a voice recording, Adobe VoCo can make a person “say” something they never said at all.


Image: Adobe Creative Cloud/YouTube
Demonstrated in late 2016, the program is billed as “Photoshop for voice,” and part of the demonstration showed how to alter a voice recording of Keegan-Michael Key, of Key & Peele fame. It seamlessly shifted the order of words within the recording, in addition to adding new words to it.

In a matter of minutes, “I kissed my dogs and my wife” became “I kissed Jordan three times.”

The quality of the alteration, unlike more rudimentary methods of manually splicing vocal recordings, can make it hard to catch. The recording was changed merely by uploading the clip into VoCo, which then displayed the words being said under the vocal recording. All the user has to do is move words around or type in additional ones.

Predictably, the audience met the demo with cheers and applause, while Jordan Peele, who was emceeing the event, jokingly declared, “You’re a demon!”


Image: Adobe Creative Cloud/YouTube

VoCo takes in large amounts of voice data and breaks it into the distinct sounds that make up spoken language, collectively known as phonemes, before creating a voice model of whoever is recorded. If a word isn’t already in the recording, then the program will use these phonemes to create it from scratch.

There are numerous uses for such technology, most obviously in podcasting, given their increasing popularity over the past decade. From 2008 to 2015, the number of podcasts on iTunes rose by 50,000; over the same time period, listeners increased from 9 percent of the American public to 17 percent, according to MarTech, a marketing research website. Audio editing is a tedious process that could likely be made much easier with a program like VoCo. Software like this would also make it easier for amateurs to get into podcasting without needing extensive production experience or training.

As with many content-manipulation technologies, over the initial applause and adulation loom questions about the way such tech could easily be used to cause harm and spread fake news.

“One of the main fears of this kind of technology, where you can augment audio, is really about how can that be used in war,” says Joan Donovan, the media manipulation and platform accountability lead at the Data and Society Research Institute, which examines the social and cultural issues arising from data-centric and automated technologies.

“You can imagine in the midst of a breaking news event something like this being used to pretend there is a leak, that someone is making a death threat against a public figure, or that so-and-so has called for an invasion. There are all kinds of ways that this technology, if people don’t readily know it’s available, could be weaponized against the public,” Donovan says.

Consider something like War of the Worlds, Orson Welles’ infamous radio broadcast from 1938, which was so convincing that it caused some to panic, believing that an alien invasion was not fiction but, in fact, breaking news. Imagine Adobe VoCo taking the voice of a nation’s president and having them announce something equally as alarming over the airwaves.

Unlike Photoshop, programs such as Adobe VoCo aren’t widely known, which makes people more susceptible to them. If you described Adobe VoCo to a friend, perhaps they might say they could imagine it, but would they know it already exists? And that it’s practically on the market?

These kind of voice alterations could allow anyone to improve upon classic phishing campaigns—say, requesting someone’s password while pretending to be a family member or a boss. If you wanted to create a widespread false-information operation, the software could be used to spread fake audio clips. Or it could be used simply to harass people. Journalists regularly receive threatening emails — what if those were phone calls or voicemails that appeared to be from friends or acquaintances? Some of our more secure institutions, such as banks, use voice verification as a part of their security. Imagine if Donald Trump claimed the damning audio of him bragging to Billy Bush about sexually assaulting women had been digitally altered?

Researchers like Donovan have put together the digital tools needed to go back and see when, where, and how certain images have been manipulated. But she characterizes it as a losing game, because they’ll always lag behind the most recent technology. Widespread tools for identifying falsified speech are the next hill to climb.

Some biometric security companies believe they’re ready for this wave of technology, however, as more companies (including Google’s DeepMind audio-mimicking system WaveNet) move into this security space.

“The technology is new, but its underlying principles have been understood for some time,” Steven Murdoch, a cybersecurity researcher from University College London, told the BBC. “Biometric companies say their products would not be tricked by this because the things they are looking for are not the same things that humans look for when identifying people. But the only way to find out is to test them, and it will be some time before we know the answer.”

Adobe also seems well aware of the risks involved. The company has not yet released a beta of VoCo for download, and as of late 2017, it was still testing and developing the program. At the initial demo, Adobe’s presenter explained potentially using audio watermarks, a unique electronic identifier embedded in a recording and often used to identify who has ownership of copyright, to demonstrate whether an audio clip had been edited.

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Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom

An inside look at the inner workings of a technology you may take for granted

If you’re like most people in America, you use a text editor nearly every day. Whether it’s your basic Apple Notes, or something more advanced like Google Docs, Microsoft Word or Medium, our text editors allow us to record and render our important thoughts and information, enabling us to tell stories in the most engaging ways.

But you might not have ever thought about how those text editors work under the hood. Every time you press a key, hundreds of lines of code may be executing to render your desired character on the page. Actions that seem small — such as dragging a selection over a few words of text or turning text into a heading — actually trigger lots of changes in the system underlying the program.

While you may not think about the code powering these complicated text-editing maneuvers, my team here at The New York Times thinks about it constantly. Our primary task is to create an ultra-customized story editor for the newsroom. Beyond the basics of being able to type and render content, this new story editor needs to combine the advanced features of Google Docs with the intuitive design focus of Medium, then add lots of features unique to the newsroom’s workflow.

For a number of years, The Times’s newsroom has used a legacy homegrown text editor that hasn’t quite served its many needs. While our older editor is intensely tailored to the newsroom’s production workflow, its UI leaves much to be desired: It heavily compartmentalizes that workflow, separating different parts of a story (e.g. text, photos, social media and copy-editing) into completely different parts of the app. Producing an article in this older editor therefore requires navigating through a lengthy series of unintuitive and visually unappealing tabs.

In addition to promoting a fragmented workflow for users, the legacy editor also causes a lot of pain on the engineering side. It relies on direct DOM manipulation to render everything in the editor, adding various HTML tags to signify the difference between deleted text, new text and comments. This means engineers on other teams then have to put the article through heavy tag cleanup before it can be published and rendered to the website, a process that is time-consuming and prone to mistakes.

As the newsroom evolves, we envisioned a new story editor that would visually bring the different components of stories inline, so that reporters and editors alike could see exactly what a story would look like before it publishes. Additionally, the new approach would ideally be more intuitive and flexible in its code implementation, avoiding many of the problems caused by the older editor.

With these two goals in mind, my team set out to build this new text editor, which we named Oak. After much research and months of prototyping, we opted to build it on the foundation of ProseMirror, a robust open-source JavaScript toolkit for building rich-text editors. ProseMirror takes a completely different approach than our old text editor did, representing the document using its own non-HTML tree-shaped data structure that describes the structure of the text in terms of paragraphs, headings, lists, links and more.

Unlike the output of our old editor, the output of a text editor built on ProseMirror can ultimately be rendered as a DOM tree, Markdown text or any other number of other formats that can express the concepts it encodes, making it very versatile and solving many of the problems we run into with our legacy text editor.

So how does ProseMirror work, exactly? Let’s jump into the technology behind it.

Everything is a Node
ProseMirror structures its main elements — paragraphs, headings, lists, images, etc. — as nodes. Many nodes can have child nodes — e.g., a heading_basic node can have child nodes including a heading1 node, a byline node, a timestamp node and image nodes. This leads to the tree-like structure I mentioned above.

The interesting exception to this tree-like structure lies in the way paragraph nodes codify their text. Consider a paragraph consisting of the sentence, “This is strong text with emphasis”.

The DOM would codify that sentence as a tree, like this:

In ProseMirror, however, the content of a paragraph is represented as a flat sequence of inline elements, each with its own set of styles:


There’s an advantage to this flat paragraph structure: ProseMirror keeps track of every node in terms of its numerical position. Because ProseMirror recognizes the italicized and bolded word “emphasis” in the example above as its own standalone node, it can represent the node’s position as simple character offsets rather than thinking about it as a location in a tree. The text editor can know, for example, that the word “emphasis” begins at position 63 in the document, which makes it easy to select, find and work with.

All of these nodes — paragraph nodes, heading nodes, image nodes, etc. — have certain features associated with them, including sizes, placeholders and draggability. In the case of some specific nodes like images or videos, they also must contain an ID so that media files can be found in the larger CMS environment. How does Oak know about all of these node features?

To tell Oak what a particular node is like, we create it with a “node spec,” a class that defines those custom behaviors or methods that the text editor needs to understand and properly work with the node. We then define a schema of all the nodes that exist in our editor and where each node is allowed to be placed in the overall document. (We wouldn’t, for example, want users placing embedded tweets inside of the header, so we disallow it in the schema.) In the schema, we list all the nodes that exist in the Oak environment and how they relate to each other.

export function nytBodySchemaSpec() {
  const schemaSpec = {
    nodes: {
      doc: new DocSpec({ content: 'block+', marks: '_' }),
      paragraph: new ParagraphSpec({ content: 'inline*', group:  'block', marks: '_' }),
      heading1: new Heading1Spec({ content: 'inline*', group: 'block', marks: 'comment' }),
      blockquote: new BlockquoteSpec({ content: 'inline*', group: 'block', marks: '_' }),
      summary: new SummarySpec({ content: 'inline*', group: 'block', marks: 'comment' }),
      header_timestamp: new HeaderTimestampSpec({ group: 'header-child-block', marks: 'comment' }),
      ...
    },
    marks: 
      link: new LinkSpec(),
      em: new EmSpec(),
      strong: new StrongSpec(),
      comment: new CommentMarkSpec(),
    },
  };
}

Using this list of all the nodes that exist in the Oak environment and how they relate to each other, ProseMirror creates a model of the document at any given time. This model is an object, very similar to the JSON shown next to the example Oak article in the topmost illustration. As the user edits the article, this object is constantly being replaced with a new object that includes the edits, which ensures ProseMirror always knows what the document includes and therefore what to render on the page.

Speaking of which: Once ProseMirror knows how nodes fit together in a document tree, how does it know what those nodes look like or how to actually display them on the page? To map the ProseMirror state to the DOM, every node has a simple toDOM() method out of the box that converts the node to a basic DOM tag — for example, a Paragraph node’s toDOM() method would convert it to a <p> tag, while an Image node’s toDOM() method would convert it to an <img> tag. But because Oak needs customized nodes that do very specific things, our team leverages ProseMirror’s NodeView function to design a custom React component that renders the nodes in specific ways.

(Note: ProseMirror is framework-agnostic, and NodeViews can be created using any front-end framework or none at all; our team has just chosen to use React.)

Keeping track of text styling
If a node is created with a specific visual appearance that ProseMirror gets from its NodeView, how do additional user-added stylings like bold or italics work? That’s what marks are for. You might have noticed them up in the schema code block above.

Following the block where we declare all the nodes in the schema, we declare the types of marks each node is allowed to have. In Oak, we support certain marks for some nodes, and not for others — for instance, we allow italics and hyperlinks in small heading nodes, but neither in large heading nodes. Marks for a given node are then kept in that node’s object in ProseMirror’s state of the current document. We also use marks for our custom comment feature, which I’ll get to a little later in this post.

How do edits work under the hood?
In order to render an accurate version of the document at any given time and also track a version history, it’s critically important that we record virtually everything the user does to change the document — for example, pressing the letter “s” or the enter key, or inserting an image. ProseMirror calls each of these micro-changes a step.

To ensure that all parts of the app are in sync and showing the most recent data, the state of the document is immutable, meaning that updates to the state don’t happen by simply editing the existing data object. Instead, ProseMirror takes the old object, combines it with this new step object and arrives at a brand new state. (For those of you familiar with Flux concepts, this probably feels familiar.)

This flow both encourages cleaner code and also leaves a trail of updates, enabling some of the editor’s most important features, including version comparison. We track these steps and their order in our Redux store, making it easy for the user to roll back or roll forward changes to switch between versions and see the edits that different users have made:



Some of the Cool Features We’ve Built
The ProseMirror library is intentionally modular and extensible, which means it requires heavy customization to do anything at all. This was perfect for us because our goal was to build a text editor to fit the newsroom’s specific requirements. Some of the most interesting features our team has built include:

Track Changes
Our “track changes” feature, shown above, is arguably Oak’s most advanced and important. With newsroom articles involving a complex flow between reporters and their various editors, it’s important to be able to track what changes different users have made to the document and when. This feature relies heavily on the careful tracking of each transaction, storing each one in a database and then rendering them in the document as green text for additions and red strikeout text for deletions.

Custom Headers
Part of Oak’s purpose is to be a design-focused text editor, giving reporters and editors the ability to present visual journalism in the way that best fits any given story. To this aim, we’ve created custom header nodes including horizontal and vertical full-bleed images. These headers in Oak are each nodes with their own unique NodeViews and schemas that allow them to include bylines, timestamps, images and other nested nodes. For users, they mirror the headers that published articles can have on the reader-facing site, giving reporters and editors as close as possible a representation to what the article will look like when it’s published for the public on the actual New York Times website.

   
A few of Oak’s header options. From left to right: Basic header, Horizontal full-bleed header, Vertical full-bleed header.

Comments
Comments are an important part of the newsroom workflow — editors need to converse with reporters, asking questions and giving suggestions. In our legacy editor, users were forced to put their comments directly into the document alongside the article text, which often made the article look busy and were easy to miss. For Oak, our team created an intricate ProseMirror plugin that renders comments off to the right. Believe it or not, comments are actually a type of mark under the hood. It’s an annotation on text, like bold, italics or hyperlinks; the difference is just the display style.



In Oak, comments are a type of mark, but they’re displayed on the right side of the relevant text or node.


Oak has come a long way since its conception, and we’re excited to continue building new features for the many newsroom desks that are beginning to make the switch from our legacy editor. We’re planning to begin work soon on a collaborative editing feature that would allow more than one user to edit an article at the same time, which will radically improve the way reporters and editors work together.

Text editors are much more complex than many know. I consider it a privilege to be part of the Oak team, building a tool that, as a writer, I find fascinating and also so important for the functioning of one of the world’s largest and most influential newsrooms. Thank you to my managers, Tessa Ann Taylor and Joe Hart, and my team that’s been working on Oak since well before I arrived: Thomas Rhiel, Jeff Sisson, Will Dunning, Matthew Stake, Matthew Berkowitz, Dylan Nelson, Shilpa Kumar, Shayni Sood and Robinson Deckert. I am lucky to have such amazing teammates in making the Oak magic happen. Thank you.

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Don't Be A Victim. Investigate Every Property Before You Buy Any Land This Year

Hi Everyone! 2017 and 2018 was great for so many reasons because I made people finally realize they have the power to determine how they buy property before throwing away their hard earned money. Personally i feel very very fulfilled that i did my best to help a lot of Nigerians search properties and recommend the ones that are valid and the ones that have so many hidden problems that by the time you purchase it, you end up having more headaches than when you previously didn't buy any land. I was doing my calculation yesterday and i realized i have turned down almost N165Million worth of properties that were advertised to be sold to intending purchasers that had so many hidden scruples that the agents and omoniles wont tell you till you commit your money and then its from frying pan to fire. smiley

For the avoidance of doubt for First Time Property/Land Buyers or New DestinyKing Property Viewers and Readers  who don't know what a property search is, it means before you buy any land or property what so ever in any form or shape where ever, you have to know the validity of it.

Lagos in particular is so notorious when it comes to sale of property or land that have so many fraudulent defects surrounding that land/ property that you wont even know what has hit you. These set of people are known as the Omoniles, land grabbers or land touts.

Omoniles naturally should mean owners of the original land which includes the original family that truthfully inherited the property from their fore fathers that has passed down to them. But the real problem comes when there are so many members of the family that are divided in terms of claiming ownership of the lands and how the land truthfully devolved to them. Before you know it, a property that is meant to be shared by a family of 3 to claim ownership is now being contested by the brother in law, the aunt, the great grand uncle relatives etc and that's when they begin to employ touts going around to masquerade as the original owners with the right to sell and after you fall victim of their sweet tongues and coercion, you realize that you bought from the wrong family or the wrong set of people who have no right to sell the land to you and you would be confronted by the original owners  when you have started building half way and forced to cough out another payment to the real owners or be thrown out of the land. Trust me this scourge is very very real and 65% of lands in Lagos have this problem one way or the other.

The other way your being deceived is by telling you the genuineness of the property comes from a set of documents. Those set of documents include either a survey plan, a deed of assignment, a certificate of occupancy, government allocation letter, government gazette or governors consent.

They will show you all manners of papers to make you believe them instantly and start pointing to different houses around there that has been built by one commissioner or one Minister or one big man and that their houses are still standing without any government wahala. What they want you to do is to instantly believe them and pay money to them immediately. One thing you can be rest assured is that, once you pay money to an Omonile, you will never ever ever get a refund of that money. Its gone and in some cases its in your front they will start sharing the money.

Don't ever ever fall for that trick. Always demand for what ever documents they have. I will point out the importance of each document to know the relevance of it and why it shouldn't be taken for granted.

1. Survey Plan:

This to me is the most important document From the start you must ask for from the omonile, agent or family that intends to sell the land/property to you. This survey plan is what i would carry to the Land Bureau to go and do a geographical search on first. No matter how cheap or beautiful or strategically located a land or property is, once that property has been discovered to be designated for Government use in future, there is no point going any further to purchase it. It will be a very foolish risk to attempt to defile the government and say nothing would happen, at least there are so many houses around or so many people have bought their own and nothing has happened.

Well for those who are conversant with Uncle Fashola's no nonsense approach in maintaining the master plan of Lagos, once your property is within that area that has being designated for Future Government use, no matter how long maybe its in the year 2023, the plan must be carried out accordingly and your property will go down without any form of compensation because you failed to do the right thing by throwing caution to the wind. Examples include the 8 Lane Dual Carriage Way in Badagry that all the houses that were on that land were demolished, All the houses in Alimosho local Government that were near pipe lines, The ones in Idiroko, The houses in ijegun etc! In fact remind me of the ones you know.

Also in Lekki Ajah, its even worse because there are some areas that have been specially acquired by the government for over 20 years and its just now that the government is trying to recover its lands. These areas is what is known as COMMITTED LANDS. Once an area has been designated as Committed, it is the ultimate no go area abeg. That's where they commit the area for Road expansion, future government estates or Government Reserved areas For Major Developments. As long as that Property is designated as Committed or under acquisition, it is only the Government of the day that can revoke it and anybody buying into those areas are buying at their own mega risk. Don't for once look at the houses around there as your guide to mean the government cannot demolish those houses, you would be shocked that the owners have 4 or 5 houses and can do away with that one and poor people like me and you that have no mouth to fight government will just be rendered homeless because of our stubbornness to buy at all cost there.

Remember you know where the shoe pinches and how much you have in your pocket. This is 2018. Plan to save more money than to throw it away foolishly. wink

The other option from Government is that if they choose not to demolish your house because it is sited on a committed land, they will end up giving you the option to come and pay Ratification. Ratification in this sense means your going to pay Government the full price and taxes it determines to be the cost of that place and its non negotiable. So imagine you bought the land in 2018 for N2Million in a committed area and in 2023, you now have to pay ratification also known as "Rat" at the cost of N5Million to the Government. Does that make any financial sense to you? Imagine all the fears, rumors, prayers that you would be going through so that those caterpillars don't come your way and when they decide not to demolish, they now ask you to pay Ratification, triple or quadruple the amount you bought it and remember the Omonile or Agent you bought it from is no where to be found and if Found, would not in this life time refund or assist you in any way.

Finally another advantage of the Survey Search is that if the land has been designated for Agricultural Purpose, you would know in advance. Its is mostly prevalent in Ikorodu, Badagry and Growing Rural Areas that are just cropping up. Buying into a place designated for Agric is a major no-no! Except you Want Your immediate neighbors to be Cows, Fisheries and probably Obasanjo's Chicken farmers! Unless it has been designated for Residential or Mixed Development Avoid it please.

The summary is that the Survey Plan Search saves you a lot of head ache at first before you even move ahead. And once you meet an Omonile or Agent who is extremely difficult with you in terms of not providing the survey plan on demand for search please my brothers and sisters, walk away quietly. The signs are already there for you to know your about to be scammed. A survey plan is a public document and not a private cheque book, so you shouldn't be bamboozled by people who tell you that the owner doesn't want to release it because of security reasons. Trust me there is no reason. As long as he is ready to sell, that is the first thing you get from them to know your status before proceeding.

2.The Deed of Assignment or Conveyance:

This is the second most important document you need to do a personal search. A deed of conveyance or assignment traces the history of how the property or land has reached the present owner till date. It relates all the information in respect of the true owners of the land before it was passed to Mr A and How MR A sold it to Mr B and How Mr B intend to sell it to you. With that document, you can trace in most respect the original families to find out if there is any dispute as to the ownership of the land how it has been transferred. It is extremely important to trace the original source of the land because its there you know if the land actually has been duly transferred to the present owner. It is here you get to know of if there is any family dispute and some families are still quarreling over the true ownership of the land. It is there you tend to get the family names to go and do a thorough search in court or Alausa to know of any lingering dispute. Its here you get to know the hanky panky the present owner intends to play when he begins to tell you rooster and bull stories so that you pay for the land immediately.

Never fall for this trick. Ask for a copy of the deed if they have one and hand it over to your lawyer for a through search on the family. To be honest this is the most difficult search of them all and it takes the special grace of God to make sure you come out unscathed.

Ways the present owner can deceive you includes:

1. Presenting a false person to Assume the identity of the  Original family so as to pretend that he or she sold it to the family 20 years ago

2. Telling you that the family is non existent anymore or they have moved away from that vicinity

3. Telling you all the family members have died

4. Coercing you that you don't need to meet the family because since it has been sold to him, he is the rightful person to sell to you.

This number 4 is a bloody lie and there is a reason which i wont mention here why this particular reason shouldn't stand at all and i can only disclose that in confidence based on the legality of it and the possible back door approach that Alausa frowns upon especially when your perfecting your papers tomorrow.

Bottom line, the deed of assignment is a major search instrument to know the how, why and when of the property you buying and it is very very stressful. So either be prepared to do all the walking, CID/FBI investigations or give your property lawyer on your behalf.

I hope you now know why search is not cheap!!! They say Good soup na money kill am or Penny Wise pound foolish. Because once you fail to get the real identity of the true family owners, your money has been sunk into the whitest of all elephant projects you can dream of, so be more vigilant this 2010.

3. Certificate of Occupancy, Government Allocation, Governors Consent:

These 3 are the dream lands or properties you can buy from with no stress or wahala what so ever. Any property that has any of the 3 is a very Good property to buy and to search them in Alausa is very easy because the records are there. In most situations, i will encourage you to look for properties that have a Global C/O, Private Certificate of Occupancy, Government Allocation or Governors Consent. Its so easy to perfect your papers in Future and your most likely in Most situations going to get compensated from the Government in case anything goes wrong if they attempt to acquire it or query it.

The only problems i have seen is that most properties or lands with a C/O, Government consent or Government allocation letter are quite expensive because of the paper work that has been done thoroughly by the present seller and it almost eliminates omonile from the transaction in most cases. So because the owners know that they have correct papers, they market and sell their properties quite high too because they are selling you gold. But then again you need your lawyer to help you negotiate favorably to make sure the property becomes yours.

The second problem is the issue of fake C/Os, Government Allocation Letters and Governors Consent. In my experience i have seen more than enough fake documents and these agents or omoniles would be so bold enough to dare you to go and check it in Alausa. They will so brain wash you and brag about its validity that you might be tempted to take their word for it but when you decide to go and search it in Alausa, you will find out that it doesn't exist and when you go back to challenge them, you hear new stories and unbelievable song and dance stories that you would almost want to puke.

Always demand for the Document to do the search. Don't listen to their stories. If they go as far as saying they wont release the C/O or Governors consent due to security risks, ask them for the number alone and the rest will be investigated. Don't compromise and get hoodwinked. Its the way they get their bread and butter. You fall for the scam, your on your own.

4. Government Gazette:

This is a document that records and states the areas the government has willingly given to the family and community to sell and that the government will not acquire it for what so ever reason except it duly notifies the world. The major characteristics of a gazette on provides 2 things.

1. The Area e.g Ilupeju

2. The coordinates e.g the Beacon Numbers that separates where the Land given to the family starts and stops. This is Known as an Excision. That means in a whole portion of land lets say 10 PLOTS, Government has excised 4 to the family and has taken 6 plots for its own use. Those 4 Plots will now be documented in a book form known as a Gazette. Its the Coordinates you will get to know where the 4 plots start and ends. You can never know with a unclothed Eye!

Now the danger of the Gazette that i have seen in my experience is that people who see the gazette, jump up and down and accept it whole line and sinker and proceed to pay to the family because that area is listed in the gazette and they believe that area is free. That's very wrong and dangerous.

It is only an Alausa Surveyor that can come to that gazetted area, map out the coordinates and tell you precisely whether your property falls inside the gazette or not. I have seen places where people purchased the lands that are outside the gazetted excision and still believe they are inside the gazetted excision coordinates. I have seen lazy lawyers and surveyors who wont take that time and patience to verify this one particular issue. I have seen fake gazettes with fake coordinates and worst of all i have seen people pay hard earned cash for those places that are most certainly going to be demolished.

Never ever play with a Government Gazette. They know why they documented it for you to see and if you refuse to follow those rules, you will heavily dealt with.

Anyway i have decided to assist people more this year 2018 and i thank so many people that brought me back to Property News via emails and phone calls from around the world  through words of encouragement  and blessings when i wanted to quit due to the malicious things some of my clients were saying about me and to repay this gesture as my gift back to Destinyking Property News this 2018, i would do the following for every member of Destinyking Property News that wants to buy a property free. smiley

1. When you intend to get a property, after you discuss with the agent or family selling, get a copy of the survey plan to me and i will do the survey search in Alausa for you free to know whether you should proceed to stage 2 or to forget the whole property from the beginning to save you stress and wahala. Just scan a copy of the survey plan and send it to me at destinyconsult.dc@gmail.com or call me on 08153534173.

Introduce your self and please try and convince me the reason you need the property search because i sift through my mails to know who is a time waster, clown or someone that truely needs assistance. Leave your number so i can call to tell you the result and advice you on the next stage which would include visiting the place physically to ascertain the coordinates because i have seen situations where the Survey Plan given is different from the Coordinates of the Proposed Land for sale. So when it is time for Stage 2 to carry me out, abeg prepare my deregulation money for hand o! grin (Joking)

This offer is only Open to Lands in Lagos State Alone and doesnt extend to Mowe/ Ofada/ Ogun state because of the distance going to Abeokuta back and forth. Alausa is Easier for me because my Office is a stone throw in Ikeja so i can hop in 10 times a day to get my information without crying over it in terms of the distance and transportation cost.

One more thing please, respect the fact that even though i am offering a free service, i have the right to cancel it at anytime if i realise am being taken for a ride. Property Search is a very very difficult process and if you think i am lying, devote a full day to do all the walking around in Lagos Traffic and meeting all sorts of people trying to hoodwink you and see if you have the mental capacity to withstand the shock and value how much a search would really cost if you did it alone

So take advantage of me now before i change my mind! grin.

If all is clear and you understand it throughly, then Good luck this 2010 in acquiring your dream property and may God continue to replenish your pocket to actualize your dream home and me the strenght to waka the whole of Lagos on your behalf so that you would have a Property/ Land Scam - Free year.

Finally Remember that You are not offending anybody if you are taking all the necessary steps before you drop your money for any Property Transaction, Rather your safeguarding your hard earned Money. Many Have gotten their fingers burnt for failing to do what is required in a property purchase. Its not how long but how well. Do the due diligence step by step. The property is not running away, rather its your money that will run away if you don't take these steps!Those that i have assisted one way or the other on Destinyking Property News to do a search or acquire properties will tell you how extremely thorough i am.


One more thing. If you intend to buy a property in Addo/ Badore Ajah Estates, please dont waste my time and your time. 85% of those lands / Estates there are under government acquistion and are Committed Areas. Governmnent has Acquired over 300 Hectares of Land in that place and thats approximately almost 5000 plots.

Anyone who has bought there or is intending to buy there that falls within that Committed Area is just wasting his/her time living in fear of demolition or whatever the government decides to do in that place. Nobody in those committed Areas will be able to get their C/O and anyone telling you otherwise is lying. I will not entertain searches emanating from those areas anymore. I am tired of going to the Survey General's office and hearing the same thing that it is a problematic area. Buyers Beware.

This is the problem of not doing a proper search in an area before you rush and buy land. Learn from the mistake of others before you rush and join them in their own problem. Omonile will forever convince you that the place is safe but Omonile will never refund your money after you have been 419ed! Property Buying is the easiest 419 Nigerians Fall for daily that never ceases to amaze me. Please be safe and intelligent before you make your next purchase. Whether the land is going for N400,000 or N400Million, protect your money. You didnt steal it, you worked hard for it, so dont let some people steal it from you because you failed to look before you leaped!

Cheers   

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4 Key Questions We Have for Mark Zuckerberg

It's official: Mark Zuckerberg has landed in Washington.

As the Facebook CEO prepares to face back-to-back Congressional hearings this week, more information continues to flow from the company -- from admitting guilt, to ongoing plans for how Facebook will better maintain user privacy.

Zuckerberg's appearance before lawmakers comes after revelations made in late March about political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica improperly obtaining and misusing Facebook personal user data.

Today, Facebook began issuing notifications to users whose information was jeopardized, which the company has said it conservatively estimates to have impacted 87 million people.

In fact, earlier today, the text of Mark Zuckerberg's official testimony for Wednesday's hearing with the House Energy and Commerce committee was released. The text reads somewhat like a synthesis of the apologies, statements, and plans of actions declared over the past three weeks.

How much this satisfies the members of the Committees he will be facing is yet to be determined. But what's fairly certain is that they'll have questions -- and we have questions, too.

As I prepared for my travels to D.C., where HubSpot's Social Campaign Strategy Associate Henry Franco and I will be on the ground to cover Zuckerberg's hearings, I thought about what some of those questions are. Then, I asked my colleagues:

If you were a member of Congress, what would you ask Mark Zuckerberg? And what are you hoping lawmakers ask him?

Here are the questions we have for Zuckerberg, going into this week's hearings.

1. What is the right balance between leveraging user data to improve the experience, versus marketing and selling to them?
The prioritization of ad revenue and protecting the user continues to hang in the balance as Facebook responds to and makes changes following the Cambridge Analytica revelations. Facebook has significantly modified its advertising policies to, among other things, require all advertisers on Facebook to become verified.

But beyond new policies and requirements, Zuckerberg has taken a hard stance on the user experience and what it's supposed to look like on Facebook. This began in January when the News Feed algorithm was changed to prioritize content from users' friends and families. That was part of the response to the weaponization of Facebook by foreign actors to spread misinformation and influence the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.

"My top priority has always been our social mission of connecting people, building community and bringing the world closer together," remarks Zuckerberg in his written testimony. "Advertisers and developers will never take priority over that as long as I'm running Facebook."


But some, including HubSpot Chief Marketing Officer Kipp Bodnar, wonder if Facebook is in such depths of building its advertising Platform that it's too late to re-focus on Zuckerberg's social mission.

"Have they gone too far?" Bodnar asks.

At this point, with the arguably reactive onslaught of policy changes, it's easy to question if Facebook even knows what the right balance between a personalized experience and marketing might look like -- and how to achieve it.

2. What information is off-limits in ad targeting?
While Facebook has indicated that advertisers will have to go through a comprehensive verification process, the question on the mind of HubSpot VP of Marketing Jon Dick is this: "What information is off-limits in ad targeting?"

Zuckerberg noted in his written testimony that Facebook won't wait "for legislation to act" before working to address the issue-based advertising that was largely used in the spread of misinformation and divisive content leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

And yes, Facebook is rolling out several protocols to help add greater context to ads -- including who paid for it, the organization or Page associated with it, and an Ad Archive described in the video below.


https://www.facebook.com/facebook/videos/10157262455526729/?t=3

But what hasn't been explored is the subject matter of those ads. Based on what has been unveiled so far, no subject matter has been named as prohibited beyond what Facebook's terms of service and policies already dictated.

As the company continues to reshape and respond to the increasing scrutiny it has faced in recent months, that could change.

3. What about the other brands and apps owned by Facebook?
In the current storm of quickly emerging updates on both Facebook and Zuckerberg himself, it's easy to forget the breadth of the company's entire portfolio. Facebook also owns Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Oculus. So, says HubSpot VP of Marketing Meghan Anderson, it raises the question: What are Zuckerberg's plans for those brands, as well?

Instagram recently shuttered its APIs for follower lists, relationships, and commenting on public content, limiting the amount of data developers can access (and the frequency with which any information can be accessed, according to initial reports from TechCrunch).



But beyond that, how will Facebook (and Zuckerberg) extend these new efforts and policy changes to its other products? For instance, when I wrote about the experience of downloading and sifting through my data file archive, I discovered that it included details of my Messenger interactions, including the full text of conversations and any media exchanged throughout them.

And that raises even more questions. For instance, asks Dick, "How will [Facebook] ensure that user privacy is protected in messaging apps?", including Messenger and WhatsApp, as well as direct messaging features within Instagram.

4. What about the GDPR?
Zuckerberg's hearings come at an interesting time, when the General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR) is just over a month away from coming into force on May 25, 2018. According to HubSpot Web Developer Dmitry Shamis, it poses the question: "Should we extend GDPR rules beyond Europe?"

It's hardly the first time the question has come up, as Zuckerberg spoke to this possibility in an interview with Reuters and a call with several members of the press. In the former, he agreed “in spirit” to a new law in the European Union that will renovate online privacy standards across Europe. In the latter, he remarked, "if we are planning on running the controls for GDPR across the world ... my answer [is] yes."

As we enter the hearings this week, we expect lawmakers to raise the issue of regulating Facebook and its Big Tech counterparts. In fact, in the early days of the Cambridge Analytica revelations, there were rumors of Zuckerberg not appearing before Congress alone -- and that the CEOs of Google and Twitter had been invited to testify, as well.

CBS News

✔@CBSNews

9 Apr

Replying to @CBSNews

"My sense is that he takes it seriously because he knows that there is going to be a hard look at regulation," Nelson says of Zuckerberg. http://cbsn.ws/2IEJdx6  pic.twitter.com/VDc4B9guNN

CBS News

✔@CBSNews

Reporter: Would you like to see executives from Google and Twitter and other tech companies come testify?
Nelson: Absolutely. It's not just Facebook. [Zuckerberg] happens to be the point of the spear. https://cbsn.ws/2qkztk2  pic.twitter.com/iwB1BxRZEB

6:30 PM - Apr 9, 2018

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It's feasible that the hearings scheduled for this week will not be the last of their kind, and that Zuckerberg could be asked to return to Washington to provide further testimony alongside his Big Tech counterparts.

For now, we'll keep you posted on the questions that do come up this week. Questions? Feel free to weigh in on Twitter.

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