The News Tribune from Tacoma, Washington • C2

2C SUNDAY MARCH 8 2020Business THENEWSTRIBUNE.COM Climate change is a hoax, the Bible predicted President Donald election, and Elon Musk is a devil worshiper trying to take over the world. All of these fictions have found life on YouTube, the largest video site, in part because own recommendations steered people their way. For years, it has been a highly effective mega- phone for conspiracy theo- rists, and YouTube, owned and run by Google, has admitted as much. In January 2019, YouTube said it would limit the spread of videos could misinform users in harmful One year later, YouTube recommends conspiracy theories far less than be- fore. But its progress has been uneven and it contin- ues to advance certain types of fabrications, ac- cording to a new study from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.

efforts to curb conspiracy theories pose a major test of Silicon Val- ability to combat mis- information, particularly before this elections. The study, which examined 8 million recommendations over 15 months, provides one of the clearest pictures yet of that fight, and the mixed findings show how challenging the issue re- mains for tech companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter. The researchers found that YouTube has nearly eradicated some conspir- acy theories from its re- commendations, including claims that the Earth is flat and that the U.S. govern- ment carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, two falsehoods the compa- ny identified as targets last year.

In June, YouTube said the amount of time people spent watching such videos from its re- commendations had drop- ped by Yet the Berkeley re- searchers found that just after YouTube announced that success, its recom- mendations of conspiracy theories jumped back up and then fluctuated over the next several months. The data also showed that other falsehoods con- tinued to flourish in You- recommendations, like claims that aliens cre- ated the pyramids, that the government is hiding secret technologies and that cli- mate change is a lie. The researchers argue those findings suggest that YouTube has decided which types of misin- formation it wants to root out and which types it is willing to allow. is a technological problem, but it is really at the end of the day also a policy said Hany Fa- rid, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of the study. you have the ability to essentially drive some of the particularly prob- lematic content close to zero, well then you can do more on lots of he added.

use the word when they mean Farshad Shadloo, a You- Tube spokesman, said the recommenda- tions aimed to steer people toward authoritative vid- eos that leave them satis- fied. He said the company was continually improving the algorithm that gener- ates the recommenda- tions. the past year alone, launched over 30 different changes to reduce recommenda- tions of borderline content and harmful misinforma- tion, including climate change misinformation and other types of conspir- acy he said. to this change, watchtime this type of content gets from recom- mendations has dropped by over 70 percent in the U.S.” powerful recommendation algo- rithm, which pushes its 2 billion monthly users to videos it thinks they will watch, has fueled the ascent to be- come the new TV for many across the world. The company has said its recommendations drive over of the more than 1 billion hours people spend watching YouTube videos each day, making the software that picks the recommendations among the most influ- ential algorithms.

Yet that success has come with a dark side. Research has shown that recommenda- tions have systematically amplified divisive, sensa- tionalist and clearly false videos. Other algorithms meant to capture attention in order to show more ads, like newsfeed, have had the same problem. The stakes are high. YouTube faces an on- slaught of misinformation and unsavory content uploaded daily.

The FBI recently identified the spread of fringe conspir- acy theories as a domestic terror threat. Last month, a German man uploaded a screed to YouTube saying that visible secret use mind control to abuse children in underground bunkers. He later shot and killed nine people in a suburb of Frankfurt. To study YouTube, Fa- rid and another Berkeley researcher, Marc Faddoul, teamed up with Guillaume Chaslot, a former Google engineer who helped de- velop the recommendation engine and now studies it. Since October 2018, the researchers have collected recommendations that appeared alongside videos from more than 1,000 of most popular and recommended news- related channels, making their study among the longest and most in-depth examinations of the topic.

They then trained an algo- rithm to rate, on a scale from 0 to 1, the likelihood that a given video peddled a conspiracy theory, in- cluding by analyzing its comments, transcript and description. Like most attempts to study YouTube, the ap- proach has flaws. Deter- mining which videos push conspiracy theories is subjective, and leaving it to an algorithm can lead to mistakes. To account for errors, the researchers included in their study only videos that scored higher than 0.5 on the likelihood scale. They also discounted many videos based on their rating: Videos with a 0.75 rating, for example, were worth three-quarters of a conspiracy-theory recommendation in the study.

The recommendations were also collected with- out logging into a You- Tube account, which how most people use the site. Can YouTube quiet its conspiracy theorists? BY JACK NICAS New York Times DEBBIE COCKRELL: 253-597-8364, HOW TO REACH US Thursday 1 year ago Prime rate 4.25 5.50 Federal Target Rate 1.25 2.50 3-month Treasury bills 0.62 2.47 6-month Treasury bills 0.53 2.53 10-year Treasury notes 0.92 2.69 30-year Treasury bonds 1.56 3.06 BLOOMBERG.COM AND U.S. TREASURY KEY RATES Here is what Puget Sound-area banks and thrifts were offering on key consumer-loan and deposit instruments on Friday. All yields are annual. DEPOSITS MMA: Rates and yields on money-market accounts with a balance of $2,500.

CD: Fixed rates and yields on one-year certificates of deposit of $5,000. IRA: Fixed rates and yields on 18-month ac- counts. LOANS Auto: Fixed rate for a $10,000, 60-month, new-car loan and for a $7,000, 48-month, used-car loan for a 1- to 3-year-old model. Actual rates might change with variations from the scenario, and fees and other costs at loan initiation. DEPOSITS AUTO LOANS Institution MMA CD IRA New Used Chase 0.01/0.01 0.01/0.01 4.140 4.940 Columbia Bank 0.03/0.03 0.06/0.06 0.07/0.07 3.875 3.875 HomeStreet Bank West- ern 1.09/1.10 0.55/0.55 0.60/0.60 NO NO KeyBank 0.05/0.05 0.05/0.05 0.05/0.05 3.640 4.290 Qualstar C.U.

0.25/0.25 1.05/1.06 1.04/1.04 3.490 3.240 Sound Credit Union 0.75/0.76 1.30/1.31 1.60/1.61 3.840 3.540 Tapco Credit Union 0.78/0.78 1.40/1.41 3.340 3.340 U.S. Bank 0.04/0.04 0.10/0.10 0.15/0.15 5.590 5.290 Verity C.U. 0.20/0.20 1.69/1.70 1.29/1.30 3.850 3.650 Washington average 0.36/0.36 0.69/0.69 0.69/0.69 3.971 4.021 NA: Not available NO: Not offered Source: Informa Research Services 818-880-8877 Ext. 266 not have a bank, thrift or credit union charter; all products are FDIC insured MONEY RATES liant on that global supply chain, whether made ourselves more vulnerable to massive disruptions that can lead to sustained shortages and economic calamity. Those questions were being debated well before anyone had heard of coro- navirus or COVID-19.

The Council on Foreign Relations posted a blog item headlined De- pendence on Pharmaceu- tical Products From Chi- which cited a Depart- ment of Commerce statis- tic that 97 percent of all antibiotics in the U.S. came from China. The date of that post: Aug. 14, 2019. The very concerns de- bated then in articles and papers and conferences (along with issues of prod- uct quality, national secu- rity and technology trans- fer) are the ones being illustrated in real time now.

What happens if the raw materials that go into products assembled, fab- ricated and finished in this country are no longer available because they being made in the source country? The easy response is to say, should never have ceded so much of our manufacturing capacity to China. just pull all that back to the U.S.” Indeed there has been a movement, albeit small, to reshore production. nowhere as easy as it sounds. It takes time to shift components of the supply chain, assuming that the capacity and ex- pertise even remain here. Often, report manufactur- ers that are trying to resh- ore, they But if the economic pain resulting from the coro- navirus outbreak is as nasty as the more pessi- mistic forecasters are warning, it might just be enough to prompt some serious consideration and concrete action to reconfi- gure the global supply chain and reclaim manu- facturing capacity and capability.

Diseases that threaten literal health have a way of prompting dramatic change in those who survive. The long- term effect of the coro- navirus, one that will en- dure long after the conta- gion itself is dissipated, may be even more dra- matic and consequential for economic health among those who would prefer not to go through that again. A Jack Welch, who died recently, invent the modern era of the celebri- ty chief executive, but he was a prime exemplar of the trend. His name and face were featured not only in the business press but throughout general media, and his manage- ment style and pronounce- ments were copied in executive suites world- wide. The celebritization (if a word, and spell- check says it of the corporate CEO has been a harmful trend for Amer- ican business, but the more damaging portion of legacy at General Electric were the ideas about corporate manage- ment he promulgated.

philosophies in- cluded an unhealthy pur- suit of short-term returns and a belief that it matter what business you were in as long as you were a dominant player within that line. Hence GE, once an industrial-equipment and consumer-electronics powerhouse, wandered off into such businesses as financial services, which worked out so well when the Great Recession hit. Meanwhile, the manage- ment style that earned Welch the nickname named for a weapon that suppos- edly wipes out people but leaves buildings standing spread through corporate America, often to ill effect. Even before one of James McNerney took over, Boeing (under Phil Condit and Harry Stonecipher) was under thrall to the management ethos, and a case can be made that the current travails can be traced in part to that influ- ence. stature and reputation is considerably different from the days when he ran GE and was the darling of the corpo- rate world and business media.

So maybe that is his lasting contribution and legacy a cautionary tale that long-term man- agement success is not measured by the number of magazine covers you accumulate. Bill Virgin is editor and publisher of Washington Manufacturing Alert and Pacific Northwest Rail News. He can be reached at bill.virgin@yahoo.com. FROM PAGE 1C VIRGIN campaign. unusual for big com- panies like Amazon to collect taxpayer cash up- front like this instead of massive tax breaks over time, the way New Jersey does.

And the Amazon cash award amounts to of the grant money that Delaware plans to give away for the year, Jensen notes. So is a bigger incentive than it looks on the Jensen was surprised that Amazon sent Holly Sullivan, who headed the high-profile com- petition, in which dozens of rival cities offered Ama- zon billions in subsidies, to meet state officials. (Sulli- van refused questions from the media and pub- lic.) Jensen asks, bring the top folks for an automatic incentives He was also surprised the company checked the box when asked if it faced business litigation: course, Amazon has tons of Bottom line: decide if this is a more careful strategy. Or a more aggressive one. Or boss, Jeff Bezos, has a personal tie to Delaware.

After the com- munist takeover of Cuba, when the state seized his small business in Santiago and turned his school into a socialist academy, the fu- ture stepfather, Miguel Bezos, was evacuated with other refugee children (their parents had to stay) to Wilmington, where he and dozens of other boys were given shelter by Catholic Social Services and enrolled at Sales- ianum School. Miguel Bezos made many friends at He graduated from the math program at the Uni- versity of New Mexico and prospered. He married mom, adopted the future Amazon founder (who took the family name), and went on to head the Bezos Family Foundation, which has given enough to Sales- ianum that he was named to the Catholic hall of fame in 2017. The other local beneficiaries included the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. FROM PAGE 1C AMAZON we are not anywhere near a state of said Alka Ramchandani- Raj, an employment law- yer who specializes in occupational safety and health law at Littler, a large labor and employ- ment firm.

numbers are going up Northwell Health, the largest health system in New York, just asked 16 people including eight clinicians who cannot do their job at home to take a two-week paid furlough after visiting China, said Joseph Moscola, the com- senior vice presi- dent and chief people officer. Even if workers appear healthy at the end of the incubation period, their employers could require a medical exam. there is factual evi- dence someone has been exposed to the virus, an employer may ask that person to go through a medical exam or fitness for duty exam to deter- mine whether they are ready to return to Ramchandani-Raj said. WILL I BE PAID? This largely depends on your policies, but so far, many larger businesses are seeing that affected employees get paid, one way or another. Employees showing symptoms are generally taking sick leave or emer- gency leave, while those affected by quarantines have been working from home when pos- sible, according to a sur- vey of 48 large employers with operations in the United States by Business Group on Health, which represents employers on health care and benefit matters.

Sixty-eight percent of the employers surveyed said they would pay em- ployees as long as a quar- antine lasted, even if they showed no symptoms and work from home because of the nature of their job. Twelve percent said they would pay for a fixed amount of time, such as two weeks. Twenty percent of the companies, which were surveyed Feb. 13-20, said they know or made a decision yet on what they would do. Paying workers in these situations serve to incentivize employees to self-identify and self- said Susan Gross Sholinsky, a lawyer with Epstein Becker Green in New York.

But U.S. employers are not obligated to pay most workers, which may affect the response of businesses particularly smaller employers. WHAT HAPPENS IF I GET SICK? This also often depends on the generosity of your employer, labor experts said, because there are no federal requirements for employers to provide paid sick leave, even in the event of a natural disaster. Roughly a dozen states and several cities in- cluding California, Michi- gan, New Jersey, Washing- ton, San Francisco and New York City provide paid sick leave to many workers, often including those working part-time. But the amount of paid leave will vary and often depends on the size of the employer and how long someone has worked there.

These policies typ- ically extend to caring for family members as well. If workers are seriously ill or take a while to recov- er, they may be entitled to unpaid leave under the federal Family and Med- ical Leave Act, but that cover an estimated of workers. Employ- ees could also be eligible for short-term disability benefits depending on their workplace insurance or their require- ments, Sholinsky said. FROM PAGE 1C CORONAVIRUS.