…where are friday’s tender mercies when you need ’em
The Age of Insurrection review: how the far right rose – and found Trump [Guardian]
A Georgia teacher’s plight exposes the essence of anti-woke MAGA fury [WaPo]
Australian minister Clare O’Neil calls Donald Trump Jr ‘big baby’ after speaking tour is postponed [Guardian]
Twitter was locked in a chaotic doom loop. Now it’s on the verge of collapse [Guardian]
For Yusef Salaam, a Landslide Just Might Be the Best Revenge [NYT]
…quite honestly I have had too little rest for the too much to do today is promising
Putin Created a Beast, and Now He Has No Idea How to Rein It In [NYT]
Moms for Liberty is part of a long history of rightwing mothers’ activism in the US [Guardian]
Judge Unseals More of Affidavit Used to Seek Mar-a-Lago Search Warrant [NYT]
Limits on Biden officials working with social media firms a ‘weaponisation of the court’ – expert [Guardian]
When can government persuade platforms to suppress legal speech? It’s complex. [WaPo]
French government could cut off social media during unrest, says Macron [Guardian]
Ruling Puts Social Media at Crossroads of Disinformation and Free Speech [NYT]
…so
One day after a Louisiana federal judge set limits on the Biden administration’s communications with tech firms, the State Department canceled its regular meeting Wednesday with Facebook officials to discuss 2024 election preparations and hacking threats, according to a person at the company. The move came hours before Biden’s Department of Justice filed a notice that it will appeal the ruling.
State Department officials told Facebook that all future meetings, which had been held monthly, have been “canceled pending further guidance,” said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve working relationships. “Waiting to see if CISA cancels tomorrow,” the person added, referring to the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
The person at Facebook said they presumed similar meetings the State Department had scheduled with other tech companies also were canceled, but that could not be confirmed immediately. Representatives for the State Department did not respond to a request for comment. CISA declined to comment, referring questions to the Justice Department. A Justice Department official declined to comment on the cancellations, but said the agency expects to request a stay of the District Court’s decision “expeditiously.”
[…]
The cancellation of regular meetings between Facebook parent company Meta — the world’s largest social media firm — and U.S. government agencies shows the immediate impact of Tuesday’s order by U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty, a Trump appointee. The order is a win for the political right in a broader battle over the role of social media companies in shaping online speech and information.
[…]
While the ruling won’t stop sites such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or TikTok from moderating online content, it stands to sideline federal government officials and agencies that had become key contributors to those efforts. In the past, meetings between the State Department and Facebook in particular have flagged suspected foreign influence operations for the companies to investigate.
When tech companies and State Department officials meet, “they talk about foreign influence, they compare notes. It gives them the opportunity to ask questions about foreign influence they are seeing,” this person said. “State will share Russian narratives, things they are seeing in state media in Russia about U.S. topics. They will ask whether Facebook is seeing things from known entities, such as the Chinese Communist Party or the Internet Research Agency,” the Russian entity thought responsible for much of the interference in the 2016 election.
[…]
The person at Facebook confirmed that the meetings include two-way sharing of information on foreign influence operations.
[…]
Leading U.S. social media companies began coordinating regularly with the federal government in 2017, following revelations of a Russian campaign to sow discord among Americans during the 2016 presidential election campaign. Partnerships between Silicon Valley and Washington on what the tech companies call “content moderation” deepened and broadened during the pandemic, when platforms such as Twitter, Google’s YouTube, and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram became hotbeds for conspiracy theories about the virus and opposition to public health guidance.
[…]
On Tuesday, Doughty, who sought to block several Biden administration mandates during the pandemic, sided largely with the plaintiffs. He issued a preliminary injunction that prohibits several federal agencies and their employees from “meeting with social-media companies for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”
[…]
Meta, Twitter and Google have declined to comment on the injunction. But the judge’s decision creates uncertainty about the future of content moderation at the companies ahead of the 2024 elections and raises legal questions about how they will communicate with officials at all levels of government about falsehoods related to voting.The Biden administration is likely to appeal the injunction before voters head to the polls next year. But in the interim, the order is poised to have a chilling effect on the companies’ efforts to guard against misinformation as they work to sort out what types of partnerships are allowed.
Tech companies are already taking significant steps to unwind programs to combat disinformation on their services. Under the helm of Elon Musk, Twitter has slashed its Trust and Safety teams and initiatives. Amid financial pressure and company layoffs, Meta has also made cuts to similar teams.
“There is so much wrong with this decision — not least of all that it will make us less secure going into the 2024 elections,” wrote Yoel Roth, the former head of Trust and Safety at Twitter, in a social media post. Roth said the most glaring problem with the decision is that it asserts the companies were “coerced” to remove posts simply because they met with government officials. “That’s just … not how any of this works,” he wrote.
[…]
In April 2021, then-White House adviser Andy Slavitt sent an email to Facebook staff with the subject line, “Tucker Carlson anti-vaccine message,” noting that it was “number one on Facebook.” Later that day, a Facebook staffer responded, saying the video did not qualify for removal under its policies. The employee said the company was demoting the video and labeling it with a “pointer” to accurate information about the vaccine.The company’s decision to leave the video up prompted backlash from Rob Flaherty, a another former White House official, who responded: “Not for nothing but last time we did this dance, it ended in an insurrection.”
[…]
“There’s no version of us being able to do our job, or other versions of the field of trust and safety, without being able to communicate with all stakeholders, including government and including industry,” said a leading researcher on extremism and foreign influence who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing litigation.Another researcher, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity because of pending litigation, added: “Platforms had already gutted their trust and safety departments, and now they aren’t supposed to [talk to the] government.” The person added, however, that “information sharing between platforms and government in this area was always fairly minimal.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/05/missouri-biden-judge-censorship-ruling-analysis/
[…]
“The really tough question is when does the government cross the line from responding to speech — which it can and should do — to coercing platforms to censor constitutionally protected speech?” Kosseff said. “The judge here believes that line was crossed, and he certainly cited some persuasive examples,” such as administration officials suggesting antitrust actions against tech firms or changes to their liability protections while criticizing their content moderation efforts.
…I’m going to have to be on my best behavior
Chinese companies have been investing in AI for years — from lining city streets with surveillance cameras to using facial recognition to monitor paper use in public toilets — and have long been at the cutting edge of surveillance technology.
But when it comes to some other types of AI, Chinese firms lag years behind their international peers.
That’s partly because the Chinese Communist Party-run government strictly controls information and communication.
Rather than focusing on AI technology that lets the general public create unique content like the chatbots and image generators, Chinese companies have instead focused on technologies with clear commercial uses, like surveillance tech.
Restrictions on access to the most advanced chips, which are needed to run AI models, have added to these difficulties.
[…that’ll be the sort upwards of 90% of the supply of comes out of taiwan…incidentally]
This has made it harder for Chinese tech companies to access the most advanced chips that run complex AI frameworks. Beijing has called the measures abuses intended to reinforce the U.S. “technological hegemony.”
[…]
While Beijing pushes to make comparable chips at home, Chinese AI companies have to source their chips any way they can — including from a black market that has sprung up in Shenzhen, where, according to Reuters, the most advanced Nvidia chips sell for nearly $20,000, more than twice what they go for elsewhere.
[…]
Despite the obstacles, Chinese AI companies have made major advances in some types of AI technologies, including facial recognition, gait recognition, and artificial and virtual reality.These technologies have also fueled the development of China’s vast surveillance industry, giving Chinese tech giants an edge that they market around the world, such as Huawei’s contracts for smart city surveillance from Belgrade, Serbia, to Nairobi.
[…]
“[…] in China, the government threw open the door and told companies ‘Please have access to our giant facial recognition data sets; let’s push ahead as fast as we can,’” [Helen Toner, director of strategy at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology] said.While Chinese tech firms doubled down on developing this kind of AI, American companies were developing tech such as chatbots designed to entertain and put creative tools in the hands of the public.
[…]
Companies developing AI in China need to comply with specific laws on intellectual property rights, personal information protection, recommendation algorithms and synthetic content, also called deep fakes. In April, regulators also released a draft set of rules on generative AI, the technology behind image generator Stable Diffusion and chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.
[…]
“You can say many things about Chinese AI developers — but one thing you can’t say is that they can build whatever they want,” Toner said.
[…]
“That level of freedom has not been allowed in China, in part because the Chinese government is very worried about people creating politically sensitive content,” Ding said.
[…]
AI regulation in the United States could easily fall short of Beijing’s heavy-handed approach while still preventing discrimination, protecting people’s rights and adhering to existing laws, said Johanna Costigan, a research associate at the Asia Society Policy Institute.“There can be alignment between regulation and innovation,” Costigan said. “But it’s a question of rising to the occasion of what this moment represents — do we care enough to protect people who are using this technology? Because people are using it whether the government regulates it or not.”
Will China overtake the U.S. on AI? Probably not. Here’s why. [WaPo]
…or I’m going to wind up taking out a bunch of frustration
There’s theoretical poetry to the whole thing, a federal judge ruling on Independence Day that the government had engaged in an “Orwellian” suppression of speech. One envisions fictional President Bill Pullman using the moment to reassert the government’s commitment to the foundational freedom embodied in the First Amendment.
But only in theory. The reality of the injunction — the immediate effect of which is to curtail government interactions with social media companies, among other things — is that a right-wing argument about “censorship” on platforms like Facebook and Twitter found a remarkably credulous ally. Little encompasses that reality better than the fact that U.S. District Court Judge Terry A. Doughty used inaccurate information in his argument that the government shouldn’t actively seek to limit the spread of inaccurate information.
In broad strokes, Doughty’s reasoning is that the government relentlessly pressured Facebook and Twitter to tamp down what the government insisted was false information, an effort that spread throughout the administration. (That the focus is explicitly only the Biden administration is telling in its own right.) While the First Amendment stipulates only that no law limiting speech can be introduced, Doughty points to other precedents, suggesting that broad efforts to suppress speech also can trigger First Amendment concerns.
Doughty points to “White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield’s announcement that ‘the White House is assessing whether social-media platforms are legally liable for misinformation spread on their platforms, and examining how misinformation fits into the liability protection process by Section 230 of The Communication Decency Act.’” This is mentioned earlier in the ruling, referencing a “July 20, 2021 … White House Press Conference” in which Bedingfield “stated that the White House would be announcing whether social-media platforms are legally liable for misinformation spread on their platforms.”
[…how liable does it look like fox news is feeling in its bottom line?]
There does not appear to have been any such news conference. There are reports of Bedingfield’s saying that social media companies “should be held accountable” if they share misinformation — but that was during an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” Bedingfield was asked whether there might be a review of the companies’ protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and she said the White House was “reviewing that.”
[…]
In the abstract, this is a shocking mistake. In the context of the ruling overall, though, it makes sense.After all, this is a document that takes seriously the complaints of defendant Jim Hoft of the conspiracy website Gateway Pundit. Like all Americans, Hoft has the right to say what he wants. But he and his website offer numerous examples of careless, dishonest claims that might be good for engagement but hardly reflect well on platforms that carry them.
The lawsuit notes that Hoft’s Twitter account was permanently banned in February 2021 after it posted “video footage from security cameras in Detroit, Michigan from election night 2020, which showed two delivery vans driving to a building at 3:30 a.m. with boxes, which were alleged to contain election ballots.”
The issue wasn’t that Hoft shared the video. It’s that his site claimed, without evidence and inaccurately, that this was evidence of fraud. It was not.
[…]
The defendants in the case include a wide, wide array of government actors, a galaxy of actors that allows the plaintiffs to accrue a great mountain of examples of “pressure” being applied. It worked on Doughty, with sporadic incidents across months being presented as an unwavering effort across government.He says as much:
“They flagged posts and provided information on the type of posts they wanted suppressed. They also followed up with directives to the social-media companies to provide them with information as to action the company had taken with regard to the flagged post,” the ruling reads. “This seemingly unrelenting pressure by Defendants had the intended result of suppressing millions of protected free speech postings by American citizens.”
[…]
The ruling opens with the famous quote from Evelyn Beatrice Hall: “I may disapprove of what you say, but I would defend to the death your right to say it.”Except that, as my colleague Aaron Blake pointed out, the quote is instead attributed to Evelyn Beatrice “Hill.” But what’s the harm of a little false information when you’re making a political point?
A deeply ironic reinforcement of right-wing misinformation [WaPo]
…on people who deserve a whole other flea in their ear
Guess Who’s Been Paying to Block Green Energy. You Have. [NYT]
‘Double agents’: how US cities, tech firms and universities use fossil fuel lobbyists [Guardian]
Financiers bought up anesthesia practices, then raised prices [WaPo]
World’s 722 biggest companies ‘making $1tn in windfall profits’ [Guardian]
While State Farm in May refused to take new home insurance applications in California, it retains a lobbying firm in the state – the Sacramento-based KP Public Affairs – which also represents Tenaska, a gas developer. Across the US, State Farm shares lobbyists with a raft of oil and gas companies, including ExxonMobil, Calpine and Occidental Energy.
Allstate, another insurer that followed State Farm in pulling out from new policies in California due to the state’s worsening wildfire risk, has also contracted lobbyists who have fossil fuel clients, such as Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Kinder Morgan.
State Farm and Allstate are just two of more than 150 insurance companies and associations – part of an industry facing steepening losses from fires, floods and other disasters spurred by the climate crisis – that use state-based lobbyists also aligned to fossil fuel interests, according to F Minus, a new database of public disclosure records.
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/05/state-farm-stopped-insuring-california-homes-due-to-climate-risks-but-it-shares-lobbyists-with-big-oil
[…]
The F Minus database revealed how more than 1,500 lobbyists in the US are working on behalf of fossil fuel companies while at the same time representing hundreds of liberal-run cities, universities, technology companies and environmental groups that say they are tackling the climate crisis.
[…]
The climate crisis is starting to destabilize the insurance industry across the US, with rising global temperatures linked to longer, more ferocious wildfires and more damaging floods and storms. Eight of the 10 costliest wildfires on record have occurred since 2017, while last year saw 18 climate-related disasters that resulted in more than $1bn in damages.
[…]
The US Department of the Treasury warned this month that insurers face significant risks from the policies they issue, as well as from potential lawsuits for failure to address exposure to climate calamities. Insurance is regulated at the state level in the US, with some states more inclined than others to focus on climate risks.
In the four years since DeSantis took office, his administration has routinely stonewalled the release of public records, approved a slew of new legal exceptions aimed at keeping more information out of the public eye, and waged legal battles against open government advocates, the press and other watchdogs.
DeSantis, a Harvard-educated lawyer and former U.S. attorney, is the only Florida governor known to use “executive privilege” to keep records hidden, transparency advocates and experts said.
[…]
DeSantis also has fought to conceal information about some of the most significant events during his tenure, including withholding Covid infection data and blocking release of records about the controversial relocation of dozens of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, legal filings show.It’s difficult to compare DeSantis to past Florida governors on transparency issues — in part because his administration has withheld some key information sought by NBC News and other media organizations that would show how often it denies requests for records and how long it takes to disclose them.
[…]
DeSantis, a fierce media critic who typically avoids mainstream reporters, declined NBC News’ requests for an interview to discuss his record on transparency issues for this story and did not respond to written questions.Adam Marshall, a lawyer for the national nonprofit Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, said transparency in Florida had fallen before DeSantis, but that “decrease is now accelerating.” He added that transparency at the federal level is already bad and likely would not improve under a DeSantis presidency. “Could it get much worse? Yes,” he said.
[…]Florida has long had a reputation for government transparency, boasting some of the nation’s broadest public records and open meetings laws. In 1992, Floridians overwhelmingly approved an amendment to enshrine citizens’ access to public records and open meetings as rights in the state’s constitution — the first state to do so.
Such rights include access to records held by the state’s governor. Only Florida’s Legislature is constitutionally authorized to make exceptions to the state’s Public Records Act, as long as it can justify each exemption as a “public necessity” and make it “no broader than necessary.”
Since taking office in 2019, DeSantis has repeatedly tested the letter and spirit of Florida’s sunshine laws and constitutional guarantees, sometimes bypassing the Legislature in novel ways, experts say.
In legal filings, lawyers for the governor have contended DeSantis can exercise executive privilege to withhold records at his discretion, although such an exemption isn’t cited in the state’s laws or its constitution.
In a January ruling on one of those lawsuits — a case involving an anonymous requester who sought the names of DeSantis’ advisers for deciding his picks for the state supreme court — a Leon County judge agreed he could invoke the authority. The ruling — a first in DeSantis’ favor on the issue — isn’t binding to other courts, but some open government activists and media groups fear it will embolden DeSantis’ use of executive authority.
…how’s that chorus go again? …for me but not for thee, I believe it always goes
Among other changes, the measures aimed to strip reporters’ legal privileges to keep anonymous sources confidential and lower the “actual malice” standard required for public officials to prove defamation. That standard, set by a landmark 1964 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, requires public figures to prove that journalists knowingly published false information or did so in “reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”
The First Amendment Foundation, a Tallahassee-based open government advocacy group, viewed DeSantis’ attempt to reframe defamation law as “the biggest threat to free speech and a free press” during the state’s legislative session, said Bobby Block, the group’s executive director.
[…]
But other legislative efforts to chip away at public access proved successful. By the foundation’s count, Florida’s Legislature created 23 public records exemptions this session and reinstated nine others that were about to sunset. It’s been nearly a decade since lawmakers came anywhere near that — when they introduced 22 public records exemptions in 2014, Block said.
[…]
Block said lawmakers could have narrowly tailored a measure to redact specific details about security personnel and strategies. But instead, they approved a “wholesale exemption” that now keeps secret details such as where the governor went, who he met with, the reason for his trip and how much it cost.Disclosure of such information in the past has helped identify taxpayer-funded travel abuses by at least two governors and other state officials, he said. What’s more, the exemption was applied retroactively, keeping hidden details of DeSantis’ past trips where security concerns are no longer an issue, Block said.
[…]
Only after the watchdog group sued did DeSantis’ office start releasing some responsive records, though portions of those were blacked out. On Oct. 25, a trial court judge ruled DeSantis’ office had violated the Public Records Act by improperly redacting some records and failing to turn over others within a reasonable time frame.
[…]
Since then, the office has disclosed some records, including those showing a top administration official sent emails via a private Gmail account while seeking to help a former legal client win a contract to oversee the migrant relocation program. DeSantis’ office is now appealing the judge’s ruling that it violated the state’s record law by failing to disclose records in a reasonable time frame.“It’s outrageous. They’re using private electronic devices and accounts to conduct official business,” Barfield said. “And when they’re challenged, they fight tooth and nail.”
Likewise, Florida’s state health department under DeSantis continues to fight a two-year-old lawsuit contending it violated the state’s records act by failing to make Covid-19 data available during the height of the pandemic.
DeSantis is squeezing the sunshine out of Florida’s public records law, critics say [NBC]
[…]
Carlos Guillermo Smith, then a Democratic state representative from Orlando, later sued, contending the information was “vital to the ability of citizens to understand the risks and make informed decisions about their lives.”
…though they’re just as capable of making the reverse sound like more of the same
Revealed: UK plans to drop flagship £11.6bn climate pledge [Guardian]
…& could very possibly choke on a full fat piece of my mind
We are post-Trump I but possibly on the precipice of Trump II. We are past the whopping $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems but awaiting the denouement of a similar case brought by Smartmatic. We are past the departure of Tucker Carlson and his sky-high ratings, but we are still waiting to see how the new evening lineup will fare in the increasingly cutthroat world of partisan cable television news.
Where once upon a time kings controlled their empires through vast landholdings, armies and pledges of fealty, Mr. Murdoch controls his corporate empire through the ownership of a special class of stock that gives him the largest voting stakes in his two main companies, the Fox Corporation and News Corp, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and other media properties.
In 2017, more than 40 percent of the shareholders in one Murdoch company voted to end the dual-class stock structure. But it was not enough to force the change. “It’s a corporate governance nightmare,” said Nell Minow, the vice chair of ValueEdge Advisors, a corporate governance consultancy.
As a result, there doesn’t seem to be anyone or anything at either company that can keep Mr. Murdoch from doing what he wants. That fact was less of an issue when he started Fox News nearly 30 years ago. But it’s clearly a problem now.
[…]
Apparently, dynastic succession is still a viable concept in corporate America. Mr. Murdoch’s heir apparent, Lachlan, defended Fox and the Dominion settlement when speaking to investors on May 9. “The settlement in no way alters Fox’s commitment to the highest journalistic standards across our company or our passion for unabashedly reporting the news of the day,” he said. Comments such as these do not exactly inspire confidence that Fox News has any plans to try harder to stick to the facts in its reporting. “They’re doubling down,” Ms. Minow said. And that is downright scary, especially given the size of Fox’s audience and its influence.The drama we’re watching play out at the Fox Corporation is an extreme example of how companies with a controlling shareholder can suffer — the stock is down almost 18 percent in the past five years — but it isn’t the only one. To a lesser degree, I see problems occurring at companies such as Comcast (controlled by the Roberts family) and Paramount Global (controlled by Shari Redstone), among others. When dual classes of stock are involved, a family’s voting power often far outstrips its economic ownership, leading to financially foolish, and even bizarre, behavior.
There’s a reason that a century ago the idea of professional management was introduced into American corporations. A professional manager creates a sense of distance between shareholders and management, which is held accountable to a board of directors, chosen to represent the shareholders. Professional managers are paid to look at problems objectively, accounting for what will theoretically be best for all stakeholders, including shareholders, creditors, vendors and employees. It may not be a perfect system, but the pas de deux between a professional manager and a board of directors has proved to be a durable way to create lasting wealth.
[…]
One way to rein in Mr. Murdoch may lie with Smartmatic. If it emerges victorious in its lawsuit, it could insist, as part of any settlement, on governance changes at Fox or even demand that the C.E.O. succession process include candidates outside the Murdoch family. Smartmatic, or even the recently filed shareholder lawsuit against Fox, could end up pressuring Fox, and indirectly News Corp, to scrap their dual-class stock structures.Rupert Murdoch has had absolute power at both Fox and News Corp for far too long. That’s dangerous under any circumstances, but it’s especially troubling at a national news organization, such as Fox, where disinformation and lies, apparently, are the coin of the realm. And there doesn’t seem to be any way that will change if the Murdochs maintain their absolute power and absolute control. That fact alone further imperils what has become America’s fragile democracy.
No One Can Stop Rupert Murdoch. That’s Increasingly a Problem. [NYT]
…so
Authors file a lawsuit against OpenAI for unlawfully ‘ingesting’ their books [Guardian]
…past form notwithstanding
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/metaverse-zuckerberg-pr-hype/
…converting upwards of 10% of instagram users to your new punch below elon’s belt might actually merit some proportion of the full court press courting the zuck on this one
Meta launches Twitter rival Threads in 100 countries [Guardian]
…anyway
It is not yet clear how the power and possibilities of AI will play out. Here are the best-case scenarios for how it might help us develop new drugs, give up dull jobs and live long, healthy lives
Coming on Friday: Five ways AI might destroy the world
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/06/ai-artificial-intelligence-world-diseases-climate-scenarios-experts
…apologies for venting
It is understood that the main issue for the Twitter competitor, called Threads, is the implementation of the EU’s Digital Markets Act, which contains provisions on sharing user data across different platforms. Meta is awaiting further clarification from the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, on how the legislation will be implemented before considering its next steps.
[…]
Elon Musk, who owns Twitter, has been quick to flag the amount of data that may be collected by Threads, pointing to the app store’s listing of the kinds of information that “may be collected”which includes “location” and “search history”.
[…]
However, Twitter’s own website acknowledges that the platform collects user data such as location, the device you use and interactions with other users’ content.Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and backer of another rival service called Bluesky, posted a picture of Threads’ app store listing on Tuesday with the quip “all your Threads are belong to us”.
…seriously?
…these assholes want to talk about the dark arts of online telemetry at the intersection with big money? …or are they just that cocky about how few people are going to dig into how any of that shit works?
Two recent rulings against Meta have created problems for the company’s operations in the EU. This week the European court of justice upheld the right for EU watchdogs to investigate privacy breaches in a ruling that said user consent was needed before using their personal data to target them with adverts.
It followed an EU ruling in May ordering Facebook to stop transferring user data to the US, which could lead to the social media network shutting its European services.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/jul/05/meta-delays-eu-launch-of-twitter-rival-threads-amid-uncertainty-over-personal-data-use
[…]
[Twitter] pointed to companies developing artificial intelligence programs that rely on publicly available information, such as posts on social media platforms, as one source of the vexatious accounts, stating that entities were “scraping people’s public Twitter data to build AI models”. It also said there were accounts “manipulating people and conversation” on the platform.
…uh huh…sure thing, genius…I bet you know what you’re doing at least as well as you know how to take responsibility for your bullshit
https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/05/twitter-silently-removes-login-requirement-for-viewing-tweets/
…but
Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School Poll, recently made a point on social media worth remembering as we consider evaluations of the Supreme Court and politics more broadly: A lot of Americans don’t actually know enough to have informed opinions on the subjects.
This is not a generous assessment of the body politic, certainly, and it’s important to recognize that most Americans are aware of the basic elements of governance. But lingering at the edges — or, often, in the middle — is this gap.
Franklin was responding specifically to the Supreme Court, given that Marquette conducts polling focused on the court every two months.
“It is important in reporting or messaging to know 30% think there is a Dem appointed majority,” Franklin wrote, sharing a graph to that effect. Since 2019 or so, when Marquette’s data begin, about 3 in 10 Americans say they think that Democratic presidents definitely or probably appointed most of the members of the court.
That is not the reality. In fact, it has not been the reality for decades.
[…]
What Franklin didn’t detail is the divide in perceptions by party. It has consistently been the case that Marquette’s polling has found that Republicans (and independents who tend to vote Republican) have been more likely to believe that the court is made up mostly of Democratic appointees. That’s particularly true in the more recent polling.
[…]
In October, I looked at a similar question: How familiar were Americans with their elected representatives? That analysis, based on the 2020 Cooperative Election Study, found that 9 in 10 Democrats and Republicans knew the party of their state’s governor and 8 in 10 knew the party of their representatives and senators. About three-quarters of partisans correctly identified majority control in the House and Senate.
[…]
Among independents, though, the numbers were substantially lower. This is not uncommon; self-identified independents tend to say they pay less attention to politics and, as a result, might be expected to be less familiar with how power is distributed.Interestingly, that’s not the case in Marquette’s polling about the Supreme Court. Independents and Republicans are equally likely to say that a majority of the court was definitely or probably appointed by Democratic presidents.
Regardless, Franklin’s point is worth remembering. When people are asked to opine on a political subject, some portion of those who respond may misunderstand some fundamental aspect of the question. It’s not that the results are invalid or otherwise unrepresentative; it’s more that there’s a hard-to-measure margin of error that overlays everything.
Nor is this without consequence. On any given Election Day, after all, some chunk of the electorate is misinformed about who and what is on the ballot. But, then, it almost certainly always has been.
It’s useful to remember how little many Americans know about politics [WaPo]
…&
Jackson Bone: the Trump-linked US law firm engaged in anti-trans litigation [Guardian]
…well
Erin Morrow Hawley Is Leading the Charge to Ban Abortion Medication. She’s Also Josh Hawley’s Wife [Vanity Fair]
…as previously mentioned…by “many people”…including some smarter than me
…& another thing
…so…anyway
…something came up that reminded me of a couple of things
…& with all due respect to the warrior ways of some waffle house employees…& the part where the thumbs thing & the ape noises are part of a whole callback to an over arching thing about arthur c clarke’s 2001 & evolution…& aliens…& all manner of shit…the cletus safari ain’t nothin’ on the OG flying saucer tour
…if your name’s hicks I imagine you might have some thoughts on the subject…& he made people laugh for a living…whereas…as I was just recently reminded…some of the people who earn a living from things that are a joke…resemble those remarks
…now…I don’t know a whole heap about that young lady…I don’t presume to know what she thinks about all manner of other things…let alone consider myself to automatically endorse her views wholesale on anything from matters sartorial to political…& we obviously have some differences of opinions on religion on account of she follows one…but…off the back of that interview going viral a few years back…she took the 15mins & plowed it into (among I kinda assume a bunch of other stuff) this
https://becauseweveread.com/#guide
…&…well…I’m reasonably confident that if the opportunity arose…she & I could probably find some things we agreed about…who knows…we might even be able to say some nice things about where a lot of white men get their ideas from if we tried hard enough
…& I’ll do my best to remember that a hit dog may holler…& a trapped one might hurt you if you get too close…but
…depends on how you read the situation?
You forgot to mention the most electrifying news of all.
All very interesting. So he hooks up with an out Black Lesbian six years older than him and a foot and half shorter, they have a couple of kids, he’s politically ambitious, so is she, he succeeds by failing upwards and because of the biracial kids angle, she fails because—I’m not going to revisit that whole grim period in Gotham’s history.
Conspiracy theories abound. Why are they not divorcing and still living together? Well, at one point deBlah made up some mental health initiative, ThriveNYC, allocated $850 million to it, and put Chirl in charge of it. And the money vanished. No one, including her, to this day, can or will say where it went. This was never investigated of course because, you know, professional courtesy when it comes to large-scale municipal graft. Even deBlah’s arch-nemesis Emperor Andreus Marcus Maximus gave this a pass.
So the thinking is a spouse cannot be compelled to testify against the other spouse, but if they actually divorced, and a hostile actor (it wouldn’t be a Republican, God forbid, but an ambitious Dem looking to score points) depending on the scenario they might be able to compel testimony. The couple is so widely loathed that even the Brooklyn and Manhattan judiciary might pause in their relentless pursuit of Donald Trump and pursue this case. And if I were on that grand jury, or the petit (courtroom) jury? Send them both back to Massachusetts, where they grew up. In shackles. Leg monitors for the rest of their lives. Blecch.
…did see some stuff about that, as it goes
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/05/nyregion/de-blasio-marriage-chirlane-mccray.html
…but to be honest I mostly passed it by?
That’s what started this whole thing off, a very ill-advised chat with the NYT, which is a very friendly outlet that’s been carrying water for him for something like 30 years, and what was supposed to be a warm profile of the couple came thisclose to being Prince Andrew’s trainwreck Newsnight interview. Of course it did, because it’s deBlah and Chirl. Imagine meeting them socially. Well, you wouldn’t have, because they were hermits and he seemed to hate New York, never went out, blew off or arrived late at any kind of function, barely showed up at City Hall. I have met in person every Mayor going back to Koch. DeBlah? Never. And I’m not part of the press corp. I’d be in a restaurant, or inadvertently walking by a crime scene or the opening of a refurbished park. I once accompanied a little friend, the son of one of my best friends, to his small private school for friends and family day. And who showed up? Michael Bloomberg. And he taught the class. He read some kind of children’s book to them. And believe me, it wasn’t called GenderQueer. But that was a long time ago.
Well this isn’t good.
https://apple.news/AokdhUbA5SDihKe2k9IUvUw
With money comes power and we don’t need these fuckers to have more than they’ve already stolen.
In theory, I don’t hate the idea of walling off the government from social media as a free speech/1st Amendment issue. There’s a long history of governments putting their thumb on various media orgs to push narratives based on “classified info” that turned out to be somewhere between grossly self-serving and outright fabrication.
The problem is that we already know what the alternative is, and it’s unquestionably worse. Moreover, in practice, we all know this rule would not apply to all administrations equally. Thankfully, we can rely on the Supreme Court to … oh … oh God.
Someone in another venue referred to them as “the right-wing hyperpartisan think tank formerly known as the Supreme Court” and I detect no lies.
Not wrong!
The reality is that nutjobs like this judge don’t want an end to government power to communicate with social media companies. They want the government to crack down on legitimate action by the left and stop enforcing the law as far as the right.
One of the facts exposed by January 6 investigations is that in 2020 to early 2021 the FBI was hung up chasing imaginary Antifa to the point where they were using Proud Boys as informants to supply garbage conspiracy theories, while not using those informants to supply intelligence on the Proud Boys themselves.
It’s been the story of domestic surveillance for decades — pay insane amounts of attention to peaceful protest groups on the left while pretending that genuinely violent nuts on the right simply don’t exist.
And now this judge is trying to monkey wrench investigations into guys like the kook who recently went after Obama after Trump published Obama’s address on Truth Social.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/trump-posted-obamas-address-prosecutors-armed-man-arrested-100719403
All of the right wing loudmouths like Ted Cruz who generated the fake narrative of government interference with free speech have been simultaneously calling for social media crackdowns on their opponents. But they keep it up because the default position in the press is that they’re neutral advocates. It’s not even close, and it’s vastly more extreme than what liberal politicians want, which is consistent and reasonable threat assessments.
To spell this out in greater detail, to a huge extent the profit center of utilities has switched away from the traditional model of straightforward sales to customers and profiting from the margins. They make their big money now from speculation and trading. The markets are insanely complex.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/042115/understanding-world-electricity-trading.asp
In a lot of ways it’s become like the microsecond quant trading that big finance companies carry out, where the goal isn’t so much to profit from real market conditions as to simply make money from the constant churn.
The way segmented grids work in the US there are gigantic chokepoints which allow companies which control some aspect of supply imbalances to profit from endless, second by second trades, and the fact that the imbalance can flip from one sector back to the other and net out to zero is irrelevant — what matters is both can squeeze a microprofit from the trade itself is what matters.
Grid operators hate the idea of increased independent generation because it will shrink the volume of their trades and shrink profits from churn. They hate the idea of ironing out supply system chokeholds because that also reduces oportunities for the churn their traders can benefit from.
It’s not as bad as crypto, but it’s still awfully frothy. And it’s a huge impediment to getting where we need to be.
Didn’t work out well for Enron from what I remember.
A friend of mine was one of those quants. He has a PhD in mathematics from one of the Ivy Leagues and worked for decades on Wall Street. Over time the Wall Street firms developed and deployed ever more sophisticated computer modeling systems, which he contributed to, effectively working himself out of a job.
He now teaches high school math at a charter school. The public schools wouldn’t have him because he doesn’t have all the bogus MEd theory educational experience from some bogus graduate school program. Just a PhD in mathematics. One of the many reasons why NYC public school achievement levels are dropping like a stone into a well and why they can’t revise and drop the standards fast enough to mask how badly the kids are doing.
And your “theory” would have to be based on the media making a good-faith effort to convey the best available information, which has been dead since Rush Limbaugh, probably a lot longer.
UPS workers edge closer to strike as talks break down with shipping giant
I’m honestly surprised (but not surprised) that Facebook didn’t launch a Twitter competitor already.
Alternatives like Bluesky have had problems getting their IT to scale to match Twitter, but if anybody could do it quickly, it would be Facebook. And of course they have the userbase already.
Twitter by itself isn’t profitable and never would be, but as an integrated product in the Facebook world there would be a huge potential benefit to the company in terms of user engagement and retention.
But it would also require Facebook to commit to a simple, clean product that’s easy to use, and Facebook’s corporate culture is all about unchecked internal rivalries that bubble up in ways that screw up the user experience. There would need to be a bunch of new people hired when Zuckerberg is committing to slashing payrolls, and it would require Facebook to think harder about moderation policies at a time when they really want to wash their hands of it all.
But it appears that Musk’s insanity may be forcing Zuckerberg to do what makes business sense anyway.
I dunno, I think it makes sense they never tried it — it’s not likely to ever be profitable and there’s no point in trying to bump off a functioning Twitter just to lose more money. But trying to edge out a non-functional version of Twitter? That’s a different proposition.
I’d actually argue the even more likely outcome would be Zuck to buy Twitter and just make it part of Meta. That would require Elmo to get bored of his purchase or lose so much money that he’d have to give it up … but neither of those seem way outside the realm of possibility.
Facebook’s audience is stagnating and getting less engaged, and a lot of that has to do with people finding the product itself lacking functionality
Zuckerberg tried to fix that by spending $100 billion or whatever on Meta, which by itself was unlikely to generate more revenue per user hour, but the hope was that it would increase the user base and increase time per user.
But he had an easy win sitting there for the same goals by launching a Twitter clone.
As a pure revenue source it’s a loser, but as a way to strengthen the core product it was a no brainer. It’s like a mall adding bathrooms — by themselves they don’t add any revenue and increase costs, but if a mall doesn’t have them, the customer base is going to leave a lot sooner.
But Zuckerberg is too clever by half and then half again. So he’s finally seeing what was in front of him, and even then who knows if he can make it work.
I mean, the bigger problem is that the era of free money is over and just growing your subscriber base isn’t enough anymore to please shareholders. That’s led all the social media companies to frantically try to cram more ads in people’s faces … which, of course, reduces functionality and convinces people to spend less time on the product. It’s the perfect executive trap, honestly, because they have no idea why people use their products or why the sites are successful in the first place.
But let’s also not forget that the metaverse was not merely an attempt to get Grandma Gertie — Facebook’s median user — to stay online an extra hour or two a day. Zuck wants what Microsoft has with Teams; he wanted to be able to sell a metaverse meeting product for businesses, to sell to the people who actually have the money. But it turns out that’s a drier hole than expected because a) that shit already exists and b) lots of companies are pulling people back into the office because of insecure management and/or leases they can’t get out of on commercial real estate.
The core product of Meta was also a massive joke. At least Twitter was proven to be popular.
It was a money loser, to be sure, but at Facebook’s scale not that much, “only” about a billion a year before Musk blew it up. And Facebook already had a lot of the infrastructure and technical expertise. Even if they didn’t want to make their own, the reality was they needed in house expertise just to stay on top of it and understand how it worked with their systems, to the point where taking the final steps just wasn’t going to cost them anywhere close to launching a brand new product line.
And I think these are the things that have led Zuckerberg to finally join the party.
I think it’s similar to the way Microsoft for dumb reasons for many years refused to be in the antivirus/security business, and let companies like Norton handle it. There were good reasons for MS to stay out of many areas of software, but security had so many connections to their core business, and they were already deeply engaged with it at the level just below the product level, that they finally got over their hangups and launched their own version.
There’s certainly no guarantee Facebook will take over. But the reality was they were already waist deep in that space, so they may as well have gotten all wet sooner. It was only a matter if time before the big wave came and drenched them.
…it might have lost upwards of a billion in previous years…but the last one before a big ego bound it to a debt that costs more than that to service on a rolling annual basis they were down to losing 200-&-some million off the back of about $5.1 billion in annual revenue…which by tech unicorn standards is a manageable cashflow some would be envious of…the funds they had in the bank could have underwritten another five or six years of that kind of thing without needing a handout
…plus…you know…it worked…& was staffed by people who knew what that took & how it happened & in many cases cared a lot more about seeing it keep working…better if possible…beyond what might reasonably be expected of employees on a transactional reward basis
…as for the metaverse…whatever zuck plowed into the development of threads…which is literally begging people for data apple & others have made it harder for him to help himself to…it’s less than he’s spent not getting legs on facebook’s virtual avatars…but it’s probably a lot more than I pull in in a year…or ten…& involved a classic throw-devs-at-it-&-scream-“crunch”-a-lot approach that according to some reviews still feels like a beta-test rather than a finished product
…but…traction-wise…it’s got more legs on day 1 than have ever set foot in the metaverse
…decentraland is, last I checked, the biggest userbase anything on there can boast…when they were claiming 8,000 daily users a year or so ago they were valued at $1billion
https://www.similarweb.com/website/decentraland.org/#traffic
…that looks like they’d struggle not to knock a zero off that daily user count these days…so…when people are saying stuff like this
…they ain’t talking about zuck filling his boots…but that’s one part of the pot at the end of the rainbow he’s trying to get to make landfall in his house…& these boys thought the final word on that passed back in dec of last year
The Final Word on Decentraland’s Numbers
…but…apparently that’s what it looks like to go all in on web3
https://web3isgoinggreat.com
…then again…if by core product you meant hardware…maybe that might go better for them
https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23619730/meta-vr-oculus-ar-glasses-smartwatch-plans
…in which case I’ll turn out to be wrong about how many people find the idea of a “neural interface” smart watch appealing…which I very well could be given how many people like that their apple watch tracks their pulse ox on a rolling basis?
That’s certainly true of my company, although I will submit that it wasn’t so much that they couldn’t get out of their leases as they steadfastly refused to let go of them for three years and now they have to have a reason to justify dragging us all back in spite of all the data proving that we are WAY more productive at home.
The only Twitter killing App is emlo himself.
…pretty sure facebook did try…possibly more than once…they have their “messenger” thing & much like when they tried some “stories” tweak previously to instagram they tried to nudge the facebook userbase into a shitty twitter knock off through the backdoor & it didn’t really take
…or I’m conflating some other bout of involuntary A/B testing that I remember being griped about…but there have been so many it’s easy to miss them once they blur together
…& the demographics don’t break the right way on facebook…that’s presumably why they’re pinning their shot on the insta crowd who don’t even have to set up a new account to make it over their low bar for entry…while bluesky is still turning them away & trying to keep up with onboarding invitees…& everyone still thinks it’s difficult to get mastodon working the way they want it to over in the fediverse
…&…they posted big numbers…millions of signups within less than 12hrs…though…when the people you’ve gifted an account number in the hundreds of millions…that’s not actually as impressive as it sounds in a lot of the write ups
…plus ça change & all that jazz…except…one change on the twitter thing was that while profits might have been slim they were well within sustainable levels of breaking even before fuckwitticus maximus declared himself chief twit off the back of borrowed chits & leveraged stock options
I’ve never had a Twitter account, and right now don’t plan on a Threads account, either. But I found this interesting.
We tried Threads, Meta’s new Twitter rival. Here’s what happened
…I nearly quoted some parts of that one in the post
…but on the one hand the amount of low-key water carrying going on with just about all the coverage…particularly the framing of the uptake as the fastest that a social media platform has ever grown at launch…rather than it being a conversion rate that’s sub-20% of the pre-integrated users who need only activate the thing…for example
…I mean…I’m kinda here for the shade…but I feel like it wildly misses the point…which has to do with an amount of overlap between the likes of the surveillance stuff attributed to china in that “oh, don’t worry about them – they aren’t even building the cool shit we want to tell you about…& we’ve made it way more expensive for them to do that sort of thing, anyway…aren’t we awesome?” piece…&…not just the likes of palantir or the popular bogeymen of the surveillance capitalism paradigm that’s filled so many column inches…but the basic facts of how the whole kit & caboodle functions…those dark arts of telemetry I mentioned in passing so as not to wind up with some multiple-posts-long incomprehensible rant chock full of the jargon that’s designed to make your brain switch off & not really think about what’s actually getting passed back & forth by what bits of what under the hood where what you don’t know absolutely can hurt you if there isn’t a damn good reason why it’s going to cost somebody that isn’t you a whole bunch of money if they don’t get that shit wired right
…& that’s just at the level that it shows up in the disclosure…just out of genuinely legitimate without-this-pinging-back-&-forth-none-of-this-shit-works telemetry they could cover the majority of the stuff we talk about being uncomfortable with…how the insane amount of zero-friction-invisible-to-the-user third-party ecosystem that lives behind the pretty waterfall we all like staring at actually does what it does with what it does & how that eventually winds up with somebody getting paid that isn’t us for the market-derived financial value of stuff about the fine grains of our online conduct…is absolutely the wild west in the worst kind of way…so…I figured I’d tried people’s patience enough for one day as it was without taking a running jump as deep in the weeds as I’d struggle not to take that?
I found that really funny in that story — Twitter being all sniffy about Chinese spying when they collect and sell all that data for themselves already. I guess it’s better if it’s homegrown metadata trawling?
…gotta keep it in the family…bros are all about family…I’ve seen the fast & the furious…I know the score
I DON’T HAVE FRIENDS, I HAVE A FAMILY!!!!!!!!
I think the most interesting part, and only lightly touched on in that piece, is that it’s not released in the EU yet because of that organization’s much more stringent data protection regulations. Sure, America, let’s fret over China’s hold on TikTok, but no worries when it comes to domestic data piracy….
…nothing says “come on into my walled data harvesting garden – the, err, water’s lovely – but don’t go peering beneath the surface or anything” quite like “well, you see people want to use my product but treating my users or their data as though I have any kind of duties or obligations regarding either that don’t pertain to maximizing stockholder returns…well…breaks my whole business model, actually…so…make the laws go away or I won’t let your voters play here & they’ll all get mad & vote for a bunch of nazis to teach you a lesson & then you’ll be sorry”
When I think Threads, I think of the early 80s British anti-nuke animated film that made me so sad and depressed as a kid that I almost wanted to kill myself to avoid nuclear war.
…yeah…that’s a deep cut in several senses
Oh God, there’s two hours that scarred me for life.