…one way or another a good bit of what I’m finding when it comes to catching up on what whistled past the graveyard of my browsing habits during my enforced downtime is that it’s hard to identify what’s “new” in the sea of new stuff about topics that are old…much of which doesn’t feel like it provides anything that might be described as new…even if some of it still bears repeating?

Social media companies are receding from their role as watchdogs against political misinformation, abandoning their most aggressive efforts to police online falsehoods in a trend expected to profoundly affect the 2024 presidential election.
[…]
And X CEO Elon Musk has reset industry standards, rolling back strict rules against misinformation on the site formerly known as Twitter. In a sign of Musk’s influence, Meta briefly considered a plan last year to ban all political advertising on Facebook. The company shelved it after Musk announced plans to transform rival Twitter into a haven for free speech, according to two people familiar with the plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive matters.

The retrenchment comes just months ahead of the 2024 primaries, as GOP front-runner Donald Trump continues to rally supporters with false claims that election fraud drove his 2020 loss to Joe Biden. Multiple investigations into the election have revealed no evidence of fraud, and Trump now faces federal criminal charges connected to his efforts to overturn the election. Still, YouTube, X and Meta have stopped labeling or removing posts that repeat Trump’s claims, even as voters increasingly get their news on social media.

…I could care less if the one asshole appears in conjunction with the other asshole…or about the mugshot(s) &/or their role as campaign “assets”…I’d have to get up very early indeed to fit in the extra side-eye time…but I could…but…there persist on the one hand disturbing numbers of people lapping that shit up & asking for more…&…well…a supply that never fails to outstrip demand?

Trump capitalized on those relaxed standards in his recent interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, hosted by X. The former president punctuated the conversation, which streamed Wednesday night during the first Republican primary debate of the 2024 campaign, with false claims that the 2020 election was “rigged” and that the Democrats had “cheated” to elect Biden.

On Thursday night, Trump posted on X for the first time since he was kicked off the site, then known as Twitter, following the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol. Musk reinstated his account in November. The former president posted his mug shot from Fulton County, Ga., where he was booked Thursday on charges connected to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. “NEVER SURRENDER!” read the caption.

The evolution of the companies’ practices was described by more than a dozen current and former employees, many of them speaking on the condition of anonymity to offer sensitive details. The new approach marks a sharp shift from the 2020 election, when social media companies expanded their efforts to police disinformation. The companies feared a repeat of 2016, when Russian trolls attempted to interfere in the U.S. presidential campaign, turning the platforms into tools of political manipulation and division.

…do they, though? …because if actions speak louder than words they’ve been positively screaming from the rooftops about their chosen bed-fellows & fellow-travelers for a hot minute at this stage in proceedings

These pared-down commitments emerge as covert influence campaigns from Russia and China have grown more aggressive, and advances in generative artificial intelligence have created new tools for misleading voters.
[…]
“Musk has taken the bar and put it on the floor,” said Emily Bell, a professor at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, where she studies the relationship between tech platforms and news publishers. For the 2024 presidential election, misinformation around races is “going to be even worse,” she added.
[…]
Fact-checkers at USA Today, one of dozens of media organizations Meta pays to debunk viral conspiracies, deemed the post false, and the company labeled it on Facebook as “false information.” But Meta has quietly begun offering users new controls to opt out of the fact-checking program, allowing debunked posts such as the falsified one about Pritzker to spread in participants’ news-feeds with a warning label. Conservatives have long criticized Meta’s fact-checking system, arguing it is biased against them.

…so

Meta Global Affairs President Nick Clegg said the ability to opt out represents a new direction that empowers users and eases scrutiny over the company. “We feel we’ve moved quite dramatically in favor of giving users greater control over even quite controversial sensitive content,” Clegg said. McPike added that the new fact-checking policy comes “in response to users telling us that they want a greater ability to decide what they see.”

…there is a non-zero chance we may swiftly be approaching peak-bullshit

YouTube has also backed away from policing misleading claims, announcing in June it would no longer remove videos falsely saying the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump. Continuing to enforce the ban would curtail political speech without “meaningfully reducing the risk of violence or other real-world harm,”the company argued in a blog post.

…with all the slippery slopes you can handle thrown in for good measure

These shifts are a reaction from social media executives to being battered by contentious battles over content and concluding there is “no winning,” said Katie Harbath, former director of public policy at Facebook, where she managed the global elections strategy across the company.

“For Democrats, we weren’t taking down enough, and for Republicans we were taking down too much,” she said. The result was an overall sense that “after doing all this, we’re still getting yelled at … It’s just not worth it anymore.”

…it’s…a familiar refrain?

But as the tech giants grappled with narrowing profits, this proactive stance began to dissolve.

In the summer of 2021, Meta’s Clegg embarked on a campaign to convince Zuckerberg and the company’s board members to end all political advertising on its social media networks — a policy already in place at Twitter. Meta’s decision not to fact-check politicians’ speech had triggered years of controversy, with activists accusing the company of profiting off the misinformation contained in some campaign ads. Clegg argued the ads caused Meta more political trouble than they were worth.

While Zuckerberg and other board members were skeptical, the company eventually warmed to the idea. Meta even planned to announce the new policy, according to two people.

By July 2022, the proposal had been shelved indefinitely. Internal momentum to impose the new rule seemed to plummet after Musk boasted of his plans to turn Twitter into a safe haven for “free speech” — a principle Zuckerberg and some board members had always lauded, one of the people said.
[…]
After Musk’s official takeover later that fall, Twitter would eventually rescind its own ban against political ads.

“Elon’s position on that stuff definitely shifted the way the board and industry thought about [policy],” said one person who was briefed on the board discussions about the ad ban at Meta. “He came in and kinda blew it all up.”
[…]
On his first night as owner, Musk fired Trust and Safety head Vijaya Gadde, whose job it was to guard the companies’ users against fraud, harassment and offensive content. Soon after,just days before the midterms, the company laid off more than half of its 7,500 workers, crippling the teams responsible for making high-stake decisions about what to do about falsehoods.
[…]
In a June interview with the right-leaning tech podcast host Lex Fridman, Zuckerberg said Musk’s decision to make drastic cuts to Twitter’s workforce — including by cutting non-engineers who worked on things such as public policy but didn’t build products — encouraged other tech leaders such as himself to consider making similar changes.
[…]
Musk reinstated high-profile conservative Twitter accounts, including Jordan Peterson, a professor who was banned from Twitter for misgendering a trans person, and the Babylon Bee, a conservative media company. Musk also brought back Republican politicians including Trump and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), whose personal account was banned for violating the platform’s covid-19 misinformation policies. He simultaneously suspended the accounts of journalists including Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell, CNN reporter Donie O’Sullivan and others who reported on Musk.
[…]
Soon after Musk’s Twitter acquisition, scores of Republican candidates and right-wing influencers tested Meta, Twitter and other social media platforms’ resolve to fight election misinformation. In the months leading up to the midterms, far-right personalities and GOP candidates continued to spread election denialism on social media virtually unchecked.
[…]
Last year, Meta dissolved the responsible innovation team, a small group that evaluated the potential risks of some of Meta’s products, according to a person familiar with the matter, and simultaneously shuttered the much-touted Facebook Journalism Project, which was designed to promote quality information on the platform.

“What was once promoted as part of an essential component of Meta’s role in helping secure democracy, election integrity and a healthy information ecosystem, appears now to have been expendable,” said Jim Friedlich, executive director of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, which served for two years as a lead partner in helping execute Facebook’s journalism grantmaking.
[…]
Soon after the company launched Threads, Meta started warning users who tried to follow Donald Trump Jr. on the new social network that his account has repeatedly posted false information reviewed by independent fact-checkers. Trump Jr. posted a screenshot of the message on rival Twitter, complaining that “Threads not exactly off to a great start.”

A Meta spokesperson responded by saying, “This was an error and shouldn’t have happened. It’s been fixed.”

Following Elon Musk’s lead, Big Tech is surrendering to disinformation [WaPo]

…I may yet to have quite found my bearings when it comes to what passes for triangulation as far as these posts are concerned

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/26/growing-number-of-countries-consider-making-ecocide-crime

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/24/carbon-credit-speculators-could-lose-billions-as-offsets-deemed-worthless-aoe

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/aug/26/rishi-sunak-faces-fresh-conflict-of-interest-row-over-india-trade-talks

…not to mention still needing to finish catching up on what might qualify as repetition hereabouts…I’m not the only one around here who makes free with the links & there’s only so many sleepless hours to go around…so…maybe I’m just feeling more rusty than salty…or maybe those things go together the way the car people say…either way…maybe you’d rather spend some time with the past

Sixty years ago, in the summer of 1963, a four-story townhouse on West 130th Street in Harlem became the headquarters for what was then the largest civil rights event in American history, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. For one summer the house, a former home for “delinquent colored girls,” was a hive of activity — so frenetic that the receptionist twice hung up on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by mistake.

The march, which took place on Wednesday, Aug. 28, is now best remembered for Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and for the crowd of 250,000 filling the National Mall. But it would not have been possible without the organizing at 170 West 130th Street, led by Bayard Rustin, a brilliant tactician whose homosexuality and former communist ties made him a target both inside and outside the movement.

Under the aegis of the march’s patriarch, the labor leader A. Philip Randolph, Mr. Rustin brought together the heads of the five big civil rights organizations — the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, N.A.A.C.P., National Urban League, Congress of Racial Equality and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Together with Mr. Randolph, they became known as the Big Six.

It was a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement, following Dr. King’s tumultuous campaign to force the desegregation of Birmingham and President John F. Kennedy’s sending the National Guard to enable Black students to attend the University of Alabama; Medgar Evers, a field secretary for the N.A.A.C.P., was assassinated in June in Mississippi. As Courtland Cox, one of the march organizers, recalled, “People were sick and tired of being sick and tired, and they wanted to make a statement to the nation.”
[…]
[Below are the memories of 10 people, now aged 75 to 92, who helped plan and organize the march. Their remarks have been edited for clarity and conciseness.]

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/26/nyregion/march-on-washington-harlem.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/interactive/2023/march-on-washington-60th-anniversary-memories

…not that past behavior is necessarily a rewarding currency

He became the first Black mayor of a rural Alabama town. Then a white minority locked him out [Guardian]

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/26/realestate/national-association-of-realtors-sexual-harassment.html

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/aug/26/its-like-doing-an-arctic-expedition-with-german-scientists-in-1943-life-on-the-international-space-station-at-a-time-of-war

…but

Putin Had Every Reason to Want Prigozhin Gone [NYT]

‘Prigozhin’s death benefits everyone except Putin’: battle begins over Wagner chief’s legacy [Guardian]

…if life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/26/ai-generated-art-copyright-law-recent-entrance-paradise-creativity-machine

…might be about time for a plan?

The Biden administration is embarking on a wide-ranging effort to check corporate power by promoting competition — a stated goal of both parties — and it needs Congress to support its effort with bipartisan legislation. It has proposed new rules, like a ban on noncompete agreements that prevent workers from changing jobs more freely. It is seeding competition, for example, by investing more than $1 billion to open and expand smaller meatpacking plants. And it has taken a tough line on mergers, blocking some big deals, dissuading companies from pursuing others and even suing to unwind Facebook’s 2012 acquisition of Instagram.
[…]
“In my view, it’s the most important economic policy thing that the Biden administration will do this year,” said Tim Wu, a Columbia Law School professor who served until earlier this year as President Biden’s adviser on technology and competition policy. Mr. Wu, who was not involved in creating the proposed guidelines, said the document reflected a determination to end a “green light” era in which American antitrust enforcers largely declined to enforce antitrust laws.
[…]
For several decades, beginning under President Ronald Reagan, both Democratic and Republican administrations embraced the idea that corporate concentration was often economically beneficial — and that companies engaged in harmful behavior would be disciplined by market forces. The merger guidelines issued by the Reagan administration in 1982 set the tone: “Although they sometimes harm competition, mergers generally play an important role in a free enterprise economy,” the guidelines said. Under subsequent administrations, the government refined an approach that gave corporations the benefit of the doubt. It wasn’t enough to show a merger would reduce competition; the government generally sought to block deals only when it could show a merger would result in higher prices for consumers or that it would clearly cause some other quantifiable harm — a standard that was rarely met.

Under this E-ZPass approach to antitrust enforcement, industries rapidly consolidated until the United States was left with four major airlines, three major cellphone companies and two dominant makers of coffins. A 2018 analysis concluded that concentration had increased in three-quarters of domestic industries, giving companies more power to raise prices, squeeze suppliers, suppress wages and influence policymakers.

Americans have been living as subjects in a large-scale experiment in letting big companies do as they please, and the consequences are increasingly apparent in daily life. Compare the United States with Europe, where authorities have more successfully resisted the consolidation of major industries. Airfares in the United States are now significantly more expensive; North American airlines pocketed more than twice as much in profits from each passenger in 2022 as their European counterparts did. The internet costs more, too: Americans pay more than twice as much for broadband, and the cost of cellular service is also, on average, more than twice as high in the United States as the average in other developed nations. The economist Thomas Philippon wrote in a 2019 book about the decline of competition in the United States that the American economy would be roughly $1 trillion larger than it is today if the United States had simply maintained the level of competition that prevailed in 2000.
[…]
Some harms are difficult to quantify. Some are difficult to anticipate. And sometimes the damage is cumulative. In separate interviews, Jonathan Kanter, the assistant attorney general who heads the Justice Department’s antitrust division, and Lina Khan, the chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, argued that the changes should be seen as a restoration of the plain meaning of the nation’s antitrust laws, which place limits on corporate concentration even when it isn’t possible to show negative economic effects in advance. Mr. Kanter said his department is focused on protecting competition because that is the goal that Congress enshrined in law and he is in the law enforcement business. “We’re going back to enforcing the law to its fullest extent,” he said.
[…]
Congress can help. Prominent politicians in both parties regularly express concern about the effects of concentration and the power of corporations, but Congress has not passed a significant law addressing antitrust enforcement in more than 70 years. The proposed guidelines seek to apply those old laws to the modern economy, but it’s an imperfect fit. The United States needs to update its antitrust laws to place stronger limits on corporate concentration and specifically to curb the power of tech companies. Bridging differences between the two political parties won’t be easy, but enduring changes in antitrust policy have always required bipartisan support.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/26/opinion/biden-lina-khan-ftc.html

…so…baby steps & all…but…maybe steps?

After years of aggressively lobbying against “right to repair” legislation, iPhone maker Apple this week endorsed a measure requiring companies to give customers the tools to fix their products independently — a landmark reversal that follows years of mounting pressure from advocates, lawmakers and federal regulators.
[…]
Proponents of the campaign called it a massive and potentially game-changing shift by Apple, which has long resisted and lobbied against “right to repair” legislation. 

California legislators for years have struggled to advance legislation on the issue amid consistent industry resistance. 
[…]
Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of the Repair Association, a coalition of advocacy groups that lobbies in favor of “right to repair” legislation, said the timing of the endorsement suggests Apple “realizes they won’t be able to stop” the bill from advancing, and so “they are clearly trying to get out in front of another legislative defeat.”
[…]
President Biden in July 2021 signed an executive order that urged the Federal Trade Commission to craft rules “barring unfair methods of competition,” including when cell phone manufacturers “impose restrictions on self and third-party repairs.”
[…]
Facing the prospect of tougher federal enforcement, tech companies responded, with both Microsoft and Apple announcing plans to make it easier for customers to fix their products within a few months, marking another major victory for the “right to repair” movement. 

Biden later touted the changes, saying, “What’s happened [is] a lot of these companies said, ‘You’re right. We’re going to voluntarily do it. You don’t have to order us to do it.’”

Even so, groups representing Apple have reportedly continued to lobby around “right to repair” legislation at the state level as officials pushed to enshrine such protections.

…apples, barrels, trees…whatever your metaphor there’s some over-ripe fruit in the collection of basket cases running big tech

As fires and floods rage, Facebook and Twitter are missing in action [WaPo]

…so…every little helps…tiny acorns & all that […bonus points if you clock the pun…if it’s a pun…I think it’s a pun…but I need more coffee so that may not mean a whole lot]

The Federal Communications Commission requested public comment on whether the agency should renew Fox’s Philadelphia TV station license after a grass-roots organization argued that it should be revoked because Fox knowingly broadcast false information about the 2020 election, Bloomberg News’s Todd Shields reports.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/08/24/apples-surprising-about-face-right-repair/

…either way…my thoughts may have drifted past the voight-kampf test a few times today

“Aquí, Aquí!” yelled one of them in Spanish.“Here, here! They are trapped!” A pair of leatherback sea turtle hatchlings wriggled inside a cracked white plastic bucket turned on its side, fluttering their minuscule flippers in a desperate attempt to escape.

“Take a picture,” said Veelenturf, founder of the Leatherback Project, a conservation nonprofit. “That can maybe be used as evidence someday.”

…& I’m barely through with breakfast

These hatchlings have legal rights in Panama. A law passed by the country’s National Assemblyearlier this year guarantees sea turtles the right to thrive in a healthy environment, a protection until now typically reserved for humans.

Panama is part of a growing list of countries and communities around the world latching on to the Rights of Nature movement, which seeks to grant wildlife a similar legal status to that of individuals and companies.

While the strategy has so far been mostly used to protect whole ecosystems, such as forests and rivers, advocates of wild animals are starting to deploy it as well, hailing it as an essential tool to combat the biodiversity crisis. Despite existing environmental protections, the world continues to lose animal species at an alarming pace.

Countries are starting to give wild animals legal rights. Here’s why. [WaPo]

…but I’m not used to feeling so much sympathy for the robots…assuming sympathy is the right term…which it probably isn’t

‘Prigozhin’s death benefits everyone except Putin’: battle begins over Wagner chief’s legacy [Guardian]

…but then…where angels fear to tread

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/aug/26/zadie-smith-i-get-in-trouble-when-i-talk-about-the-state-of-the-nation

…well…what could possibly go wrong

Naomi Klein on following her ‘doppelganger’ down the conspiracy rabbit hole – and why millions of people have entered an alternative political reality [Guardian]

…for a consensus reality it sure is looking kinda skewed these days

Trump’s return to Twitter solidifies a sharp right turn for Musk’s platform [Guardian]

…but then…that’s what weather vanes do…particularly vain ones

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/26/silicon-valley-elites-buy-800m-land-new-city

[…I know we already mentioned that but…remember the anarchists & the bears? …because that seems like how you give a town over to bears…anyway…where was I?]

…oh, yeah…I remember now

After America’s summer of extreme weather, ‘next year may well be worse’ [Guardian]

…what else would you expect?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/26/vivek-ramaswamy-elon-musk-presidential-adviser

…we’re gonna need a bigger boat RICO case…but that’s a whole other post

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/house-republican-demands-unredacted-jan-6-panel-transcripts-white-house

…if the meek are due to inherit the earth they better get a wriggle on or their inheritance is liable to amount to a hill of beans

Trump’s Georgia case could get real — quickly [WaPo]

…still…I’ve had about all I can stands & I can’t stands no more…or, as it happens, spinach…which puts me shit out of luck & off to forage for tunes…& coffee…hopefully strong…anyway…day of rest & all…go easy?