onfocus

“Polarizing divisive content is to Facebook as nicotine is to cigarette makers: a component of their product which their own internal research shows is harmful, but which they choose to increase, rather than decrease, because its addictiveness is so profitable.”

Ethics in social media.

Best summary I’ve read of the Twitter activist investor threat.

"But business ain’t beanbag, and “good enough” clearly isn’t cutting it for Paul Singer. Unless something changes dramatically, it would appear that Jack Dorsey is in for the fight of his life."

After bending over backward to not enforce Twitter policy for politicians, this is the thanks Jack gets?

38 albums of soundtracks are now widely available to stream.

Hooray for more beautiful Studio Ghibli creations more widely available!

Are movies getting more divisive? Rex shows that Rotten Tomatoes audience vs. critics scores are getting further apart.

"Many films from the past year saw huge disparities between audience and critic ratings. For instance, Gemini Man, a deepfake doppelganger thriller starring Will Smith, scored 83% fresh with audiences, but a paltry 26% fresh with critics."

Click through to see many more examples.

I’m enjoying the Recs reboot. I assume you already subscribe because I made subscribing mandatory last year. If not, now is the time!

Your weekend long read that attempts to explain why the US is politically polarized:

"Destructive cherry-picking breeds fear, anger, and cynicism. It’s why we always think crime is getting worse even though it’s almost always getting better."

The most resonant part to me was about media negativity bias and disgust. It's a cliché that we don't hear good news but it's also true and feeds our cognitive biases.

"The new thing here is that Yandex is working not just as a reverse image search tool; it seems to be doing facial matching."

Nelson has an interesting follow-up to the bellingcat guide to reverse image searching I posted recently.

"The warmongers are never ruined by their mistakes."

Justified outrage at the media's willful ignorance of recent history.

The state of reverse image search on the web.

"...if you only use Google for reverse image searching, you will be disappointed more often than not."

As disinformation season ramps up in 2020, finding an image origin is a useful tool to have.

Excellent description of how broken “both sides” journalism is right now.

"Chuck Todd has essentially said that on the right there is an incentive structure that compels Republican office holders to use their time on Meet the Press for the spread of disinformation. So do you keep inviting them on air to do just that?"

Paging Upton Sinclair.

This is the scariest take I’ve read on impeachment. We have arrived at the future Neil Postman warned us about in the 80s: no debate is possible because there's no space for serious debate. In Amusing Ourselves to Death Postman asked, "Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture’s being drained by laughter?" Everything is entertainment.

This article is very motivating to me. I should set up a semi-private Mastodon instance for locals. We have some good tools available to make New Internet happen.

Take 25 minutes to watch this. He makes a fantastic, succinct argument for regulating social media to stop the reach of hate speech.