their.tube
their.tube What if the YouTube I see is not the YouTube you see? This is a good demonstration of how personalized recommendations work.
media
mediamatters.org
mediamatters.org"Fast forward five years and journalists and commentators are still talking about imminent pivots and praising him for always-temporary changes in his tone."Tiring Trump trope.
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com"Facebook has constrained its efforts against false and misleading news, adopted a policy explicitly allowing politicians to lie, and even altered its news feed algorithm to neutralize claims that it was biased against conservative publishers, according to more than a dozen former and current employees and previously unreported documents obtained by The Washington Post."This article is a good summary of how Facebook rewrote its policies to accommodate hate speech and misinformation so they could stay in favor with the current administration. Related, so far more than 100 advertisers have agreed to stop advertising on Facebook in July: Facebook’s reckoning arrives.
Facebook is on the Wrong Side of History
So much Facebook in the news:
NYT: What’s Facebook’s Deal With Donald Trump?
The Atlantic: How Facebook Works for Trump
NYT: What’s Facebook’s Deal With Donald Trump?
"While executives across Facebook insist that Mr. Zuckerberg’s position on free speech on the platform is a matter of long-term planning and principle, not political expediency, his political team also recognizes that they are badly out of position for a Democratic administration."Mashable: Facebook faces boycott push from NAACP, ADL, and other civil rights groups
"They allowed incitement to violence against protestors fighting for racial justice in America in the wake of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, and so many others. They amplified white nationalists by including news sources with known extremist ties into their 'fact checking' program. They turned a blind eye to blatant voter suppression in their platform."And I think this older article from April gives important context about why exactly Facebook's alliance with the administration is dangerous:
The Atlantic: How Facebook Works for Trump
"Instead of paying to put particular media in front of a specific audience, an advertiser now pays Facebook to deliver a selected outcome from a certain stripe of people. For example, a clothing manufacturer might pay Facebook for webpage visits from women in their 30s who live in Los Angeles, or for likes by parents with college degrees whose online behavior is similar to that of users who had previously made purchases."The combination of microtargeting, proprietary machine learning, increasing radicalization through recommended groups, and an unwillingness to prevent voter supression or misinformation is hurting our ability to have a healthy democracy.
nytimes.com
nytimes.com"As I scrolled through endless collections of these online, I found it hard to escape the conclusion that America’s police forces are not just unfairly brutal — they also do not seem to care anymore about being caught on tape."Cameras are capturing what our system with no consequences for bad actors looks like.
The Verge
The VergeBy continuing to provide him with a platform, Facebook and Twitter have become a key mechanism in the president’s effort to silence his critics and violate their civil rights — not in their news feeds or timelines, but where they worship, where they gather, and even where they live.I know I'm a broken record on this, but Facebook is a key piece of infrastructure for our lives and it's doing real harm in the world.
nytimes.com
"Facebook’s principles and policies supporting free speech “show that the right action where we are right now is to leave this up,” Mr. Zuckerberg said on the call referring to Mr. Trump’s posts."I just deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts after reading this. Enough.
nytimes.com
Matt Haughey on social media trolls:
“Every bad thing at MetaFilter happened with someone who had been testing the rules for a year or two,” he said. “Those are the ones who tend to blossom into super-trolls over time. They’ll see what they can get away with, they’ll figure out what the limits are, and just stay a step inside. It can go on forever. And when you inevitably break and say, this is a bad idea, they freak out, and try to play the victim.”Good for Twitter for starting to enforce their terms at this late hour. I can imagine a world where they enforced their terms all along and it makes me disappointed and angry.
Daring Fireball
Daring Fireball“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.
getrevue.co
getrevue.co 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?
hypebeast.com
hypebeast.com38 albums of soundtracks are now widely available to stream.Hooray for more beautiful Studio Ghibli creations more widely available!
mailchi.mp
mailchi.mpAre movies getting more divisive? Rex shows that Rotten Tomatoes audience vs. critics scores are getting further apart.
I’m enjoying the Recs reboot. I assume you already subscribe because I made subscribing mandatory last year. If not, now is the time!
"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!