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Facebook tells employees to preserve all communications for legal reasons

Facebook tells employees to preserve all communications for legal reasons

The New York Times reports: Facebook has told employees to “preserve internal documents and communications since 2016” that pertain to its businesses because governments and legislative bodies have started inquiries into its operations, according to a company email sent on Tuesday night. The move, known as a “legal hold,” follows intense media, legal and regulatory scrutiny over the social network’s harms. Lawmakers and the public are up in arms after Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee turned whistle-blower, provided thousands…

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Top U.S. general confirms ‘very concerning’ Chinese hypersonic weapons test

Top U.S. general confirms ‘very concerning’ Chinese hypersonic weapons test

Reuters reports: The top U.S. military officer, General Mark Milley, has provided the first official U.S. confirmation of a Chinese hypersonic weapons test that military experts say appears to show Beijing’s pursuit of an Earth-orbiting system designed to evade American missile defenses. The Pentagon has been at pains to avoid direct confirmation of the Chinese test this summer, first reported by the Financial Times, even as President Joe Biden and other officials have expressed general concerns about Chinese hypersonic weapons…

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The secret lives of cells — as never seen before

The secret lives of cells — as never seen before

Nature reports: For a few weeks in 2017, Wanda Kukulski found herself binge-watching an unusual kind of film: videos of the insides of cells. They were made using a technique called cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) that allows researchers to view the proteins in cells at high resolution. In these videos, she could see all kinds of striking things, such as the inner workings of cells and the compartments inside them, in unprecedented detail. “I was so overwhelmed by the beauty and…

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Facebook has treated most of the planet with all the care of an invading imperial force

Facebook has treated most of the planet with all the care of an invading imperial force

Siva Vaidhyanathan writes: Facebook, like the internet itself, is supposed to be a global phenomenon. It’s designed, its leaders say, to unite the world, transcend difference, and collapse distance. Its global reach and influence is undeniable. Nothing in human history has connected more than 3 billion human beings. Nothing has had such a profound set of effects in such a short period of time as Facebook has had everywhere—except, more or less, the People’s Republic of China—over the past decade….

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More internal documents show how Facebook’s algorithm prioritized anger and posts that triggered it

More internal documents show how Facebook’s algorithm prioritized anger and posts that triggered it

Nieman Lab reports: As if there wasn’t enough Facebook news to digest already, another deep dive from The Washington Post this morning revealed that Facebook engineers changed the company’s algorithm to prioritize and elevate posts that elicited emoji reactions — many of which were rolled out in 2017. More specifically, the ranking algorithm treated reactions such as “angry,” “love,” “sad,” and “wow” as five times more valuable than traditional “likes” on the social media platform. The problem with this plan…

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Joe Manchin’s deep corporate ties

Joe Manchin’s deep corporate ties

Dan Kaufman writes: Last month, as Democrats were struggling to craft a passable version of the Build Back Better Act, a $3.5-trillion bill that contains much of the Biden Administration’s domestic agenda, Joe Manchin, the Democratic senator from West Virginia, told a group of reporters, “I cannot accept our economy, or, basically, our society, moving towards an entitlement mentality.” The Democrats are attempting to pass the measure through the budget-reconciliation process, an effort that will take every Democratic vote in…

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Secretaries of state targeted by Trump election lies live in fear for their safety and are desperate for protection

Secretaries of state targeted by Trump election lies live in fear for their safety and are desperate for protection

CNN reports: “I am a hunter — and I think you should be hunted,” a woman can be heard saying in a voicemail left for Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs in September. “You will never be safe in Arizona again.” Or there’s the man who spit, “Die you bitch, die! Die you bitch, die!” repeatedly into the phone, in another of several dozen threatening and angry voicemails directed at the Democratic secretary of state and shared exclusively with CNN…

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Why ‘evangelical’ is becoming another word for ‘Republican’

Why ‘evangelical’ is becoming another word for ‘Republican’

Ryan Burge writes: The conventional wisdom about religion in the United States is that the number of people who have no religious affiliation is rising rapidly. In the 1970s, secular Americans (often called the Nones) made up just 5 percent of the population; now, that number has climbed to at least 30 percent. The data suggest that religious groups must be suffering tremendous losses as the Nones continue to increase in size and influence each year. That’s why a recent…

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Covid cases keep falling

Covid cases keep falling

David Leonhardt writes: The number of new daily Covid-19 cases has plunged 57 percent since peaking on Sept. 1. Almost as encouraging as the magnitude of the decline is its breadth: Cases have been declining in every region. Forecasting Covid’s future is extremely difficult, as we all should know by now, and it’s certainly possible that cases will rise again in the coming weeks. But the geographic breadth of the decline does offer reason for optimism. Past Covid increases have…

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The brain processes speech in parallel with other sounds

The brain processes speech in parallel with other sounds

Jordana Cepelewicz writes: Hearing is so effortless for most of us that it’s often difficult to comprehend how much information the brain’s auditory system needs to process and disentangle. It has to take incoming sounds and transform them into the acoustic objects that we perceive: a friend’s voice, a dog barking, the pitter-patter of rain. It has to extricate relevant sounds from background noise. It has to determine that a word spoken by two different people has the same linguistic…

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The study of the mind needs a Copernican shift in perspective

The study of the mind needs a Copernican shift in perspective

Pamela Lyon writes: In On the Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin draws a picture of the long sweep of evolution, from the beginning of life, playing out along two fundamental axes: physical and mental. Body and mind. All living beings, not just some, evolve by natural selection in both ‘corporeal and mental endowments’, he writes. When psychology has accepted this view of nature, Darwin predicts, the science of mind ‘will be based on a new foundation’, the necessarily gradual…

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The regenerative revolution in food

The regenerative revolution in food

BBC Future reports: Low lying and layered with clay, the soils of Molescroft Farm in East Yorkshire have never been the easiest to cultivate. Driven by ever-dwindling productivity, the land was pushed to its limits for decades – more passes with machinery, more fertilisers, more pesticides. These intensive agricultural practices kept the farm afloat; but beneath the surface, the soil was dying. “The land had been farmed very conventionally, so the ground was overworked and had lost its organic matter,”…

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The Facebook Papers: ‘History will not judge us kindly’

The Facebook Papers: ‘History will not judge us kindly’

Adrienne LaFrance writes: Before I tell you what happened at exactly 2:28 p.m. on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, at the White House—and how it elicited a very specific reaction, some 2,400 miles away, in Menlo Park, California—you need to remember the mayhem of that day, the exuberance of the mob as it gave itself over to violence, and how several things seemed to happen all at once. At 2:10 p.m., a live microphone captured a Senate aide’s panicked warning that…

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Facebook wrestles with the features it used to define social networking

Facebook wrestles with the features it used to define social networking

The New York Times reports: In 2019, Facebook researchers began a new study of one of the social network’s foundational features: the Like button. They examined what people would do if Facebook removed the distinct thumbs-up icon and other emoji reactions from posts on its photo-sharing app Instagram, according to company documents. The buttons had sometimes caused Instagram’s youngest users “stress and anxiety,” the researchers found, especially if posts didn’t get enough Likes from friends. But the researchers discovered that…

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