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Category: Social media

The content that fills discontent with nothing

The content that fills discontent with nothing

Kyle Chayka writes: In the beginning, there was the egg. In January of 2019, an Instagram account called @world_record_egg posted a stock photo of a plain brown chicken egg and launched a campaign to get the photo more likes than any online image had before. The record holder at the time was an Instagram shot of Kylie Jenner’s daughter, Stormi, which had more than eighteen million likes. In ten days, the egg’s like count rocketed beyond thirty million. It remains…

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The long history of Glenn Greenwald ‘making common cause’ with the most evil regimes around the world

The long history of Glenn Greenwald ‘making common cause’ with the most evil regimes around the world

Cathy Young writes: In the months since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, maverick journalist Glenn Greenwald has emerged as one of the loudest anti-Ukraine voices in the American media, with all the usual themes: transparent gloating over Russia’s apparent war gains in Eastern Ukraine; alarmism over United States support for Ukraine leading to World War III; even the flogging of “American biolabs in Ukraine” conspiracies in his Substack newsletter and in videos. While Greenwald has made overwrought claims about the “neo-Nazi…

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Video: Debunking Putin’s propaganda

Video: Debunking Putin’s propaganda

  The Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) is an independent, non-profit social enterprise dedicated to countering disinformation, exposing human rights abuses, and combating online behaviour harmful to women and minorities.

How harmful is social media?

How harmful is social media?

Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes: In April, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published an essay in The Atlantic in which he sought to explain, as the piece’s title had it, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” Anyone familiar with Haidt’s work in the past half decade could have anticipated his answer: social media. Although Haidt concedes that political polarization and factional enmity long predate the rise of the platforms, and that there are plenty of other…

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An agreement with Elon Musk is worthless

An agreement with Elon Musk is worthless

Matt Levine writes: Elon Musk is the richest person in the world, and an active Twitter user. When he tweets, he gets a lot of spammy replies, many of which seem to be written by automated bots. He has complained about this a lot. Eventually he decided to do something about it. The thing that he decided to do about it was buy Twitter. On April 13, he sent a letter to Twitter Inc.’s board of directors offering to buy…

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Why is Larry Ellison pouring $1 billion into Elon Musk’s Twitter bid?

Why is Larry Ellison pouring $1 billion into Elon Musk’s Twitter bid?

Grid reports: When Larry Ellison pledged $1 billion to back Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, Musk got more than just another investor: He also gained a powerful political ally, with ties to the MAGA right and a history of backing the “anti-conservative bias” movement. Behind the scenes, Oracle, which Ellison founded and oversees as chairman of its board of directors, has been engaged in a sprawling anti-Big Tech lobbying campaign, including funding a dark money group that presents itself as a…

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The impact of cheap speech on American democracy

The impact of cheap speech on American democracy

Jeff Kosseff writes: In 1995, Eugene Volokh published a law review article in which he predicted that the rapidly growing internet would “dramatically reduce the costs of distributing speech” and that “the new media order that these technologies will bring will be much more democratic and diverse than the environment we see now.” The concept, which Volokh dubbed “cheap speech,” would mean that “far more speakers—rich and poor, popular and not, banal and avant garde—will be able to make their…

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TikTok’s real power isn’t over our data. It’s over what users watch and create

TikTok’s real power isn’t over our data. It’s over what users watch and create

Ezra Klein writes: A few weeks ago, I gave a lecture at a Presbyterian college in South Carolina, and asked some of the students where they liked to get their news. Almost every one said TikTok. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. And Chinese companies are vulnerable to the whims and the will of the Chinese government. There is no possible ambiguity on this point: The Chinese Communist Party spent much of the last year cracking down on…

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Inside Elon Musk’s grand plans for Twitter

Inside Elon Musk’s grand plans for Twitter

The New York Times reports: Elon Musk has never been accused of dreaming small. He has reinvented at least two industries with Tesla, his electronic vehicle company, and SpaceX, the rocket company — and now his ambitions are carrying over to his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter. Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, has presented a pitch deck to investors in recent days outlining his grand — some might say incredible — plans for Twitter and its financial targets. The…

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Vicious political disagreement is seeping into every corner of life

Vicious political disagreement is seeping into every corner of life

Quinta Jurecic writes: By now, the stories are familiar. Most, though not all, start on social media: a post on Facebook or Twitter identifies a name, and then the threats begin. Shortly after the 2020 presidential election, conspiracy theorists focused on a video of a voting-machine technician at work in Gwinnett County, Georgia. One Twitter user published the young man’s name, declaring him “guilty of treason,” along with, according to the Georgia election official Gabriel Sterling, an animation of a…

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Facebook deliberately caused havoc in Australia in pre-emptive strike against new law, whistleblowers say

Facebook deliberately caused havoc in Australia in pre-emptive strike against new law, whistleblowers say

The Wall Street Journal reports: Last year when Facebook blocked news in Australia in response to potential legislation making platforms pay publishers for content, it also took down the pages of Australian hospitals, emergency services and charities. It publicly called the resulting chaos “inadvertent.” Internally, the pre-emptive strike was hailed as a strategic masterstroke. Facebook documents and testimony filed to U.S. and Australian authorities by whistleblowers allege that the social-media giant deliberately created an overly broad and sloppy process to…

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How Facebook’s algorithms decide what you see in your news feed

How Facebook’s algorithms decide what you see in your news feed

Gizmodo reports: Several key [internal] documents [published by Gizmodo today] concern what Facebook calls “meaningful social interactions,” a term introduced by the company in Jan. 2018. This metric, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained at the time, was meant to help prioritize “personal connections’’ over an endless online dribble of viral news and videos. This “major change,” as he put it, was framed as an effort to put first the “happiness and health” of the user—Facebook’s way of encouraging users to…

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Social media companies need to release their data to independent researchers

Social media companies need to release their data to independent researchers

Renée DiResta, Laura Edelson, Brendan Nyhan, Ethan Zuckerman write: Social media platforms are where billions of people around the world go to connect with others, get information and make sense of the world. These companies, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok and Reddit, collect vast amounts of data based on every interaction that takes place on their platforms. And despite the fact that social media has become one of our most important public forums for speech, several of the most important…

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Elon Musk is a problem masquerading as a solution

Elon Musk is a problem masquerading as a solution

Anand Giridharadas writes: It is a perfect marriage for an age of plutocracy: Twitter with its serious problems and Elon Musk, the embodiment of those problems. What happens when the incarnation of a problem buys the right to decide what the problem is and how to fix it? Twitter has a disinformation problem — fake news about Covid vaccines, climate and more running buck wild across the platform. Mr. Musk has shown himself to be a highly capable peddler of…

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Elon Musk probably won’t buy Twitter

Elon Musk probably won’t buy Twitter

Lauren Silva Laughlin and Gina Chon write: There are good reasons for him to get cold feet. The biggest is Tesla. The electric-vehicle maker’s stock has fallen around a fifth since Musk first revealed his stake in Twitter, partly because Musk may sell shares to fund his new adventure. If Tesla’s stock bounces back – likely if the Twitter deal falls away – the $40 billion of recouped wealth would more than make up for the break fee. China is…

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The world’s richest person didn’t like Twitter. So he’s buying it

The world’s richest person didn’t like Twitter. So he’s buying it

David Leonhardt writes: Two years ago, the economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman published a statistic that you don’t normally see. It was the share of wealth owned by the richest 0.00001 percent of Americans. That tiny slice represented only 18 households, Saez and Zucman estimated. Each one had an average net worth of about $66 billion in 2020. Together, the share of national wealth owned by the group had risen by a factor of nearly 10 since 1982. This…

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