Attention to the Unseen

The Washington Post reports: For years, the U.S. military has pushed to meet prospective Generation Z recruits on Discord, the online group-chat tool where many spend their time. It even runs a 17,000-member chatroom there for service members to talk about first-person shooter games, meet with career counselors and participate in what one sergeant in 2019 called the “Army of tomorrow.” But Defense Department officials have also struggled to confront the risks of how Discord’s closed channels operate — and…

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Mike Masnick writes: So here’s the deal. If you think the Twitter Files are still something legit or telling or powerful, watch this 30 minute interview that Mehdi Hasan did with Matt Taibbi (at Taibbi’s own demand):   Hasan came prepared with facts. Lots of them. Many of which debunked the core foundation on which Taibbi and his many fans have built the narrative regarding the Twitter Files. We’ve debunked many of Matt’s errors over the past few months, and…

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Semafor reports: Twitter is no longer taking steps to limit the reach of Chinese and Russian state-controlled media outlets, violating the social media platform’s own stated policies. In 2020, Twitter started labeling official government and state-controlled media accounts, and blocked the latter from appearing in search results. The platform announced last year that it would also begin flagging tweets that contained links to government-controlled sites such as RT.com or the Global Times, telling users to “Stay informed” and alerting them…

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Yoel Roth writes: Back in August 2020, the Trump White House issued an executive order purporting to ban TikTok, citing national security concerns. The ban ultimately went nowhere — but not before TikTok and Oracle cobbled together “Project Texas” as an attempt to appease regulators’ privacy worries and keep TikTok available in the United States. The basic gist of Project Texas, Lawfare reported earlier this year, is that TikTok will stand up a new US-based subsidiary named TikTok US Data Security (USDS) to…

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NBC News reports: In the nation’s capital, the debate over banning TikTok has largely focused on whether the app’s Chinese parent company poses a security threat to Americans. But behind closed doors, Democrats are also being forced to weigh whether blocking the popular video platform could come with heavy political costs. In 2020, Aidan Kohn-Murphy used TikTok to rally support for Joe Biden. Now, he’s trying to use the platform to stop Biden from killing it. “I’m not defending TikTok…

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What goes on in the Twitter shadows. By Carl Miller, King’s College London In the days after Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, the social media platform saw a “surge in hateful conduct,” which its then safety chief put down to a “focused, short-term trolling campaign.” New research suggests that when it comes to antisemitism, it was anything but. Rather, antisemitic tweets have more than doubled over the months since Musk took charge, according to research that I…

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