Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: In Pittsburgh, Memphis and Los Angeles, massive billboards recently popped up declaring, “Birds Aren’t Real.” On Instagram and TikTok, Birds Aren’t Real accounts have racked up hundreds of thousands of followers, and YouTube videos about it have gone viral. Last month, Birds Aren’t Real adherents even protested outside Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco to demand that the company change its bird logo. The events were all connected by a Gen Z-fueled conspiracy theory, which posits…

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Judd Legum writes: On Monday, Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) announced that Congressman Devin Nunes (R-CA) will be retiring from Congress to become the company’s CEO in January. Nunes has no experience in the media business and once sued a fictional cow for making fun of him on Twitter. Writing in Bloomberg, Matt Levine concludes there is “almost no sign that TMTG is actually building a social network or a streaming platform or anything else.” Nevertheless, TMTG projects 121…

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MIT Technology Review reports: In 2015, six of the 10 websites in Myanmar getting the most engagement on Facebook were from legitimate media, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-run tool. A year later, Facebook (which recently rebranded to Meta) offered global access to Instant Articles, a program publishers could use to monetize their content. One year after that rollout, legitimate publishers accounted for only two of the top 10 publishers on Facebook in Myanmar. By 2018, they accounted for…

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The Verge reports: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday at his company’s Connect event that its new name will be Meta. “We are a company that builds technology to connect,” Zuckerberg said. “Together, we can finally put people at the center of our technology. And together, we can unlock a massively bigger creator economy.” “To reflect who we are and what we hope to build,” he added. He said the name Facebook doesn’t fully encompass everything the company does now,…

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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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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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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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