Werd I/O

[Caralee Adams at the Internet Archive]

The Internet Archive is always a gem, but it's been particularly important this year.

"With two-thirds of the process complete, the 2024/2025 EOT crawl has collected more than 500 terabytes of material, including more than 100 million unique web pages. All this information, produced by the U.S. government—the largest publisher in the world—is preserved and available for public access at the Internet Archive.

[...] As an added layer of preservation, the 2024/2025 EOT Web Archive will be uploaded to the Filecoin network for long-term storage, where previous term archives are already stored. While separate from the EOT collaboration, this effort is part of the Internet Archive’s Democracy’s Library project. Filecoin Foundation (FF) and Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW) support Democracy’s Library to ensure public access to government research and publications worldwide."

This is important on multiple levels: most importantly, it means that even if the Internet Archive is attacked or shut down for any reason, these archived versions of government websites and data will remain online and accessible.

As it happens, the current administration has been pulling down datasets and redacting websites with wild abandon, so although this is a routine activity for the Archive whenever there's a change in administration, it provides a vital historical record this year. Good news for researchers, future historians, journalists, and anyone who depended on this data.

#Democracy

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[Janus Rose at 404 Media]

This is an important but hard pill to swallow:

"“The reality is you are oxygenating the things these people are saying even as you purport to debunk them,” Katherine Cross, a sociologist and author of Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix, told 404 Media. “Whether it’s [New York Times columnist] Ross Douthat providing a sane-washing gloss on Trump’s mania or people on social media vehemently disagreeing and dunking on it, they’re legitimizing it as part of the discourse.”"

Posting is not activism. But it's both easy and cathartic to take the bait and run with it - and get approving clicks and likes in return. In sharing outrage rather than concrete real-world steps, we end up just amplifying the message.

As Janus Rose points out:

"Under this status quo, everything becomes a myopic contest of who can best exploit peoples’ anxieties to command their attention and energy. If we don’t learn how to extract ourselves from this loop, none of the information we gain will manifest as tangible action—and the people in charge prefer it that way."

Instead, co-ordinate online but manifest in the real world. Join protests, call your representatives, work for organizations that seek to uncover truth and take steps forward. Fewer hot takes; more collective action.

#Democracy

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[Alex Heath at The Verge]

And so begin the knock-on effects on companies across America:

"In a Wednesday memo to employees that I obtained (and you can read below), Google’s head of HR, Fiona Cicconi, said there will no longer be DEI hiring targets due to the company’s status as a federal contractor and recent “court decisions and US Executive Orders on this topic.” As The Wall Street Journal notes, Google also removed a line included in previous annual SEC reports saying that it’s “committed to making diversity, equity, and inclusion part of everything we do.”"

In other words, because DEI initiatives are now banned within the federal government, and because Google wants that sweet federal contractor money, it's ending the practice of overtly being inclusive as a company.

This is cowardice - and it's exactly what the Trump administration is going for. Its retrograde goals aren't simply for government; the idea is to remake the entire United States, and through changes to international relationships and the simple truth of America's global influence, the world.

#Technology

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[Eoin Higgins, excerpted in Lit Hub]

This is a neat encapsulation of Musk’s rightward turn, and everything that happened next:

“By this point, Musk believed that part of the business problem of Twitter was that, somehow, the right wing was “suppressed.” As such, “woke culture” needed to be destroyed for Twitter the business—and democracy itself—to survive. In many ways this belief was a natural outgrowth of the Silicon Valley mythos of meritocracy and the tech industry’s opposition to diversity; a politics based on destroying wokeness was not far from the supremacist ideology he grew up with in South Africa.”

If you take a step back, it’s remarkable that the weirdest guy from PayPal has evolved into the world’s richest and most dangerous man. This serves as a reminder of what happened.

#Technology

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[Maxwell Zeff at TechCrunch]

I know "don't be evil" is from another era of Google, but still, this rankles:

"Google removed a pledge to not build AI for weapons or surveillance from its website this week. The change was first spotted by Bloomberg. The company appears to have updated its public AI principles page, erasing a section titled “applications we will not pursue,” which was still included as recently as last week."

This dovetails with a piece from earlier this year about how AI is speeding up the military's kill chain:

"The “kill chain” refers to the military’s process of identifying, tracking, and eliminating threats, involving a complex system of sensors, platforms, and weapons. Generative AI is proving helpful during the planning and strategizing phases of the kill chain, according to [the Pentagon's Chief Digital and AI Officer]."

So AI might not be used to pull the trigger, but it is being used to identify who should be in the crosshairs. All our concerns about AI hallucinations, and particularly about bias inherent in training data and therefore outcomes, apply.

#AI

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[Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards at ProPublica]

From my colleagues at ProPublica:

"Citing an urgency to protect students’ civil rights in a second Trump administration, Illinois lawmakers filed a new bill Monday that would explicitly prevent school police from ticketing and fining students for misbehavior."

This follows an investigation into how Illinois schools call on the police for infractions and - surprise, surprise - penalize Black students twice as often.

The police shouldn't get involved in troublesome kid stuff like truancy or vaping. That should be obvious. And, yet, here we are. This kind of police state nonsense absolutely paved the road towards where we are today.

#Democracy

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[The Guardian Editorial]

The Guardian editorial board isn't mincing words:

"Donald Trump is provoking a US constitutional crisis, claiming sweeping powers to override or bypass Congress’s control over spending in a brazen attempt to centralise financial power in the executive branch. If he succeeds, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman warns, it would be a 21st-century coup – with power slipping from elected officials’ hands. The real story hidden behind the president’s trade war, he says, is the hijacking of government. And Mr Krugman’s right."

The board is clear-eyed in this piece about the harms committed under Trump's first Presidency, both to the economy and the American people. And then comes to this critical conclusion:

"Mr Trump’s chaos isn’t confidence – it’s desperation. He’s trying to conjure power he doesn’t actually have. He is manufacturing a perception of dominance in the hope that Americans will simply accept it. The real danger is letting his illusion of power become reality."

The trick is to cut through the shock and awe.

#Democracy

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[Jameel Jaffer in The New York Times]

Jameel Jaffer is the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University:

"The spectacle of powerful media organizations debasing themselves before Mr. Trump has become so familiar that it is beginning to feel like scheduled programming.

[...] Mr. Trump captured the spirit of our times when he observed in December that, “In the first term, everyone was fighting me,” but “in this term, everybody wants to be my friend.” Certainly, some of the nation’s most powerful media institutions seem to have concluded that it is simply not in their commercial interests to inconvenience the president, even if sparing him inconvenience means abandoning their own First Amendment rights."

As Jaffer argues, the cases being settled by ABC News, Meta, and CBS are not slam dunks for Trump. This isn't about legal details; it's about capitulating to the new President and kissing the ring. That leaves us without an effective free press to hold truth to power.

The conclusion here is on point:

"The First Amendment is just words on a page. Giving those words meaning — sustaining their promise, generation after generation — depends on a civic courage that seems, right now, to be in ominously short supply."

And that, to be honest, is terrifying.

#Democracy

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[Cathy Gellis at TechDirt]

On point:

"So that Elon Musk and his minions have managed to walk right into government offices to take over computer systems where they had no legitimate authorization or entitlement needs to be understood as a cyberattack by a rogue actor. And every ounce of outrage we ever would have had if any other rogue actor had taken over critical government infrastructure needs to be mustered here, because it is just as outrageous, and as dangerous, if not more so on both fronts, because this time the threat to America’s security came from within.

[...] Meanwhile, we know little to nothing about his team. Even some names are unknown, let alone the full range of their affiliations, which we usually ask about before giving anyone access to the country’s most sensitive information. They have had zero vetting and in many cases no known security clearance (and, in the case of Musk, there were limits to his, which was already in jeopardy).

[...] They are a bunch of strangers who have essentially busted into government offices and strong-armed the career staff there into giving them access to all these systems with all this critical function and data. Systems that it has heretofore been the priority of the United States government to protect because of their sensitivity and how vulnerable the nation would be if an adversary could access them."

This is a dangerous situation and it's evolving quickly. Who knows what it will look like tomorrow, or this time next week. But it doesn't look good.

#Democracy

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[Matt Haughey]

I really like the way this guide to Signal lays it all out. As Matt Haughey explains:

"A friend of mine works in the federal government and wrote a guide for their fellow federal workers on how to use Signal. There are lots of good reasons for switching to Signal for messaging, and this does a great job of laying it all out. This friend doesn't currently have a blog, so they asked me to post it for them, and I obliged since I think it's a straightforward introduction to protecting yourself when communicating with others."

This doesn't just go into the what - it talks a little about the why for Signal, including some of the protections you'll get on Signal that you won't get anywhere else.

Take a look - and then start using it.

#Technology

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[Naseem S. Miller at the Journalist's Resource]

A massive, last-minute data preservation effort was undertaken this week as important federal datasets were taken offline:

"The new Trump administration has at least temporality halted most communications from the Department of Health and Human Services and has begun taking down government websites, including many pages that include DEI initiatives. CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey site, which monitors health behaviors of high-school students, including sexual behavior, mental health and tobacco use, is no longer available."

This is another reason why the Internet Archive is vitally important infrastructure: websites and datasets were saved, among other places, to the Wayback Machine. Teams including at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health raced to capture the data before it went dark.

These datasets include important information about health (including vaccine information); gender; climate; mortality. They enable reporting and allow us to have a clearer picture of how well our democracy is functioning. At least for now, they're now historical datasets: it's not clear that any further data will be published. Researchers, journalists, medical professionals and more will need to look elsewhere for important information that helps them do their jobs and keep us safe.

#Democracy

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[Herman Martinus]

I recognize a lot of the sentiment here. Twenty years ago, I ran an open source social networking startup and tried to differentiate ourselves by saying many of these same things.

"Bear won't sell. I'm not building this to flip it to the highest bidder. No VC funding, no external pressures, no "exit strategy." Bear is independent and will stay that way."

In practice, I don't know how much that means to very many people. For a comparable example, take a look at Mastodon vs Bluesky (not, by the way, that this is a binary choice); the latter has taken on at least thirty million dollars in VC funding but is currently thriving.

Trust is something you earn over time through your actions and decisions, and isn't a direct outcome of your funding choices. There certainly are bootstrapped companies that have stood the test of time - Esri comes to mind, among others - but there are also VC-funded companies that have proven to have longevity and have done okay by their users. (This will alienate some of my readers, but I don't think VC is inherently bad; it only becomes so when it is considered to be the only funding option and non-VC businesses are shoehorned into that structure and strategy.)

Herman effectively comes to this conclusion in the piece too:

"I've recently chatted to a few bloggers and legal professionals on what a good structure looks like for a project like this. And the common theme was that the legal structure didn't matter nearly as much as the intentions of the people running things. We've seen our fair share of open-source projects become sour (see the recent Wordpress drama) or abandoned entirely. We've seen OpenAI become ClosedAI. There's a common thread here. Trust isn't just a legal structure, but a social contract."

Additionally, I think the conclusion that small, sometimes family-owned businesses last longer is not wrong, but context is important. For a local business? Absolutely. To what extent does this make sense on a global web where every service can be available to everyone? I really badly want this to be true here too, but it's not a given that it is.

Anyway. I really love what Herman is doing with Bear, and this piece isn't a criticism of him or his service in any way. It's fantastic that he's out there doing this. My feelings are more: this is a hard road, and the answers aren't yet clear. But it's a journey that I'm very glad people are on.

#Technology

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[Adrian Hon]

I was today years old when I learned the original meaning of an "adventure playground":

"The post-war period saw “junk playgrounds” flourish as a kind of reparations for the trauma of war. They gave children the freedom to build, explore, experiment, and role play – and in doing so, inoculate them against fascism. For a while it seemed like they were the future."

This conception of an anarchic (in the best possible way) creative space is in stark contrast to today's very controlled, very sterile spaces for children:

"Proponents of experimental playgrounds believe they can be more than spaces of vertiginous, physical fun. They should be spaces of concentrated creativity, where children can visit their own make-believe worlds. Instead, the modern world has commercialised play and made boring, insurance-friendly playgrounds."

What must this do to childrens' imaginations, and their horizons? How can it create anything other than cautious rule-followers?

Adrian argues that software like Minecraft and Roblox are the natural heirs to these real-world spaces: while we don't seem to be able to foster this level of uninhibited creativity for children in the real world anymore, there are no insurance worries or complaints about unsightly play structures in virtual space. It's not perfect, but it's something.

#Culture

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[Ross Douthat and Marc Andreessen in The New York Times]

This podcast conversation with Marc Andreessen is very revealing. It's particularly fascinating to me that what I experienced as "America finally having a much-needed moral awakening" presented to people like Andreessen as "radical Marxism". If nothing else, that shows he's never actually met a radical Marxist, and doesn't have a solid take on what that really means. Bernie Sanders ain't it; that guy just wants universal healthcare and well-enforced antitrust rules.

"It turned out to be a coalition of economic radicals, and this was the rise of Bernie Sanders, but the kids turned on capitalism in a very fundamental way. They came out as some version of radical Marxist, and the fundamental valence went from “Capitalism is good and an enabler of the good society” to “Capitalism is evil and should be torn down.”

And then the other part was social revolution and the social revolution, of course, was the Great Awokening, and then those conjoined. And there was a point where the median, newly arrived Harvard kid in 2006 was a career obsessed striver and their conversation with you was: “When do I get promoted, and how much do I get paid, and when do I end up running the company?” And that was the thing.

By 2013, the median newly arrived Harvard kid was like: “[expletive] it. We’re burning the system down. You are all evil. White people are evil. All men are evil. Capitalism is evil. Tech is evil.”"

I think that's a little bit overblown - after all, the tech industry was still booming and still swimming with engineers, designers, product managers, and the like. But also, it represented a class of workers (not just young people, as Andreessen falsely asserts) who were coming to terms with the impact their industry was having in the world politically, environmentally, and socially. The internet is a core part of society now, unlike the hyper-growth years of a decade or two prior, so of course people have more nuanced opinions about it and are reckoning with its impacts. You can't turn back the clock on human perception.

Still, I find that understanding - a gap between my experience and theirs - to be very useful. That's something we can work with, and maybe, just maybe, we can find a bridge.

#Technology

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[Taylor Lorenz at UserMag]

This is like something from a cyberpunk novel:

"The phrase “cute winter boots” is not about footwear. It's a code phrase being used to discuss resistance to Trump and how to fight back against the draconian immigration policies his administration is enacting. Users talking about “cute winter boots” keeping people safe from "ice," are referencing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "Cute winter boots" is just the latest example of algospeak, coded phrases and words aimed at subverting algorithmic filters."

The reason is a perceived idea - which may well have basis in fact - that actual discussion of how to combat ICE raids and so on will be demoted by the platform's content algorithm. It's also clearly a way of trying to avoid scrutiny from authorities. But it also reveals a strong knowledge of what the TikTok algorithm likes to promote:

"The videos discussing "cute winter boots" leverage the TikTok algorithm's preference for product-focused content to amplify their reach. "What the algorithm likes is products," said Diana, the admin of @/citiesbydiana, a TikTok account about urban planning. "It’s a way to talk about resisting the federal government in a way that will actually reach people.""

This is absolutely dystopian police state stuff, but at the same time, it shows a ton of initiative, and illustrates that people aren't going to take any of this lying down. Power to them.

#Technology

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[Mike Masnick at TechDirt]

On Zuckerberg's claims about why he's changing Meta's fact-changing policy:

"If you only remember two things about the government pressure campaign to influence Mark Zuckerberg’s content moderation decisions, make it these: Donald Trump directly threatened to throw Zuck in prison for the rest of his life, and just a couple months ago FCC Commissioner (soon to be FCC chair) Brendan Carr threatened Meta that if it kept on fact-checking stories in a way Carr didn’t like, he would try to remove Meta’s Section 230 protections in response.

Two months later — what do you know? — Zuckerberg ended all fact-checking on Meta."

His appearance on Joe Rogan's show served as a way to whitewash this argument. I don't doubt that the government placed pressure on him to enact certain kinds of community moderation policies, but the timing makes the underlying reasons clear.

This is a long piece that goes into Zuckerberg's claims and debunks them soundly. Here's what you really need to know: it's a PR move to placate the incoming administration, and that Zuckerberg capitulated so soundly and so quickly is a very bad sign.

#Technology

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[Ethan Zuckerman in The Atlantic]

I completely agree with the points Ethan makes here. The TikTok ban was a spectacular own-goal for all kinds of reasons. In particular:

"[...] This is a depressing moment for anyone who cherishes American protections for speech and access to information. In 1965, while the Cold War shaped the U.S. national-security environment, the Supreme Court, in Lamont v. Postmaster General, determined that the post office had to send people publications that the government claimed were “communist political propaganda,” rather than force recipients to first declare in writing that they wanted to receive this mail. The decision was unanimous, and established the idea that Americans had the right to discover whatever they wanted within “a marketplace of ideas.”"

Truly, so much for the country that is allegedly about freedom of speech. There's something particularly messed-up and McCarthyist about how this ban came about, not least because some representatives have admitted that the ban is partially because of the availability of pro-Palestinian content on the platform. If we endorse this ban, do we also need to revisit the rightly widely-derided un-American-activities policies of the past? I'd rather we leave them in the dustbin of history.

But luckily, the kids are alright. This is also true:

"Although I don’t think this specific rebellion can last, I’m encouraged that American TikTok users realize that banning the popular platform directly contradicts America’s values. If only America’s leaders were so wise."

#Democracy

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[Matthew Green]

I think this is the most important discussion with respect to AI:

"[...] I would say that AI is going to be the biggest privacy story of the decade. Not only will we soon be doing more of our compute off-device, but we’ll be sending a lot more of our private data. This data will be examined and summarized by increasingly powerful systems, producing relatively compact but valuable summaries of our lives. In principle those systems will eventually know everything about us and about our friends. They’ll read our most intimate private conversations, maybe they’ll even intuit our deepest innermost thoughts. We are about to face many hard questions about these systems, including some difficult questions about whether they will actually be working for us at all."

I lead technology at a non-profit newsroom where we've banned use of hosted AI models on sensitive data like reporting notes and source information. We've turned off AI assistants on our cloud services, and we've deployed client-side encryption for sensitive documents.

Even if we think vendors are trustworthy (I don't), sending this level of data to any third party creates a honeypot for surveillance and potential misuse by government, law enforcement, the vendors themselves, and beyond. If a vendor has access to your most personal data and receives a criminal subpoena, which could easily come from the government or from a third party, you might never know that your information was compromised. (Civil subpoenas sometimes allow vendors to notify you that this happened.)

So these solutions are pretty interesting, although fall far short of the encryption standard the author and I would both like to see:

"Apple’s approach to this problem is called “Private Cloud Compute” and it involves the use of special trusted hardware devices that run in Apple’s data centers. [...] Apple ensures that no long-term state is stored on these machines, and also load-balances your request to a different random server every time you connect."

As the author notes, when this level of data is being gathered centrally and is potentially available for government use (or even vendor use beyond our intent as users), serious questions are raised about who this software actually works for. Is it ours? Is it empowering? Is it covertly a system of control and monitoring? Or all of the above?

I think the answer, sadly, is inevitable.

#AI

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[David Marchese in The New York Times]

This profile of Curtis Yarvin in the New York Times (paywalled, probably for the best) is far softer than it should have been, with far less formal fact-checking. It is of the moment, though: this guy’s writing is highly influential to the political class that’s about to land in power, as well as to prominent VCs and other tech luminaries.

It’s not a bad idea to shine a spotlight on who he is and what he’s all about — this is a man who has directly inspired JD Vance, multiple prominent venture capitalists, and other people in our still-forming tech oligarchy. And as softball and cozy as the conversation really is, it’s still hard to come away without thinking: this guy is genuinely evil.

In this interview he argues, among other things, that the Civil War (what he calls the “War of Secession”) didn’t improve anybody’s lives, and that women’s lives before suffrage were pretty great. He argues that people had at least as much liberty in the era of kings than they do today.

Towards the end of the interview, you'll find this exchange:

"What’s your Achilles’ heel? I also have self-confidence issues. I won’t bet fully on my own convictions."

I mean: good.

#Democracy

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[Oliver Milman in The Guardian]

Car culture isn't just physically bad for us, it affects us mentally too:

"The car is firmly entrenched as the default, and often only, mode of transport for the vast majority of Americans, with more than nine in 10 households having at least one vehicle and 87% of people using their cars daily. Last year, a record 290m vehicles were operated on US streets and highways.

However, this extreme car dependence is affecting Americans’ quality of life, with a new study finding there is a tipping point at which more driving leads to deeper unhappiness. It found that while having a car is better than not for overall life satisfaction, having to drive for more than 50% of the time for out-of-home activities is linked to a decrease in life satisfaction."

The trick, of course, is that most of our communities have been heavily designed around the car, in part because of a century of lobbying and pressure from the automotive industry. It's obvious that more integrated city planning that doesn't heavily favor car use leads to a happier and healthier life, but American society is largely not built for it.

In turn, most Americans can't even imagine a world that isn't car-centric, and vehicles have become a core part of the culture. That's as intrinsically toxic as smoking culture, but because it literally has dictated how the environment around us has been designed and built, it's going to take a long time to undo - and before we get there, we need to have the widespread will to undo it, which doesn't seem to exist.

Compounding that, our most walkable and transit-enabled communities are also by far the most expensive to live in, because - shocker! - they're the most desirable. So a reasonably healthy living environment has become the preserve of the relatively wealthy.

This is the kind of thing that needs to be legislated for: new built environments need to hit certain standards for integration, transit, and walkability, and then our existing environments need to be iteratively rebuilt. That seems like a tall order in the current American cultural era, but I don't see how this gets better on its own.

#Society

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[Joan Westenberg]

An absolutely spot-on call to action:

"Cynicism is the cheap seats. It’s the fast food of intellectual positions. Anyone can point at something and say it’s broken, corrupt, or destined to fail. The real challenge? Building something better.

[...] Cynicism comes with hidden taxes. Every time we default to assuming the worst, we pay in missed opportunities, reduced social trust, and diminished creative capacity. These costs compound over time, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy in which cynical expectations shape cynical realities."

We've got to have optimism. Not the dumb kind that Andreessen talks about; the kind where we know we can make the world better, we just have to go out and do it.

A thousand times, this:

"The world has enough critics. What it needs are builders who can see problems clearly without being paralyzed by them, people who can maintain hope without succumbing to naïveté, and people who can engage with reality while working to improve it."

Criticism is useful, but the real work is in imagining something new, something better, and making it a reality.

#Culture

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[Dave Karpf at Tech Policy Press]

Peter Thiel and other tech oligarchs are seeking to weaponize US foreign policy as a way to enforce their corporate agendas:

"Thiel is developing a blueprint for putting Big Tech’s policy agenda at the center of US foreign policy. Australia’s social media ban is bad for American social media companies. The European Union’s Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act impose regulatory requirements on very large online platforms that operate within the EU. Peter Thiel expects the US government to do something about that, in the guise of investigating and redressing past wrongdoings.

Tech billionaires like Thiel simply do not believe that their companies and investments should be beholden to governments. And now that they have control of the US government, they are suggesting that, if any other countries interfere with their business, the US government ought to intervene on their behalf."

The thing is, protections like the ones offered by the European Union are really good, and significantly better than we enjoy in the United States. Part of the worry is that if they're allowed to stand, similar restrictions will emerge here too. We're already seeing that in more progressive states like California.

That's an inevitability: as we all get more used to the internet now that most of us are on it, beyond the initial excitement, we're going to make more nuanced policy decisions. Clearly, privacy is an important democratic prerequisite, and countering the internet's tendency to support monopolies is similarly important to prevent outsized centralization of power. When it comes to the free reign moguls have enjoyed to build giant businesses unencumbered, time is ticking. But in the meantime, they'll keep trying to protect their interests - in increasingly dramatic ways.

#Democracy

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[Sergio Hernández, Nat Lash, Brandon Roberts and Ken Schwencke at ProPublica]

Private schools in the US are much whiter than public schools. My colleagues over in the newsroom at ProPublica explored this data while illuminating the ongoing extent of segregation academies in the south:

"Our analysis of that survey revealed, among other things, Amite County, Mississippi, where about 900 children attend the local public schools — which, as of 2021, were 16% white. By comparison, the two private schools in the county, with more than 600 children, were 96% white."

But that data hasn't traditionally been easy to explore. Until now:

"In the course of our reporting, we realized that this data and analysis were illuminating and useful — even outside the South. We decided to create a database to allow anyone to look up a school and view years worth of data."

The Private School Demographics database is available to use for free. It makes it very easy to examine disparities between private schools and their surrounding school districts. And knowing is the first step towards changing something.

#Democracy

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[Joseph Cox at 404 Media]

Not just obeying in advance but actively collaborating:

"Multiple speech and content moderation experts 404 Media spoke to drew some parallels between these recent changes and when Facebook contributed to a genocide in Myanmar in 2017, in which Facebook was used to spread anti-Rohingya hate and the country’s military ultimately led a campaign of murder, torture, and rape against the Muslim minority population. Although there are some key differences, Meta’s changes in the U.S. will also likely lead to the spread of more hate speech across Meta’s sites, with the real world consequences that can bring.

“When we look at the history of mass atrocities against particular groups, we always see a period where the information landscape is shaped away from recognizing the humanity of the targeted group. By letting hate speech flourish online, you enable the pre-conditions for group violence offline,” [Rebecca Hamilton, law professor at American University] added."

We're in for a rough few years, and Meta and its big tech compatriots seem to be all in.

#Technology

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[Mark Lemley on LinkedIn]

Meta's lawyer in its AI case has fired them as a client, and is not beating around the bush as to why:

"I have struggled with how to respond to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook's descent into toxic masculinity and Neo-Nazi madness. While I have thought about quitting Facebook, I find great value in the connections and friends I have here, and it doesn't seem fair that I should lose that because Zuckerberg is having a mid-life crisis.

[...] I have deactivated my Threads account. Bluesky is an outstanding alternative to Twitter, and the last thing I need is to support a Twitter-like site run by a Musk wannabe."

I wish I could read a response from Zuckerberg himself. I suspect none will be forthcoming.

#Technology

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