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Threads takes an important baby step toward true fediverse integration

[Wes Davis at The Verge]

Threads added a little more fediverse support:

"While fediverse posts won’t show in feeds, Instagram head Adam Mosseri says their profile and posts do appear on Threads, and you have the option to get notifications when they publish. That’s something, at least."

This is pretty cool, but there's still a long way to go before Threads has full fediverse integration. When I tested it, I could mention my Mastodon profile in a post (when I published it using the web interface), and then subsequently could follow the generated link in the post to follow my Mastodon account in Threads.

What it won't do is show you fediverse content in the main feed. Apparently it will notify you when the fediverse profiles you subscribe to post new content, which I haven't had an opportunity to test yet; I can imagine that getting annoying if someone I subscribe to posts frequently.

A test post from my Mastodon account that referenced my Threads account, but wasn't in response to a Threads post, didn't generate a notification on Threads. I imagine there's a lot to think through with these kinds of interactions.

Clearly it's very early days - as you can see in the linked post, embedded Threads posts don't render fediverse handles properly, for example - but it's still exciting to see this kind of progress on genuine interoperability. It's the kind of thing internet services should have been doing at scale decades ago - but the second best time is now.

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FTC Bans Location Data Company That Powers the Surveillance Ecosystem

[Joseph Cox at 404 Media]

This is good to see:

"The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced sweeping action against some of the most important companies in the location data industry on Tuesday, including those that power surveillance tools used by a wide spread of U.S. law enforcement agencies and demanding they delete data related to certain sensitive areas like health clinics and places of worship."

Gravy and its subsidiary Venntel are two of the largest companies used to sell location information to law enforcement. The FTC is not banning the practice outright - but it's requiring that information relating to sensitive locations is removed. That includes "medical facilities, religious organizations, correctional facilities, labor union offices, schools and childcare facilities, domestic abuse and homeless support centers, shelters for refugee or immigrant populations, and military installations."

Of course, many other locations not covered by this ban are also sensitive, depending on context, and it would be far better to not sell this information at all. It's also highly likely that other service providers are selling this information under the radar.

Still, it's a start.

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These Tech Firms Won’t Tell Us If They Will Help Trump Deport Immigrants

[Sam Biddle at The Intercept]

In the face of Trump's promise to conduct mass deportations, The Intercept set out to find out who in tech would be collaborators:

"To see whether corporate America will support Trump’s promised anti-immigrant operation, The Intercept reached out to data and technology companies that hold immense quantities of personal information or sell analytic software useful to an agency like ICE. The list includes obscure data brokers that glean intimate personal details from advertising streams, mainstream cellular phone providers, household-name social networks, predictive policing firms, and more."

Only four companies responded. Of those, two said they would; one said they would not; and the other (Thomson Reuters Clear) hedged with a dodgy answer that suggests the door is open.

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Fourteen years

[Joel Gascoigne]

I always appreciate Joel's updates.

"Early on, my dream was just to create a tool that made it easy to Tweet consistently, build it for myself and others, and make enough money to cover my living expenses and go full-time on it. The number for me to be able to work on it full-time was £1,200 per month, and that felt almost out of reach in the beginning. Today, Buffer generates $1.65 million per month, serves 59,000 customers, and enables fulfilling work for 72 people."

It's a tool I personally pay for and use every day (although it runs behind the scenes for me, as part of automations I've set up for myself). But even before then, Joel's build in public approach felt meaningful - it resonated as a way I wanted to work and do business, too.

Although there are inevitably sensitive topics that I'm sure Joel hasn't been able to talk about, I've been impressed with this transparency, which has held through good times and bad. It's a model to learn from, and one that also leads to longevity:

"When I really stop to take a step back, I feel very lucky that I've been able to do this for fourteen years. It's a long time in any sense. In tech and social media it feels like almost a lifetime already."

It is. And I love it. Kudos.

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The Twitter Board made a historic mistake and the World will pay the price.

[Ricardo Mendes]

Ricardo argues that Twitter's sale to Elon Musk was one major factor that led to the rise of extremism worldwide, and that it should never have been allowed:

The sale of Twitter to Musk should never have been allowed to proceed without serious scrutiny, oversight, or regulation. It handed control of a vital part of the global information ecosystem to a tech mogul whose priorities are clearly out of step with the principles of democracy. The risks were evident from the outset: toxicity, polarization, disinformation, and the undermining of democratic institutions. This is yet another example of how democracies are left vulnerable to the whims of billionaires whose agendas often run counter to the public good."

I have questions about how media ownership rules (for broadcast, newspapers, etc) could be adapted for our monopoly-first internet world. Musk didn't own any other media properties, so he couldn't have been restricted on those grounds, but there's something about the way he intentionally turned the dial to favor conservative speech that feels like it should have been illegal on a platform over a certain size.

Probably, as Ricardo notes, this comes down to anti-trust: no platform with a single owner should be allowed to be this big and this influential to begin with. I'd love to see a world where we keep networks (and services) small and manageable in order to dilute the influence any one person can have over our discourse and our elections. This seems to be a lesson we need to learn again and again - and, of course, there are plenty of forces that are against exactly this from happening, because they're trying to achieve exactly this level of power, influence, and financial value.

I don't know what the solution is, but I'm excited about the growth of Mastodon and Bluesky for this reason. Enough is enough, please.

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For Love of God, Make Your Own Website

[Gita Jackson at Aftermath]

I love a good treatise in favor of the indie web:

"Unfortunately, this is what all of the internet is right now: social media, owned by large corporations that make changes to them to limit or suppress your speech, in order to make themselves more attractive to advertisers or just pursue their owners’ ends. Even the best Twitter alternatives, like Bluesky, aren’t immune to any of this—the more you centralize onto one single website, the more power that website has over you and what you post there. More than just moving to another website, we need more websites."

Almost every single advance in my career, and many of the good things that have happened in my personal life, have come from writing on my own website over the years. It's both liberating and empowering to have your own platform - and anyone can build one.

And this is also true:

"“We were already long overdue for a return to websites we control, rather than feeds manipulated by tech oligarchs,” Molly White from Web3 Is Going Great! told me. “Now that they’ve made it clear how eager they are to help usher in authoritarianism, I think it will only become more painfully clear how important sovereign websites are to protecting information and free expression.”"

Want to start blogging? I made you a guide. Want to put up a website of any kind but don't know where to start? Show up at a Homebrew Website Club and say hello. There are so many ways to start, and so many ways to be online. Go get started.

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Introducing Sill

[Tyler Fisher]

Tyler Fisher has built a Nuzzel-like service for Bluesky:

"Sill connects to your Bluesky and Mastodon accounts and aggregates the most popular links in your network. (Yes, a little like Nuzzel.)"

It's a personal project for now but there's more to come:

"I built Sill as a passion project, but I'd also like to keep it sustainable, which means making plans for revenue. While I am committed to always keeping the basic Sill web client free, once we exit the public beta period (likely early next year), I plan to launch some paid plans for Sill with additional features."

I've been using it for a while and have found it to be quite useful. If you're a Bluesky user, you can sign up at Sill.social.

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Immigrants’ Resentment Over New Arrivals Helped Boost Trump’s Popularity With Latino Voters

[Melissa Sanchez and Mica Rosenberg at ProPublica]

Important resentments coming to the surface here:

"Her anger is largely directed at President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party for failing to produce meaningful reforms to the immigration system that could benefit people like her. In our reporting on the new effects of immigration, ProPublica interviewed dozens of long-established Latino immigrants and their U.S.-born relatives in cities like Denver and Chicago and in small towns along the Texas border. Over and over, they spoke of feeling resentment as they watched the government ease the transition of large numbers of asylum-seekers into the U.S. by giving them access to work permits and IDs, and in some cities spending millions of dollars to provide them with food and shelter."

The issue is not so much with asylum seekers as such - it's that asylum makers could make progress while immigration reforms that could help people who were already here stalled. These resentments mirror other complaints about the struggles of working class people who saw other groups receive what they perceived as preferential treatment.

What's particularly sad is the idea that Trump will help immigrants (or working people) in any meaningful way. He's been very clear that he wants to conduct unprecedented mass deportations - not just for criminals, but potentially for tens of millions of people.

"But the Democrats “promised and they never delivered,” Garza Castillo said. “They didn’t normalize the status of the people who were already here, but instead they let in many migrants who didn’t come in the correct way.” He believes asylum-seekers should have to wait outside the country like he did."

And of course, the challenge is that these reforms were blocked by Republicans - it's not that Democrats didn't want them (although it must be said that Democrats have not done a stellar job of backing the kinds of grassroots reforms that are really needed). There's a whole base of people out there who simply don't like immigrants. I find that point of view repellant - but it's prevalent, and it doesn't seem to be going away soon. Certainly not over the next four years.

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Elon Musk floats buying MSNBC, but he’s not the only billionaire who may be interested

[Brian Stelter at CNN]

CNN's Chief Media Analyst Brian Stelter reports that multiple very wealthy individuals, including Elon Musk, have enquired about buying MSNBC:

"I spent Sunday on the phone with sources to gauge what might be going on. I learned that more than one benevolent billionaire with liberal bonafides has already reached out to acquaintances at MSNBC to express interest in buying the cable channel. The inbound interest was reassuring, one of the sources said, since it showed that oppositional figures like Musk (who famously bought Twitter to blow it up) would not be the only potential suitors."

The channel is not, as far as anyone knows, up for sale. Instead, it's being spun out of Comcast into a new media entity, SpinCo, whose name has a double meaning that is probably unintentional.

I don't think a media landscape where each outlet is owned by a different billionaire with their own individual interests is healthy for anyone. Hopefully we can divest from this kind of media ownership structure. I'd rather see a more fragmented landscape with lots of smaller outlets and a greater presence of non-profit organizations.

I'm not a cable news viewer myself - it all just feels like it's screaming at me - but I can't imagine much worse than Musk or someone aligned with him gaining ownership of a station alongside Twitter / X. It's not like the government is going to stop such a move over the next four years, so let's just hope it doesn't come to pass.

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Bluesky is breaking the rules in the EU

[Wes Davis at The Verge]

Interesting announcement from the European Commission:

"The European Union says Twitter alternative Bluesky violates the EU Digital Services Act rules around information disclosure, reports Reuters. But since Bluesky isn’t yet big enough to be considered a “very large online platform” under the DSA, the regulator says it can’t regulate Bluesky the way it does X or Threads."

All platforms doing business in the EU need to have a dedicated page on their website that enumerates how many users they have in the EU. Bluesky isn't big enough for the DSA to actually be enforceable yet, but this raises interesting questions about how they would do this - or how any decentralized system would go about this. Will Bluesky need to start tracking location, or even KYC information? That doesn't seem desirable.

Whereas Bluesky's architecture lends itself to a few big players, led by the Bluesky Social corporation, Mastodon is made up of many, much smaller communities. These individually will never be big enough to be regulated under the DSA. If that model becomes predominant, will it in turn trigger DSA changes that take the fediverse into account? Or I wonder if there can be another path forward where a platform just has to demonstrate that it meets EU data standards for all users, and then doesn't need to track them?

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With Trump alliance, Elon Musk became exactly what he vowed to expose

[Mike Masnick at MSNBC]

As Mike Masnick points out here, the hypocrisy from Elon Musk about collusion between tech and government is staggering:

"Before, we were told that White House officials’ merely reaching out to social media companies about election misinformation was a democracy-ending threat. Now, the world’s richest man has openly used his platform to boost one candidate, ridden that campaign’s success into the White House himself, and ... crickets. The silence is deafening."

There never was an anti-conservative bias on social media - but now there's active collusion between the owner of X and the Trump administration, to the extent that he's actually got a formal role in it. X is a clear threat to democratic values; further to that, it's an obvious warning against any centralized social media site of its magnitude. No one person should have control over how so many people learn from the world and communicate with each other. And yet, here we are.

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How decentralized is Bluesky really?

[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

Christine Lemmer-Webber has written a superb post that sets out to ask how decentralized Bluesky is but goes far deeper into the different models at play in decentralized social networking. It's required reading for anyone who cares about the space.

"What many users fleeing X-Twitter right now care about is a replacement for Twitter. For that matter, if you're coming from Twitter, whether or not Bluesky is truly decentralized, it certainly seems more decentralized than Twitter, the same way that Twitter may seem more decentralized than cable news. Things are sometimes more decentralized in degrees, and I certainly think the fediverse could be more decentralized than it is. (More, again, on this later.) But in all ways related to the distribution of power, Bluesky's technology is notably much less distributed than existing and prominent decentralized technology in deployment today."

There are few people more qualified to go into the nuts and bolts than Christine, and I really appreciate this perspective. The incremental nature of the improvements here doesn't mean that they're bad - and, indeed, Bluesky has done so well at curating a thriving community that the relative lack of decentralization compared to Mastodon doesn't matter to most users. Social networking is not about the technology; it's about the people. If it wasn't, we'd call the space subscription protocols or some other term that prioritizes the technology interactions. (And what a boring space that would be.)

Additionally: "the organization is a future adversary" is a wonderful rallying cry for anyone trying to build a platform that is free from lock-in and seeks to be a net positive for society. If you assume that some future state version of you or your organization will go bad, you're far more likely to put measures into place that help the work you're doing exist without you. I think that's both noble and wise.

As is, for the record, Bluesky's attempts to give itself enough runway to operate with. I fear that we may see challenges with Mastodon over the next year that relate to its low budget - unless it can pull something together to put it on more stable ground.

Anyway, this piece is fantastic, and I recommend everyone who cares about the state of decentralized social networking read it and its references.

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An Interview with Boots Riley

[Annalee Newitz at The Believer]

Boots Riley is a national treasure. I loved this interview with him in The Believer:

"BLVR: Do you think that all expression is propaganda?

BR: The word propaganda got popularized in different ways at different times. But our generation knows it as a derogatory word for what other countries do. However, in the 1980s, if you were to call Red Dawn—which was my favorite movie at the time—propaganda, people would have been like, Oh, you’re crazy. That’s just freethinking.

[...] BR: Yeah. We think anything could happen because it’s in this other reality. You need some connections to what is happening on our world for people to question it as they’re watching. When it’s in space, you have the possibility of saying, OK, cool, a rebellion seems natural. I want to make movies where people don’t just theoretically agree to rebel if the moment is right. I want them to look at where they are right now and ask themselves whether they agree."

The full interview is worth your time.

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Decentralised social media ‘increases citizen empowerment’, says Oxford study

[Oxford Martin School]

The Oxford Martin School is a multidisciplinary research institution at the University of Oxford focused on tackling global challenges and shaping a sustainable future through innovation and collaboration. It ran a study on the societal implications of decentralized social media and found that "such platforms offer potential for increased citizen empowerment in this digital domain."

The lead author of the paper, Zhilin Zhang, noted that:

‘Decentralised social media platforms represent a shift towards user autonomy, where individuals can engage in a safer and more inclusive digital space without the constraints and biases imposed by traditional, centralised, algorithm-driven networks.

[...] Decentralised social media is more than just a technical shift; it's a step toward restoring autonomy and trust in our digital lives, empowering individuals and communities to connect without compromising their values or privacy.’

While the paper was undertaken under the auspices of the Martin School, its authors are affiliated with Oxford, University College London, and Stanford University: a true collaboration between centers of excellence with respect to the intersection of computing and society.

There's (I think) an obvious follow-on, which is that public interest funders should consider how they might support non-profit decentralized social media efforts, and continue to investigate their societal impacts. Which fund or foundation will step up first?

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Google must sell Chrome to end search monopoly, says US justice department

[Dan Milmo at The Guardian]

The Department of Justice has filed its proposed remedies to Google's illegal monopoly over search services:

"The proposals filed to a Washington federal court include the forced sale of the Chrome browser and a five-year ban from entering the browser market; a block on paying third parties such as Apple to make Google the default search engine on their products and divestment of the Android mobile operating system if the initial proposals do not work."

The court also wants everyone to have a way to block their content from being used as AI training data - and for the search index itself to be opened up.

The judge will decide next year. I have to assume there will be intense negotiations about which remedies actually get implemented - and I don't hold out much hope for strong enforcement under the Trump administration (particularly one where Elon Musk and JD Vance are participants). But it's a hint of what strong, capable antitrust enforcement could look like.

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Undergraduates with family income below $200,000 can expect to attend MIT tuition-free starting in 2025

[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]

Changes to financial aid at MIT:

"Undergraduates with family income below $200,000 can expect to attend MIT tuition-free starting next fall, thanks to newly expanded financial aid. Eighty percent of American households meet this income threshold."

If your family makes less than $100,000 a year, you also get housing, dining, and fees included, as well as an allowance for books.

I was a part of the final year of students to attend university tuition-free in the UK, and it made a huge difference to me. I would also have met this bar for having all costs covered - which will give the students who qualify an enormous head start. May more universities follow this lead.

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The Right Triumphed Over Social Media and Helped Elect Trump

[Julia Angwin at The New York Times]

In an op-ed for The New York Times, Julia Angwin makes a strong argument for the open social web:

"If we want a quality information environment, we have to build a new one beyond the walls of the existing Big Tech social media platforms.

We can do that by funding people who do the hard work of collecting facts (a.k.a. journalists) and by finding new ways to reach audiences beyond the grip of social media algorithms that are designed to promote outrageous content rather than sober facts. There is also a new movement brewing that aims to break open the gates of the closed social media platforms."

Julia goes on to describe the fediverse and how it's a key part of the solution. I particular, it's a way for all of us to seize control of our social media environment from platforms that are not acting in any of our interests.

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How Rappler Is Building Its Own Communities to Counter AI and Big Tech

[Lucinda Jordaan at Global Investigative Journalism Network]

I'd missed this story from back in July. Rappler is building its own end-to-end encrypted, decentralized communities on the Matrix protocol.

"Built on the open source, secure, decentralized Matrix protocol, the app has the potential to become a global independent news distribution outlet, and promises to pave the way for a “shared reality” — a call Ressa has been making to counter “the cascading failures of a corrupted public information ecosystem.”"

This is both incredibly cool and makes a ton of sense. It's the first time I've seen a newsroom build decentralized communities in the wild - and it's doubly cool that it's end-to-end encrypted. For CEO Maria Ressa, whose work has been beset by endless legal challenges in the Philippines, that last feature is particularly vital. But it all helps the newsroom evade censorship and avoid serving up its content for AI vendors to train on.

This quote from Ressa is something that every newsroom should learn from:

"We realized: there is no future for digital news unless we build our own tech, because there are only three ways a digital news site, or any digital site, gets traffic: direct, search, or social search.

[...] If you do not trust the tech, then you are always going to be at the mercy of surveillance for-profit tech companies that, frankly, don’t understand news or the value of journalism."

Exactly. I've banged this drum repeatedly, but it's a far more effective message from Ressa than me. This is the way. I truly hope that more will follow.

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The global growth rate for mobile internet subscribers has stalled

[Khadija Alam and Russell Brandom at Rest of World]

Mobile internet subscriber growth is significantly slowing globally:

"From 2015 to 2021, the survey consistently found over 200 million coming online through mobile devices around the world each year. But in the last two years, that number has dropped to 160 million. Rest of World analysis of that data found that a number of developing countries are plateauing in the number of mobile internet subscribers. That suggests that in countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Mexico, the easiest populations to get online have already logged on, and getting the rest of the population on mobile internet will continue to be a challenge."

Many services - Facebook included - were able to grow rapidly by hitching a ride on the growth of the internet itself. It looks like that rapid growth is coming to an end, which will have implications for consumer startups down the line.

It will also fundamentally change the way we relate to the internet. It used to be that the majority of internet users were new: correspondingly, there was a shine to just being connected that overshadowed shortcomings. But we're finding ourselves in an era where most of us have been able to sit with the internet for a while, sometimes for generations. That inevitably leads to a more nuanced relationship with it - and in turn, more detailed thoughts around regulation, policy, and the kinds of applications we want to be using in the long term. That cultural change will be interesting to watch, and likely societally positive - but it will come with some downsides for tech companies and platforms.

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Don't call it a Substack.

[Anil Dash]

Anil Dash on Substack's attempt to brand "writing in a newsletter":

"We constrain our imaginations when we subordinate our creations to names owned by fascist tycoons. Imagine the author of a book telling people to "read my Amazon". A great director trying to promote their film by saying "click on my Max". That's how much they've pickled your brain when you refer to your own work and your own voice within the context of their walled garden. There is no such thing as "my Substack", there is only your writing, and a forever fight against the world of pure enshittification."

Anil makes a point to highlight Substack's very problematic content policies: not only won't they ban someone who is using the platform to spout real hate, and have not removed most Nazis (not figurative Nazis, not right-wing voices, but literal flag-waving Nazis) from posting or earning money there.

They don't deserve to brand an open platform like email. And, in fact, nobody does. I appreciate Anil calling it out.

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SF tech layoffs: Tales of post-pink-slip reinvention

[Jillian D'Onfro at The San Francisco Standard]

On one level, this piece about tech workers leaving the industry behind and doing something more culturally meaningful is quite nice:

"Andrew Wasilewski, who managed to live “very frugally” on his layoff package while launching the Faight Collective, a music and art community in the Lower Haight, signed the lease for the space mere weeks after his last day of work in tech sales."

But then you find yourself asking: how does an artist community pay a lease on the Lower Haight? How do any of these folks live like this, even for a while, in one of the most expensive cities in the world?

And the answer is obvious, and a little sad, and perhaps not very empowering after all.

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Inside UnitedHealth’s Playbook for Limiting Mental Health Coverage

[Annie Waldman at ProPublica]

UnitedHealth Group has been using an algorithm to determine whether patients have been receiving "too much" therapy and then cutting them off:

"Around 2016, government officials began to pry open United’s black box. They found that the nation’s largest health insurance conglomerate had been using algorithms to identify providers it determined were giving too much therapy and patients it believed were receiving too much; then, the company scrutinized their cases and cut off reimbursements."

The kicker here is the regulatory arbitrage: the practice has been ruled illegal in three states so far, but United simply undertakes its activities to a state where it's still legal. And because it doesn't answer to a single regulator, it's hard to impose stronger rules. In fact, more than 50 regulators each have jurisdiction over small slices of United's activities.

Effectively that makes it ungovernable:

"For United’s practices to be curbed, mental health advocates told ProPublica, every single jurisdiction in which it operates would have to successfully bring a case against it."

And:

"State regulators are supposed to be making sure private insurers that manage Medicaid plans are following the mental health parity laws. But this year, a federal audit found that they were failing to do so. “They are not well designed to essentially be watchdogs,” Lloyd said. “There’s very little accountability. Insurers can run roughshod over them.”"

In other words, the system needs to be radically overhauled if patients are going to receive adequate care. Will it be? Perhaps not soon.

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Microsoft and Google incubated Chinese startups tied to police

[Joanna Chiu and Viola Zhou at Rest of World]

Tech companies like Microsoft and Google have, through their accelerators, supported startups that provide censorship and policing technologies in China. It's perhaps not a surprise that they've supported these endeavors - after all, startups look to find product/market fit in their regions - but it flies in the face of efforts they've made to appear to care about human rights.

I've been thinking about this a lot:

"Support for the companies through their startup incubator programs raises questions about the future of these initiatives, especially as Donald Trump prepares to take a second term as president."

We know that tech companies comply with authoritarian regimes when they try to do business there. There's a long history of that, from IBM colluding with the Nazis through Yahoo giving up the identities of bloggers to the Chinese authorities. What happens when their home turf becomes one? I don't think we can expect anything other than collaboration.

At this point, that's mostly speculation (beyond existing contracts with ICE, say) - but there's no doubt that surveillance and censorship have been used in China to squash dissent and commit human rights abuses. The tech companies who directly fund the infrastructure to do this are complicit, and should be publicly held as such.

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Elon Musk algorithmically boosted Republican accounts on X from the moment he endorsed Trump

[Timothy Graham and Mark Andrejevic]

Elon Musk didn't just endorse Trump with his words - according to this pre-print research paper, he gave Republicans an algorithmic boost on X, too:

"The analysis reveals a structural engagement shift around mid-July 2024, suggesting platform-level changes that influenced engagement metrics for all accounts under examination. The date at which the structural break (spike) in engagement occurs coincides with Elon Musk’s formal endorsement of Donald Trump on 13th July 2024."

Despite big words about "free speech", Musk seems to be hell-bent on using the platform he acquired as a megaphone for his own interests, in the same way that Rupert Murdoch has used Fox News. To me, this points to the need for media regulation, and for anyone using the platform to approach it with caution. It's not an even playing field - not even close.

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Biden Asked Microsoft to “Raise the Bar on Cybersecurity.” He May Have Helped Create an Illegal Monopoly.

[Renee Dudley, with research by Doris Burke, at ProPublica]

Security lapses in Microsoft's own products led to hacks that in turn pushed President Biden to ask for help from it and other tech companies to improve White House security. Microsoft saw it as an opportunity to lock the White House into its products.

Microsoft pledged to give $150M in technical services to the government to upgrade its security. But it wasn't altruistic:

"Microsoft’s seemingly straightforward commitment belied a more complex, profit-driven agenda, a ProPublica investigation has found. The proposal was, in fact, a calculated business maneuver designed to bring in billions of dollars in new revenue, box competitors out of lucrative government contracts and tighten the company’s grip on federal business."

The result may have created an illegal monopoly on government systems - and increased its susceptibility to future Microsoft flaws:

"Competition is not the only issue at stake. As Washington has deepened its relationship with Microsoft, congressional leaders have raised concerns about what they call a cybersecurity “monoculture” in the federal government. Some, like Wyden and Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Republican from Missouri, have blasted the Defense Department in particular for “doubling down on a failed strategy of increasing its dependence on Microsoft.”"

Monocultures are bad. It's hard to see how these kinds of toxic relationships don't get worse over the next four years.

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