With everyone holding their breath for Election Day, there’s bound to be some bad information floating around. We put together this guide to fighting hoax stories a few years ago, and it’s still the best advice we’ve got. You’ll be a lot less likely to get fooled if you keep these rules in mind.
Twitter is getting the big headlines for obvious reasons, but the past week has also seen serious cuts at Stripe, Lyft and Zendesk as companies prepare for hard economic times ahead. This layoff tracker counts more than 100,000 startup layoffs globally over the course of the year.
Polls look good for Republicans, although who knows.
If Democrats lose the Senate, they’ll lose their chance to shape appeals courts, which will have a huge impact on the issues Adi wrote about yesterday.
In a new video, we take a look at the fallout from Elon Musk’s first few days as Chief Twit, and the grim outlook for Twitter users. Whatever Musk wants to do with the platform, he’s going to need good engineers to do it— and after the last week, it’s going to be harder than ever to hire them.
The executive in question is an asphalt services contractor from Billings, Montana, who attempted to monopolize the regional market for sealing up cracks in the highway. We are not exactly dealing with Standard Oil here! Still, it’s good to know all those Biden antitrust folks have not just been sitting on their hands.
[www.justice.gov]
The Intercept has a big piece this morning about Homeland Security’s work reporting misinformation, which includes reporting false claims about the COVID vaccines and the US withdrawal from Afghanistan directly to Facebook for moderation.
On some level, this makes sense: the government has been public about fighting antivaxx claims, and the reported posts really were violating platform rules. Still, it’s hard not to be nervous when the US government takes an active role in limiting the spread of specific views.
The BBC reports on a new wave of amateur documentarians harassing victims of the Manchester Arena bombing, similar to the Sandy Hook truthers spurred on by Infowars.
The point of the harassment is to get footage of the confrontation, which can then be posted to YouTube for a growing following. In theory, this kind of video is against YouTube’s content policy — but actual bans are rare.
The Washington Post did an experiment trying to get its videos suppressed on TikTok and did not find much of anything. Still, it’s a good experiment, and a reminder of how bewildering it is to have no clear information about how these algorithms work or how they’re acting on a specific piece of content.
Rest of World has a fun look at the angst that image-generators like Stable Diffusion and DALL-E are causing in anime culture. In one anecdote, an artist “was obliged to tweet screenshots showing layers of her illustration software to counter accusations that she was secretly using AI.”
