Tic toc

Confucius once said, Don’t do unto others what you don’t want done unto you…

For many years, the United States ran its own version of the Chinese state-controlled internet apparatus, but we just called it “the internet.” It’s not only that its predecessor, the ARPAnet, was an American military project. In very recent memory, the global internet was dominated by services like Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and so on. These companies — founded in the United States, and run primarily by Americans on American soil — implicitly transmitted American values and culture to other countries.

The US declared war on TikTok because it can’t handle the truth – Sarah Jeong, The Verge




Twitter-in-chief

It took a while… The company’s decision on Tuesday afternoon to affix labels to a series of Trump tweets about California’s election planning is the result of a new policy debuted on 11 May. They were applied – hours after the tweets initially went out – because Trump’s tweets violated Twitter’s “civic integrity policy”, a […]


whitewashing

With the US presidential election coming up, there’s a lot of activity recently to spin potential Russian interference as a nothing-burger: unintentional leaks, serious scientific paper, a piece in the New Yorker. It is worth reminding everyone that Russian Interference was real but it was mostly not done through advertising. $100,000 in ads on Facebook […]


I know what you did last summer

“The device’s owner was easy to trace, revealing the outline of the person’s work and life. The same phone pinged a dozen times at the nearby Secret Service field office and events with elected officials. From computer screens more than 1,000 miles away, we could watch the person travel from exclusive areas at Palm Beach […]


The umpire strikes back

Mark Zuckerberg promises Facebook won’t be biased against Elizabeth Warren – The Verge Facebook has incredible power to affect elections and our national debate. Mark Zuckerberg is telling employees that he views a Warren administration as an “existential” threat to Facebook. The public deserves to know how Facebook intends to use their influence in this […]


Five billions

This should have been big news, but people barely talked about it. It might have to do that there are more PR specialists at Facebook than there are reporters in most journals — an industry helped decimate. FTC Imposes $5 Billion Penalty and Sweeping New Privacy Restrictions on Facebook – FTC


Private totalitarianism

The Libra is currency of the day, yet is profoundly lacks balance… I worked at Facebook from 2005 to 2010 in a series of roles culminating in a position as Zuckerberg’s speechwriter, and had an opportunity to observe the development of Facebook both as a social media platform and as what it increasingly aims to […]


The panopticon is leaking

Because of course it has to.. Malicious cyber attack’ exposes travelers’ photos, says US customs agency – The Guardian Should We Be Worried About Computerized Facial Recognition? – The New Yorker “A number of years from now, we will have a difficult decision to make,” he continued. “All the core competencies we’ve built up on […]


The Platform Challenge

Alex Stamos on The Platform Challenge: Balancing Safety, Privacy and Freedom


The blue App

Nick Thompson is not mincing words 15 Months of Fresh Hell Inside Facebook – WIRED