TED’s archive is a graveyard of ideas. It is a seemingly endless index of stories about the future — the future of science, the future of the environment, the future of work, the future of love and sex, the future of what it means to be human — that never materialized… Bill Gates wheels a… Read More OSCAR SCHWARTZ: What Was the TED Talk?
The documents, including an internal post-mortem and one document showing in real time countermeasures Facebook employees were belatedly implementing, paint a picture of a company that was in fact fundamentally unprepared for how the Stop the Steal movement used its platform to organize, and that only truly swung into action after the movement had turned… Read More Facebook Papers paint damning picture of company's role in insurrection
In recent days, Frances Haugen, a former member of Facebook’s “civic integrity team”, has launched a deft and professional public assault on the company. Unlike previous Facebook whistle-blowers, like former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang, Haugen managed to capture the interest and attention of policy leaders and journalists around the world. We have to ask why Haugen… Read More Siva Vaidhyanathan: Facebook has just suffered its most devastating PR catastrophe yet / Jonathan Freedland: Is Facebook the tobacco industry of the 21st century?
Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! – Karl Marx, Capital, volume 1, Chapter 24, Sec 3. It might, as one senator put it, be remembered as “the big tobacco jaw-dropping moment of truth”. The truth-teller was former Facebook data scientist Frances Haugen, appearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday to testify that the online platform… Read More ‘Moral bankruptcy’: whistleblower offers scathing assessment of Facebook
All social media both feeds and feeds on narcissism, but Twitter’s capacity to mirror the world and its users’ neuroses in discrete verbal and visual units, at least in certain corners of the site, elevates self-regard to a formal principle. What makes Twitter so axiomatically hellish? It’s a place where even the most well-intentioned attempts… Read More KATIE KADUE – Twitter as Suspended Hell
In April 2020, Facebook purchased a 10-percent stake in Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio, the telecommunications arm of the Reliance empire. In addition to dominating telecom, Reliance is the largest player in petrochemicals and in retail. When its latest acquisition is complete, the company will control 40 percent – a large plurality – of India’s organised groceries sector. That could… Read More DANIEL BLOCK: How the Facebook-Reliance combine and the farm laws pave the way for digital colonisation
Sometimes… silence makes a lie begin to take on the shimmer of truth… Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has written a detailed essay about the conduct of young people on social media “who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion”, who she says are part of a generation “so terrified of having the wrong opinions that… Read More ‘It is obscene’: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie pens blistering essay against social media sanctimony
Late last month, an “unknown hill in the Chinese desert” was blanketed in scores of large red and white banners, flapping vitriol in the breeze. “I hope you die, bitch,” said one. “Little bitch, screw the feminists,” said others. They were all actual messages sent to women, a direct act of harassment anonymised by social media.… Read More China’s feminists protest against wave of online abuse with ‘internet violence museum’
NB: The only caveat I have to make on this incisive comment refers to the (admittedly conditional) phrase: “instances that must haunt any ruler left with an iota of conscience.” Our rulers do not have an iota of conscience. Within days of the latest lockdown, the RSS general secretary was talking about anti-national forces conspiring to… Read More Suhas Palshikar: A monumental failure of governance // ‘There should be no clampdown on information, people can voice grievances on social media’: Supreme Court
