The Verge: “Social media companies have long made their own rules about the content they allow on their sites. But a pair of cases set to be argued before the Supreme Court on Monday will test the limits of that freedom, examining whether they can be legally required to host users’ speech. The cases, Moody… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Social Media
Ask AI How Many Jobs Is Your Job
Medium – Debbie Levitt – “Credit for today’s article goes to the genius idea from Feridoon Malekzadeh and his January 2024 LinkedIn post where he gave ChatGPT a wildly long job description. He asked ChatGPT, “How big of a design team would I need to hire to do all of this work? Suggest team size,… Continue Reading
Instagram’s Uneasy Rise as a News Site
The New York Times [read free]: “In this year’s presidential election, more people are turning to Instagram for news, even as the platform tries de-emphasizing “political content.”…Mosheh Oinounou of Mo News is part of a crop of personalities who have figured out how to package information and deliver it on Instagram, increasingly turning the social… Continue Reading
Silicon Valley has its own ascendant political ideology. It’s past time we call it what it is.
The Rise of Techno-Authoritarianism by Adrienne LaFrance [The Atlantic; read free] “Silicon Valley still attracts many immensely talented people who strive to do good, and who are working to realize the best possible version of a more connected, data-rich global society. Even the most deleterious companies have built some wonderful tools. But these tools, at scale,… Continue Reading
Politics makes bastards of us all: Why moral judgment is politically situational
Kyle Hull, Clarisse Warren, Kevin Smith. Politics makes bastards of us all: Why moral judgment is politically situational [full text free to read]. Political Psychology, 2024; DOI: 10.1111/pops.12954 – “Moral judgment is politically situational—people are more forgiving of transgressive copartisans and more likely to behave punitively and unethically toward political opponents. Such differences are widely observed,… Continue Reading
Fake Funeral Live Stream Scams Are All Over Facebook
404 Media [free reg req’d]: “Facebook is awash with scams that direct visitors to fake live streams of funeral services, preying on relatives and friends of the deceased when they might be at their most vulnerable, 404 Media has found. The scams involve pulling details of real deceased people from legitimate funeral services pages and… Continue Reading
OpenAI shows off life-like videos made with AI
OpenAI – “Creating video from text. Sora is an AI model that can create realistic and imaginative scenes from text instructions. Read the Technical Report – Video generation models as world simulators. We explore large-scale training of generative models on video data. Specifically, we train text-conditional diffusion models jointly on videos and images of variable… Continue Reading
Service Jobs Now Require Bizarre Personality Test From AI Company
404 Media: “Applying to some of the most common customer and food service jobs in the country now requires a long and bizarre personality quiz featuring blue humanoid aliens, which tells employers how potential hires rank in terms of “agreeableness” and “emotional stability.” If you’ve applied to a job at FedEx, McDonald’s, or Darden Restaurants… Continue Reading
Directory of Police Department Social Media Policies
Brennan Center for Justice – “While many departments have policies addressing the use of social media data, most are too permissive or provide little transparency about actual practices. Surveys and anecdotal reports suggest that the use of social media by state and local law enforcement is widespread, with a number of police departments reporting that they… Continue Reading
Bluesky and Mastodon users are having a fight
TechCrunch – that could shape the next generation of social media: “People on Bluesky and Mastodon are fighting over how to bridge the two decentralized social networks, and whether there should even be a bridge at all. Behind the snarky GitHub comments, these coding conflicts aren’t frivolous — in fact, they could shape the future… Continue Reading
Social Media Posts Have Power, and So Do You
Rand – Stop the Spread of False and Misleading Information During Voting Season by Alice Huguet, Julia H. Kaufman, Melissa Kay Diliberti – “In a healthy democracy, having accurate information is crucial for making informed decisions about voting and civic engagement. False and misleading information can lead to knowledge that is inaccurate, incomplete, or manipulated.… Continue Reading
RSS Parrot – Turn Mastodon into your feed reader
“This is the browser home of RSS Parrot, a Fediverse service that lets you turn Mastodon into your feed reader. The Parrot follows the RSS or Atom feeds of a large number of websites, and sends out a toot whenever a new post is published on one of them. Every feed has a dedicated account.… Continue Reading
