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Category Archives: Social Media

Publishing for Profit: Selecting the Best Publisher

Via LLRX – Publishing for Profit: Selecting the Best Publisher – Jerry Lawson offers his expert advise on how lawyers (and other ambitious people) can profit by publishing. One method is to begin by focusing on your desired result. What are the best publishers for you and your work product? Lawson offers a couple of ways… Continue Reading

Tumblr and WordPress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools

404Media: “Tumblr and WordPress.com are preparing to sell user data to Midjourney and OpenAI, according to a source with internal knowledge about the deals and internal documentation referring to the deals. The exact types of data from each platform going to each company are not spelled out in documentation we’ve reviewed, but internal communications reviewed… Continue Reading

Where democracy is most at risk

The Economist: Four lessons from EIU’s new ranking of democracies – “In theory this year should be a triumphant one for democracy. More people are expected to vote in national elections in 2024 than ever before. But many elections will be problematic. This year’s democracy index published by EIU, our sister company, shows that only… Continue Reading

When Media Outlets Shutter, Why Are the Websites Wiped, Too?

Slate: “On Thursday morning, a rumor started to circulate among media workers. Vice senior editor Janus Rose disclosed that staffers were in possession of an anonymous tip that management planned to shutter Vice—and delete the entire website. Employees had noticed the company disabled a Google feature that allowed them to download their emails. “Fun times… Continue Reading

The Supreme Court is about to decide the future of online speech

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

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

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