This week's notable links
This is my regular digest of links and media I found notable over the last week. Did I miss something? Let me know!
Demoted, Deleted, and Denied: There’s More Than Just Shadowbanning on Instagram
The Markup found that Instagram is removing content about Israel and Palestine:
"Our investigation found that Instagram heavily demoted nongraphic images of war, deleted captions and hid comments without notification, erratically suppressed hashtags, and denied users the option to appeal when the company removed their comments, including ones about Israel and Palestine, as “spam.”"
"[...] As TechCrunch has detailed, the platform’s moderation system seems to disproportionately suppress Palestinian users. The Markup found a few accusations of supporters of Israel feeling suppressed, but did not identify more sweeping evidence through our reporting or testing."
When these platforms become large enough to be a de facto public square, as Instagram, Facebook, and X certainly are, their moderation policies disproportionately affect public perception. It's one reason why I prefer open protocols like the fediverse, with smaller communities that each can have different moderation policies, which in aggregate offer greater choice.
As reported here, people who want to shed light on the perspectives and lived experiences of people on one side of a conflict wind up using euphemisms instead of the names of a people in order to avoid getting their content banned or deleted. That's not the kind of information source that sits at the heart of a healthy, democratic culture. #Technology
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Nazis mingle openly at CPAC, spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories and finding allies
"In one of the most viral moments from this year’s conference, conservative personality Jack Posobiec called for the end of democracy and a more explicitly Christian-focused government. While Posobiec later said his statements were partly satire, many CPAC attendees embraced his and others’ invocations of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection." Believe them. #Democracy
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RTO doesn’t improve company value, but does make employees miserable: Study
"Overall, the analysis found that RTO mandates did not improve a firm's financial metrics, but they did decrease employee satisfaction."
The finding is unsurprising, but good to have data. It goes on:
"Specifically, after an RTO mandate, employees' ratings significantly declined on overall job satisfaction, work-life balance, senior management, and corporate culture. But their ratings of factors unrelated to RTO did not change, indicating that the RTO mandate was driving dissatisfaction." #Business
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What Happens to Your Sensitive Data When a Data Broker Goes Bankrupt?
"The prospect of this data, including Near’s collection of location data from sensitive locations such as abortion clinics, being sold off in bankruptcy has raised alarms in Congress." As it should - although, of course, fire sales are not the only way this data gets sold and transferred.
When a business goes under, its assets are usually put on the market, either to a sole acquirer or piecemeal. For a data broker, those assets include personal information for potentially millions of people.
The only real way to stop this is to prevent it from having been gathered in the first place. Putting controls on data transfers in a fire sale is good, but preventing it from being aggregated and centralized is better. Otherwise, inevitably, it will be misused at some point during its life. #Technology
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European human rights court says no to weakened encryption
"The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that laws requiring crippled encryption and extensive data retention violate the European Convention on Human Rights."
This renders some of the EU's own proposed legislation illegal. More importantly, client-side scanning and backdoors become illegal in themselves, making it harder for vendors from anywhere to include those features, lest they fall foul of the law with EU users. #Technology
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US newspaper circulation 2023: Top 25 titles fall 14%
Print newspaper subscriptions of the top 25 titles continues to steeply fall. But digital subscriptions are up. Newspaper is just a technology; the journalism it carries continues to be valuable.
One concern is how to maintain accessibility: a print newspaper can be read by anyone with access to the physical object once it's been bought, while a digital subscription can generally only be accessed by its owner. How can we best ensure that the most possible people get access to in-depth journalism that's relevant to them? #Media
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New York Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger: “Our industry needs to think bigger”
I'm pretty critical of the NYT's coverage these days - I wish they'd do much better on trans issues and on being more critical on America's involvement in global conflicts - but this is a fascinating, illuminating interview.
It's honestly very refreshing to see news organizations pull back and think carefully about forging their own future, in a way that partners with tech platforms but isn't beholden to them.
Two pull quotes:
"I’d say that our industry is still thinking too small, and I think that’s fair: we've been absolutely battered for 20 years. But I think our industry needs to think bigger. [...] I don’t think that our industry can or should accept that we are going to collectively be smaller than an eighth-grade streamer."
"We are going to meet our readers first off-platform. But we now know [tech companies] are powerful companies. They dominate the flow of traffic and engagement in the digital world. You need to be on them, and to find ways to partner with them, but your interests are not aligned. You should be clear-eyed on that, treat this as a professional partnership and make sure it meets clearly articulated standards." #Media
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Updating GOV.UK’s crown
A glimpse into a surprising design problem created by constitutional monarchy: the need to update the crown in your logo when a new King has taken the throne.
"On each accession, the monarch will choose a Royal Cypher, or symbol to represent their personal authority. You can see the Royal Cypher in many places, for example post boxes, on police and military uniforms or on the side of official buildings."
The longer I've been away from the UK, the more surreal this kind of thing has become. I will say, though, that the new crown looks a little less like a loaf of bread that's collapsed in the oven, so there's something a bit pleasing about that. #Technology
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