TikTok executives proposed giving the Biden administration control over its U.S. operations and a kill switch if things went south. The Biden administration declined, forfeiting potential influence over one of the world’s most popular apps in favor of shutting it down. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/05/29/tiktok-cfius-proposal-rejected/

The 25 most-cited news organizations in the U.S. lost 75% of their total user engagement on Facebook and 58% of interactions on Instagram between 2022 and 2024. "Where will people go for this information? Or will they just go without?" https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/21/social-media-trump-biden-politics-instagram-facebook/

NYC's AI weapon scanners produce 85% false positives

Hell Gate

NYC Has Tried AI Weapons Scanners Before. The Result: Tons of False Positives - Hell Gate

Mayor Eric Adams announced his intention to put weapons scanners on the subway system, but a 2022 pilot at a NYC hospital showed that the technolog...

"Maybe the most significant effect of that Russian op was to give American elites what Kevin Baker calls 'psy-op brain' -- the belief that any online political expression with which they are uncomfortable must be the product of a foreign psychological operation. ... Israel, portrayed badly? Gotta be a psy-op!"

Four unpersuasive arguments against TikTok

The TikTok ban, the de-professionalization of MrBeast, and what happens in the sequels to Dune

Facebook made a UI tweak to bring back the "Poke" button, and found that use of Pokes went up 13x -- mostly among users 18-29, who had probably never even used Poke the first time around

Business Insider

Facebook is reviving one of its earliest features after hiding it for years

Meta says Facebook Pokes surged after it quietly resurfaced the Poke button. And more than half of new Pokes are coming from users ages 18 to 29, t...

I sat down with Chaya Raichik of LibsofTikTok to talk about Nex's death, her role in Oklahoma politics, her beliefs on gender, the great replacement theory, sex education, her false accusations against the Uvalde shooter, why she and Seth Dillon cut ties and more: Read my latest story on her impact in Oklahoma: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/02/24/libs-tiktok-oklahoma-nonbinary-teen-death/

Mainstreaming Covid denialism/Covid denialists is now leading to the mainstreaming of full on AIDS denialism. This is what happens when the media and public boost Covid denying conspiracy theorists

VICE

Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein Promote AIDS Denialism to an Audience of Millions

Weinstein repeated discredited theories to Rogan about HIV not being the cause of AIDS, alarming and infuriating public health experts.

Chicago-area Tesla charging stations are lined with dead cars and have essentially turned into car graveyards as temperatures have dropped to the negative double digits: “A bunch of dead robots out here” https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chicago-area-tesla-charging-stations-024817227.html

Screenshotting this post 👇🏻 in order to quote post it! I don’t know where people get the idea that quote posting = dunks, personally I feel that that opinion is just Twitter brain. Every major social platform from Tumblr, to Facebook, to LinkedIn and more has the ability to natively quote post. This is because the primary use of such a feature is to amplify information w added context or to open a new line of discussion. Replies are used far more often for harassment but we don’t ban replies!

"Why do we Palestinians have to film our own country getting bombed and our own people getting killed, just for the world to watch silently?” asked Plestia Alaqad, a 22-year-old freelance journalist whose Instagram account has 4.6 million followers

TIME

Inside the Israel-Hamas Information War

Horrific scenes from Oct. 7 and the attack on Gaza fuel a global fight for public opinion.

“Meta’s policies and practices have been silencing voices in support of Palestine and Palestinian human rights on Instagram and Facebook in a wave of heightened censorship on social media”

Human Rights Watch

Meta’s Broken Promises

The 51-page report, “Meta’s Broken Promises: Systemic Censorship of Palestine Content on Instagram and Facebook,” documents a pattern of undu...

The IDF operates a Telegram channel called "72 Virgins – Uncensored" that posts sadistic images of Israelis murdering Palestinians & mutilating their bodies: “Burning their mothers…exterminating the cockroaches” Videos show Israelis rampaging through a hospital hunting for more Palestinians to kill https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2023-12-12/ty-article/.premium/graphic-videos-and-incitement-how-the-idf-is-misleading-israelis-on-telegram/0000018c-5ab5-df2f-adac-febd01c30000

Zero women in this list https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/03/technology/ai-key-figures.html

Why would a company put ads billboards when they could advertise with a sticker on the bottom of my shoe?

“Pinochet’s torture chambers were the maternity ward of neoliberalism, a baby delivered bloody and screaming by Henry Kissinger.”

Henry Kissinger, War Criminal, Dead at 100

Henry Kissinger has died at age 100, his consulting firm said in a statement on Wednesday.