Avi Asher-Schapiro
@AASchapiro
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Journalist | covering tech for Thomson Reuters Foundation @TRF | signal: +18313345688
Los Angeles
Joined March 2013
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Pinned Tweet
"We are being threatened by replacement with tools that are not qualified to replace us."
As Hollywood executives muse about replacing animators & visual affects workers with AI, I wrote about the labor unions preparing to fight back:
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It turns out all those big Telehealth startups share a firehouse of customer data with big tech companies - they'll alert Facebook that someone is "bipolar," or share with Google that a customer is experiencing migraines.
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The biggest US hospital chain uses an algorithm to select patients "likely to die," so the they can "discharge them" & claim reductions in their "mortality rate."
Families are being pushed to pull the plug on patients who might recover:
From
@gmorgenson
:
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The FBI got a massive geofence warrant for its Jan 6 investigation, compelling Google to identify 5,723 devices near the capitol that day - the case could set a precedent for how law enforcement leverage location history.
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.
@Variety
should really correct this this. This is not at all what Jonathan Glazer said. It's missing some key words.
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Though few people know this, Twitter had a human rights team staffed by some world class lawyers & human rights thinkers.
Under Musk's leadership, the *entire team* has been cut from the company.
Yesterday was my last day at Twitter: the entire Human Rights team has been cut from the company.
I am enormously proud of the work we did to implement the UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights, to protect those at-risk in global conflicts & crises including Ethiopia,
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It turns out that Coinbase, the largest crypto exchange in the US, is directly selling tools to U.S law enforcement & immigration agencies to help track peoples’ crypto transactions.
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One week ago, Elon Musk eliminated Twitter's entire human rights team.
So..what does that mean for people living in countries where Twitter is under intense pressure to censor its users, or turn over information on them to authoritarian governments?
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NPR's producer in Gaza was not able to find a single person who has been able to avail themselves of the 3 hour "safe passage" the Israeli military said it gave Palestinians to flee on the main road from northern to southern Gaza today.
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At one Amazon delivery hub in California, nearly half of the drivers vomited from heat-related illness in recent weeks.
I wrote about how drivers feel pressured by Amazon's strict metrics to push themselves beyond safe limits during a crazy heatwave
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"Investors say Musk sold about $124 million of dogecoin after Twitter’s logo change led to a 30% price jump"
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BREAKING: Twitter dissolved its Trust & Safety Council.
The group of outside experts consulted on a range of issues, including human rights, harassment, suicide prevention, mental health, child sexual exploitation content.
Here's the deleted page:
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New: Hotels in LA are using staffing apps to replace striking workers—one app automatically penalizes workers who join the picket line.
@UNITEHERE11
has filed an Unfair Labor Practice, calling out what could be an "automated" violation of the labor law
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One weird thing here is that Musk calls Odnoklassniki, an "obscure Russian website that nobody has ever heard of" - an odd thing for someone in the social media business to say about a social media website with hundreds of millions of users.
Musk doubles down on his claims that there's no evidence the Allen, Texas mall shooter had white supremacist beliefs, and that
@bellingcat
"does psy-ops" professionally.
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Bloomberg reports that Twitter no longer has any working content moderators in the "the entire Asia-Pacific region," except one Korean contractor.
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Crypto exchanges like FTX & AAX specifically targeted idealistic Nigerian students to recruit peers to boost trading volume—now that the exchanges are collapsing, some students have had to go into hiding to escape retribution.
My latest with
@BUKAdebayo
:
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As protests erupted in China, pro-govt accounts spammed Twitter, overwhelmed its defenses, & made it harder to find info about protests.
Ex-Twitter workers say the technique was known to them, but that many working on the issue left during the Musk-era.
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Local news is reporting that Michigan State University Fulbright exchange fellow Tariq Thabet was just killed in an Israeli strike in Gaza, alongside his wife & children - he worked with technology & entrepreneurship incubators in the strip.
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This appears to be a video taken from Guatemala 8 years ago - there's a real problem on this site of verified (paid) accounts spreading totally false information
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Dozens of state AGs warned congress in August that Buttigieg's DOT was *not* following up on consumer airline complaints.
Then, Pete went on TV & predicted air travel would improve by the holidays.
Oops!
Good item from
@davidsirota
&
@andrewperezdc
:
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It's kind of unbelievable how easy it is for these companies to bypass federal health privacy laws: they just have a separate entity do the intake forms—the entity that does the treatment, is technically HIPAA-compliant but the data-gathering side can do whatever it wants.
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An NFT project is selling millions of dollars of NFTs to help "guard" land it bought in the Amazon.
But, indigenous people in the area —some of whom cannot read or write—say they're being pressured contracts they don't understand.
Our latest piece:
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Here's my investigation into Fusus, a police surveillance firm that's quietly expanding into smaller towns & suburbs across the US.
Their goal? To give small town cops big-city-style surveillance—including live access to private cameras around town.
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Digital evidence—including a women's online search history about abortion—has already been used by U.S. prosecutors trying to bring pregnancy-related charges against women.
In a post-Roe world, these kinds of digital traces could become even more salient:
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In this long statement on how Twitter (X) is responding to the situation in Israel/Palestine - there's no comment on the proliferation of verified (paid) accounts spreading fabricated & fake images/information.
In the past couple of days, we’ve seen an increase in daily active users on
@X
in the conflict area, plus there have been more than 50 million posts globally focusing on the weekend’s terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas.
As the events continue to unfold rapidly, a cross-company…
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To get a building permit for a commercial property in Rialto, CA you must grant police live-view access to surveillance cameras onsite.
This is made possible by Fusus, a police tech firm that's expanding rapidly across the US.
Here's my investigation:
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For 2 years, FBI agents impersonating ISIS chatted online w/a 16-year old kid w/"brain development issues," encouraging him to send gift cards - in as little as $25 increments—to support terrorism.
After he turned 18, the FBI arrested him.
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For thousands of women wearing surveillance devices on their bodies - immigrants with ankle shackles, & women under court-ordered surveillance—evading abortion-related surveillance is not as easy as deleting a period tracker app.
I wrote about it:
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The Israeli website, "HonestReporting" suggested yesterday that photographers working for major outlets like the AP & Reuters might have had foreknowledge of Hamas Oct 7 attack.
Today, the group's director admits they have no evidence of that.
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Twitter seems to have stopped publishing its "transparency reports."
These were incomplete—but still very useful—breakdowns of the censorship & data demands Twitter receives from governments around the world.
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NYTimes put it's Baghdad bureau chief on leave for...overpaying the locals?
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FWIW, I emailed Facebook & Google to ask them what, if any, steps they'd take to make it tougher for law enforcement agencies to access digital evidence that could implicate a woman in a pregnancy related crime in the future.
Neither company emailed me back.
Digital evidence—including a women's online search history about abortion—has already been used by U.S. prosecutors trying to bring pregnancy-related charges against women.
In a post-Roe world, these kinds of digital traces could become even more salient:
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The craziest thing about this story is that the kid got so spooked he actually tried to turn in his own FBI handlers...to the FBI.
For 2 years, FBI agents impersonating ISIS chatted online w/a 16-year old kid w/"brain development issues," encouraging him to send gift cards - in as little as $25 increments—to support terrorism.
After he turned 18, the FBI arrested him.
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Imagine getting summoned to work at a nursing home by an app-w/no info about the patients you'll be caring for.
When you arrive, you realize...almost everyone else there was also summoned by an app.
I wrote about the Uberization of long term care:
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An NFT project claims its tokens are backed-up by real-world chunks of the Amazon that it bought to protect.
But indigenous people who live in the area say the land is theirs—and they reported the company to Brazilian prosecutors.
Brazilian firm
@nemus_earth
, which sells NFTs it says are linked to physical land in the country's Amazon
#rainforest
, has been asked by Brazilian prosecutors to prove its ownership of the land, which is in territory claimed by
#indigenous
people
#forests
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This month's the 20 year anniversary of the Iraq war—where the US launched a policy of "identity dominance," sucking up millions of Iraqi biometrics.
We spoke to people in Fallujah who had biometrics collected by US soldiers 20 yrs ago when they were kids.
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And then there's content moderation — w/Twitter cutting 90% staff in India, its entire Africa hub, most of its staff in Mexico—how can they identify hate speech & harassment in dozen of languages?
As
@lawyerpants
told me - this stuff isn't cheap...but it can prevent a genocide.
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Though it’s not disclosed in this piece, the author was formerly a consultant for Israeli surveillance firm NSO Group, whose technology has been used by authoritarian governments to spy on journalists, human rights workers, & dissidents.
"[Rashida] Tlaib is not helping anyone’s cause by amplifying activist rhetoric that, to many ears, casually deploys the language of annihilation," Juliette Kayyem writes:
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Hi Nick—I am wondering: has X released any information/data on how you enforce the "Creator Monetization Standards?" We are seeing a lot of verified accounts sharing doctored images out of Israel/Palestine.
How many times has X de-monetized an account for this kind of behavior?
An update on our work following the terrorist attack on Israel.
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Fox News made the decision to transfer raw footage via-open URLs that aren't password protected.
So
@bubbaprog
was able to made public anti-semitic comments Tucker bowdlerized from his Kanye broadcast.
And now the DOJ is going after him for...hacking?
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Nearly 2 weeks into
#TwitterFiles
& all 4 installments deal w/content moderation for US conservatives.
Very curious if the team has access to—& have not disclosed—docs on issues like: Saudi spies infiltrating Twitter, or lawsuits alleging Twitter facilitated child abuse material
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Saudi Arabia ARAMCO & Exxon Mobile co-own a giant plastics plant in Texas that's spewing toxic fumes into the air - last month it reported an "emissions event" releasing 478 pounds of nitrogen oxides, which causes respiratory issues.
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"Is it stupid or is it evil? Sometimes it's hard to tell."
What happens when the crypto industry tries to save the planet—& the Amazon Rainforest—by "revolutionizing" carbon markets?
ICYMI:
@ffctt
& I spent months on this investigation:
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And as an adviser to Uber
Gavin Newsom picks former SEIU leader Laphonza Butler to replace Feinstein.
Butler also worked as a lobbyist for Airbnb
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If you actually read the BI report, it's clear the accusations against Oxman go way beyond "forgetting" quotation marks, or using definitions from Wikipedia.
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In the 20 years since the US launched the war in Iraq, it has deported an estimated hundreds of veterans to Mexico—people who's parents brought them to the U.S. as kids.
I visited Tijuana to meet with veterans who can't come home 20 later.
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A Bay Area start-up that uses AI to erase accents & make call-center workers, & others, sound "whiter" raised a $23 million round earlier this summer.
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Southern California imports 60% of its water, but during an the ongoing storm will only capture 20% of the up to 10 billion gallons of water falling from the sky - because LA's storm water infrastructure is like 100 years old.
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The former chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, former GOP Congresswomen Ileana Ros-Lehtinen now works as a paid lobbyist for a foreign dictatorship.
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Twitter has tens of millions of users in places like Turkey, Saudi, & India where governments use the "law" to censor political speech/journalism online.
Fielding these "legitimate legal" requests is an important part of Twitter's job—and it's not clear Musk grasps that.
By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law.
I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.
If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect.
Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.
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The climate-knives are out for Bitcoin: a new study in Nature, says its climate impact in on par with beef, if measured as a % of market value.
ICYMI, last week Sierra Cluba/Earth Justice slammed bitcoin in a new report:
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Good things there....a video of it:
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I went on
@onthemedia
to chat about how changes Elon Musk's has made on this platform have made it easier to go viral spreading totally made up stuff from Israel/Palestine, contributing to a dangerous "algorithmically driven fog of war."
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In India, Twitter is in the middle of a high-stakes court battle to resist censorship orders from the government— the case is seen as key global precedent on free expression.
We couldn't get anyone at Twitter to confirm that—under Musk—they will continue to fight this key case.
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Whoever owns this mansion in Malibu has hired a private security guard to sit on the beach and tell people they can’t sit on the sand in front of the house-is this legal/has anyone heard of this before?
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Does Bitcoin mining present an existential threat to the future of the planet?
Or, are its critics missing a possible game-changing tech for spurring renewables & balancing grids?
For
#earthday
, I spoke to a range of voices with very strong opinions:
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The portion of temporary staffers working in US nursing homes has 5X-ed over the last 6 years.
And a bunch of VC-backed firms have rushed in to build the "Uber-for-nursing."
I wrote about what it's like to work for one of these platforms:
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Following an investigation I did with
@dsherfinski
last year—which found wildland firefighters routinely denied healthcare for injures on the job—the Biden admin just announced a new policy shift that could make it much easier for firefighters to get care.
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Important story from
@RebeccaJBurns_
that's all the more relevant given the debates over "existential vs. current" AI risk.
There are nearly 100 ongoing civil rights & consumer lawsuits against firms that use AI to predict if someone is a "rental risk."
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What if cops could tap into private cameras around town—& what if they monitored them live, based on the direction of a "predictive" algorithm?
That's already happening in Elizabeth, NJ—& it could be coming to more cities soon.
Here's my investigation:
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Crushing new details from the AP— as always, it’s so crucial to have media that challenge the official police narratives.
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What about activists who use Twitter to organize?
They rely on Twitter to resist calls from governments to unmask their identities or location - the hashtag
#EndSARS
was key to an anti-police violence campaign in Nigeria in 2020.
Is that possible anymore?
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It's here in black & white: a former HHS official on the record saying that the Trump administration made him lie to the New York Times:
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Last summer, I reported that heat waves in CA were making delivering for Amazon a nightmare job—drivers were fainting & barfing from heat.
Now, Amazon drivers announced a union, motivated in large degree by heat-related concerns:
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In which Tucker Carlson—tribune of the working class—enlists his rich & powerful neighbor, Hunter Biden, to intervene & help get Tucker's kid into Georgetown University—even though Biden didn't actually know Tucker's son.
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I just finished this magisterial history of child separation under Trump by
@itscaitlinhd
.
It's incredibly clarifying reporting on a number of fronts—from a media perspective, it reveals a concerted effort by our government to mislead the public.
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Tonight, by a vote of 95-52, New York's Assembly passed a bill that would place a 2 year moratorium on Bitcoin mining that relies on new fossil fuel sources.
It's one of the most high profile victories for environmentalists who're taking on the industry.
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Also, the human rights team was not a pie-in-the-sky thing. They were doing concrete, interesting work i.e. trying to apply international human rights law/Geneva Convention to the company's approach to content moderation in conflict zones:
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First of all, groups working with vulnerable Twitter users — i.e. women facing harassment campaigns, impersonation—say Twitter is already slower to respond.
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I’m in the Inland Empire where residents just learned the land under a local elementary school is being sold to a developer that builds Amazon warehouses.
At a community meeting where local activists are denouncing the move, demanding municipal officials step in.
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Israeli reporter Yuval Abraham, who did path-breaking work on the use of AI in Israel's targeting decisions, says that a mob has come to his home, forcing his family to flee.
A right-wing Israeli mob came to my family’s home yesterday to search for me, threatening close family members who fled to another town in the middle of the night. I am still getting death threats and had to cancel my flight home. This happened after Israeli media and German…
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After Musk’s takeover, Twitter complied with more than 100 block orders from India, including those against journalists, foreign politicians, and the poet Rupi Kaur:
Musk says Tesla to be in India 'as soon as humanly possible' after meeting Modi
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"Executives at the India offices of Netflix & Amazon Prime Video...ask for extensive changes to rework political plots and remove passing references to religion that might offend the Hindu right wing or the BJP."
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We spoke to nearly a dozen Nigerian students recruited in these crypto schemes & got our hands on chats and training documents showing how exchanges employed tactics similar to multi-level-marketing schemes to boost their trading volume.
Youth as young as 19 were brought in.
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Ji Wu is a Chinese magnate who Peruvian authorities say is part of a corruption ring smuggling illegal timber in the Amazon.
He was also a key figure in a "carbon credits," project that saw as many as ~400K credits turned into crypto currency.
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And it's important to recall that Sam Bankman-Fried personally appealed to West African users -
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Then there's the question of censorship (which Elon says he cares a lot about).
Take Turkey, where courts have barraged Twitter with demands to censor tweets from activists like
@cyberrights
.
With all its human rights staff gone will Twitter resist those demands?
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There's a new kind of ad on late-night TV: is your child addicted to social media?
Call this 1-800 number to get a lawyer who can sue Meta, TikTok, & Snapchat.
I wrote about the avalanche of lawsuits launched in the wake of the Frances Haugen leaks.
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We found extorting lending apps thriving in Google's Mexico Play Store — some access contacts lists & threaten to tell borrower's friends they're a "pedophile."
They have millions of downloads & fake-seeming 5-star reviews.
My latest w/
@DianaBaptistaR
:
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Last year, I asked
@cyberrights
—one of the leading Turkish experts on digital censorship, who has himself been targeting w/legal takedowns—how he felt about Musk's tenure.
This was after Musk had canned Twitter's team of human rights lawyers:
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It's interesting that the same PR firm helping coordinate the campaign to discredit Washington Post reporter Louisa Loveluck, also used to represent the NSO Group - the Israeli spyware firm - in its effort to convince the public it respected human rights.
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Kara Swisher gets a lot of credit in mainstream circles for being an unflappable, independent, & tough-minded tech journalist - but
@bigblackjacobin
reviewed her memoir & argues that that image is a self-constructed myth.
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This is a big deal: Twitter is censoring a documentary critical of Modi at the behest of the Indian government— before Musk took over, Twitter had a mixed record on Indian censorship requests, but this seems to be a big indicator of where things are headed
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It's now so so easy for someone to imitate a journalist on here & rack up hundreds of thousands, or even million, of views. Just 4 days ago, this account was mostly posting about cricket in India.
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As ever, if you worked with or on Twitter's human rights team, I'd love to chat with you - on, or off the record.
My signal # is in my bio.
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It's sadly very much on brand for Vice—which raised another $135 million just a year ago—to downsize & lay-off staff at Motherboard, which is the best pound-for-pound tech publication on the internet.
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A16z lead a 2021 $152M round for the makers of crypto game "Axie Infinity," claiming to be "bringing economic freedom to the world."
It caught on among working class Filipinos.
Now the game's economy has collapsed, my colleague
@MariejoRamosINQ
reports.
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Facebook’s surveillance advertising is so deeply enmeshed with the fabric of the internet, that the US government causally put Facebook’s tracking pixels on students aid websites—routing student data back to FB without consent.
The Markup found that code embedded in the website where students fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid was automatically sending the data to Facebook. The data was being collected even if the visitor to the site did not have a FB account.
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Twitter continues to comply w/censorship orders from the Indian government against accounts sharing clips from a BBC documentary critical of Modi: on the left, a legal demand posted today—on the right, the censored Tweets from
@FriedrichPieter
's thread:
Information for the masses which, if digested with empathy, may save the lives of many in days to come.
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"As news bureaus lose contact w/crews & reporters in Gaza, who are independently bearing witness to provide information about developments & the human toll of this war, the world is losing a window into the reality of all sides engaged in this conflict."
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Bill Maher, in the middle or giving a moralizing lecture on how the government was too generous in its covid response, reveals himself to be totally unaware of what Quantative Easing is or that it happened.
Must watch clip of
@krystalball
on how media condemns the poor for getting a tiny bit of cash but ignores the rich getting trillions. Such a horrid double standard that rich people (Bill Maher) have completely wiped billionaire bailouts from their memories
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Why has California's plan to tax millionaires to fund mental health programs not turned out the way boosters said it would?
I learned a lot from this piece
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@SamAdlerBell
"left-ruled" is such a weird way of saying "Democracies where labor parties won election most recently...."
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Now that the exchanges have failed, these young Nigerian students recruited by major foreign exchanges have been left alone to weather the fall-out - some have even been arrested:
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Video from
@HellGateNY
shows NYPD officer ticketing someone for "biking on the sidewalk" who is clearly not biking on the sidewalk, after the person refused to move to allow the cop to illegally park on the sidewalk.
The whole thing caught on camera:
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Here's the Reuters wire version:
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This is a really helpful piece from
@emilymbender
pushing back on the framing & many of the assumptions underlying the big NYT Mag story on GPT-3.
It's essential reading anyone thinking about how we (journalists) cover/frame these kinds of stories.
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It's striking how the current roles of "experts" are rarely disclosed in interviews. John Franchi—featured in a long interview today on NPR—now works for APCO, a lobbying/PR shp that's repped many foreign dictatorships, including Egypt & Saudi
But listeners aren't told that.
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Twitter is making a big move here, throwing signification resources into challenging Indian take-down orders
This fact pattern reveals why Elon Musk's comments about "following the law" on speech issues at Twitter is so woefully incomplete.
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Re-upping:
One week ago, Elon Musk eliminated Twitter's entire human rights team.
So..what does that mean for people living in countries where Twitter is under intense pressure to censor its users, or turn over information on them to authoritarian governments?
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