Will Oremus
@WillOremus
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writing about tech and its discontents for the @washingtonpost . focused on AI, algorithms, social media, and platforms. dm for signal.
Joined June 2010
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OK obviously I’m late to this but how wild is it that Insider contacted Elon for comment yesterday morning, and by yesterday afternoon he was publicly announcing that he’s become a Republican and to expect politically motivated “dirty tricks” from the left in retribution?
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Big day for the “free speech” crowd on here suddenly embracing the idea that online speech can lead stochastically to real-world violence, justifying the imposition of centralized content moderation.
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Antisemitic tweets have more than doubled since Elon Musk took over, a new study finds.
Asked for comment, Twitter's press department auto-responded with a poop emoji.
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If you'd asked a climate scientist a decade or two ago to speculate on what the climate crisis might look like in the US by 2021, "116 degrees in Portland, 9-month fire seasons in CA, and buildings collapsing on the Miami coast" would have been the *alarmist* answer.
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The meta-story behind the Elon Musk / Twitter saga is that the new tech barons have become so wealthy and powerful that entire companies/ markets/ industries/ news cycles hang on their every word and whim, no matter how unhinged or bizarre.
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Here's the first official communication from Twitter's new leadership to its staff, a week after Musk took over: a fun game where you get to find out if you're laid off or not based by 9am tomorrow, based on whether the email pops up in your Twitter account or personal account.
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Elon Musk has now publicly agreed with and amplified criticisms from the right of two individual Twitter employees today— one accusing its top policy exec of “censorship” and the other accusing a company lawyer of facilitating fraud.
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Sen. Blumenthal, stern-faced, asked Facebook's Antigone Davis, "Will you commit to ending Finsta?"
Davis explained that it's slang for a fake account--not an official Instagram product or service.
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VC Marc Andreessen has railed against cities like San Francisco for failing to build more housing.
But when his own hyper-rich, manicured SF suburb proposed a zoning change to allow a small number of multifamily homes, Andreessen and his wife wrote this.
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so i wrote about how facebook's "horizon worlds" vr app is overrun with young kids and a potential playground for child predators but uhh i have to say i did not consider that the predators might include facebook's own head of global community development
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“secret group” and “without overview” are very funny ways to describe a group of decision-makers at a company that included the CEO, CTO, general counsel, and head of trust and safety.
BREAKING: Twitter Files released by Elon Musk, Matt Taibbi & Bari Weiss, have suggested that a secret group headed by Vijaya Gadde, the Head of Legal, Yoel Roth, the Head of Trust, CEOs Jack Dorsey & Parag, & others, made decisions secretly & without overview to moderate Twitter.
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Late to this but the funniest part to me is that Elon Musk, who owns and fully controls Twitter and has fired over half the staff, apparently had no idea up until this moment that his top remaining lawyer was Jim Baker? And somehow that’s supposed to be Baker’s fault?
I can’t quite believe what I’m reading so let’s go slow.
The FBI’s former attorney was hired by previous Twitter management, and was the one vetting the files to be given to
@bariweiss
&
@mtaibbi
that might reveal FBI collusion…and new owner
@elonmusk
wasn’t told any of this???
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If you're looking for "how has Elon Musk changed Twitter" in a nutshell...
Prominent anti-trans accounts have gone from being suspended under Twitter's "hateful conduct" policy to getting free promotion at the top of the Notifications feed for people who don't even follow them.
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We've been led to believe that the toilet paper outages are the result of hoarders and panic-buyers cramming their closets with Charmin.
I talked to some toilet-paper insiders (really) and it turns out that is probably mostly wrong!
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Conservative op-ed columnists' obsession with campus politics makes more sense when you realize that their whole career has been a response to the undergraduate trauma of finding their cherished childhood views scorned and mocked in freshman humanities seminars.
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The scope of the Wisconsin Foxconn swindle is just astounding. Trump, Foxconn, & the Wisconsin GOP upended people's lives and pushed them out of their homes, not to mention spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, for a fake factory motivated by political gain.
President Trump struck a deal with Foxconn that promised to turn Wisconsin into a tech manufacturing powerhouse in exchange for billions in tax subsidies. Three years later, the factory — and the jobs — don’t exist, and they probably never will
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Imagine getting up and going to work in the morning for a company whose new owner is systematically attacking your colleagues for his 84 million followers, in public, on the site you work for—and knowing you might be next. This is the worst-case scenario Twitter employees feared.
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If you use Giphy, you need to read this story about all the data it collects when you use its gifs. With today's acquisition, all of that data will become Facebook's.
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All politics aside, the current US administration is run by just awful people. The kind of people that every parent tries their damnedest to teach their kids not to be.
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Facebook secretly weighted reaction emojis, including "angry," as 5x the value of "likes"--over the integrity team's warnings.
We wrote about the obscure, often arbitrary, human decisions that shape Facebook's algorithm and how we all interact online:
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Test-drove a Tesla Model 3 today. It's truly inspiring the amount of human ingenuity and innovation that went into making something as simple as driving a sedan so complicated that you need a full tutorial on things like how to adjust the mirrors or open the glovebox
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Maybe just a coincidence though. According to Musk, the real reason is, uhh… *checks notes*
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I wrote about the Facebook circle of life:
- Build problematic systems
- Research their flaws and find serious problems
- Bury the findings to avoid bad press
- Get even worse press when the findings are leaked
- Change nothing
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show me you’re in america without telling me you’re in america
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The trust-and-safety crowd should welcome this epiphany imo. “Yes! You’re so right! Now just imagine caring about the safety of marginalized people as much as you care about the safety of billionaires who own private jets and you’ll have the whole idea!”
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Asked for examples of sexual harassment at law schools, ChatGPT named a GW prof accused of touching a student on a class trip to Alaska, citing a WashPost story.
The prof is real. The rest was made up.
We wrote about what happens when AIs lie about you:
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I know I'm late to this, but the reason Amazon's HQ2 was a farce is not just that they picked two cities. It's that they raised the hopes of cities across the country that could really use an infusion of economic vitality, then picked the two that need it least of all.
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@NaomiNixWrites
There's no such thing as a "nice" layoff but worth noting Zuck addressed his staff directly, took responsibility, offered 16+ weeks' severance, immigration help, & a chance to speak w/ someone directly.
Twitter's layoff memo was unsigned and offered close to the legal minimum.
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A Tesla employee who worshipped Musk died in a fiery crash on a road trip in which he relied heavily on Tesla's "full self-driving" system. Tesla never publicly acknowledged his death and quickly replaced him. His widow says she now feels like "we were just guinea pigs."
A
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I was apprehensive about Obama taking on "disinfo" but he's starting off on a solid, nuanced note: framing social media as accelerating existing cultural divides, some of which is an inevitable byproduct of a connected world and some the result of specific decisions & biz models.
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This was a classic moment of cluelessness from a Senator, but also, the fact that some senators are clueless about how social media works seems a poor reason to keep the status quo of laissez-faire regulation.
Zuck scored points w/ "Senator, we run ads" in 2018 yet here we are.
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he can't believe this website is free
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When the Fox News host interviewing the president has to double as his PR handler to keep him on message, that's called "fair and balanced"
Trump starts comparing police shootings to golfers missing putts, but Laura Ingraham cuts him off because she realizes how bad it sounds
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Inside Elon Musk's "free speech" Twitter, a culture of secrecy and fear has taken hold. Managers and employees have been muzzled, Slack channels have gone dark, and workers are turning to anonymous gossip apps to find out basic info about their jobs.
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The Washington Post went ahead and published its prewritten George H.W. Bush obit without reading it first, I guess.
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No offense to the many intelligent people who work at Facebook, but this notion among Facebook employees that they are "the smartest people in the world" is absolutely ridiculous, and probably a big part of the company's problems.
Woof. intense qutestion from FB employee:
"“Why are the smartest people in the world focused on contorting and twisting our policies to avoid antagonizing trump?”
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Trump is right about one thing: His popular vote loss matters. It emboldens the opposition, because they know they're not outnumbered.
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when my editor asks where my draft is
The CIA has attempted to collect us. We are at sea now and will report more soon. I will continue to be dark for the next few days.
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New: YouTube told me a wildly racist Steven Crowder segment mocking Black farmers didn't violate its hate speech policy.
I wrote about what that says about YouTube's hate speech policy, and its place in the media ecosystem.
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@faizsays
Oh, fun detail about the layoff email to Twitter employees today. Not only is it unsigned (the signature just says "Twitter"), but the "To" and "From" lines of the email both just say "team (All Full Time Employees)." No one in leadership attached their name in any way.
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My son got mad at me this morning for unknown reasons and told me to “go away,” then to “get out of town,” and finally to “go to Philadelphia,” which I guess is the sickest burn his 3-year-old mind could conjure.
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Holy shit. Facebook just *got smaller,* probably for the first time in its history.
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Musk’s first ex-wife Justine, in 2010, reflecting on early “warning signs” in their marriage
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Anyway, I look forward to Blumenthal's office aggressively investigating Updog and holding its perpetrators accountable.
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Found a job! I'm extremely excited to be joining the
@washingtonpost
's hard-hitting tech team, whose work I've been admiring for years, as a news analysis writer. I start June 21.
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Since taking over a week ago, Musk has not even officially told his new staff that he is in charge. Or that he fired their CEO and other top leaders. Staff have to follow his tweets to learn about major changes in company direction. "We're all working for the Trump White House."
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I wrote about how coronavirus could reshape society, long after the quarantines are over.
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Purely from an antitrust standpoint, it seems notable that Facebook is this confident that its customers have zero leverage and no alternative but to keep buying its ads.
Mark Zuckerberg recently told Facebook employees he expects boycotting advertisers to “be back on the platform soon enough," and that he won't change policies “because of a threat to a small percent of our revenue, or to any percent of our revenue.”
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Google confirms the global Internet is being attacked by sharks:
http://t.co/jOpiAqxluJ
http://t.co/WCo8mbMRlC
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Facebook paid a GOP consulting firm to run a smear campaign against TikTok, portraying it as harmful to teens. The firm fed stories to local news outlets that blamed TikTok for bogus viral trends like the "Slap a Teacher TikTok challenge."
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this story from 2010 obviously doesn’t bear directly on musk’s guilt or innocence of the allegations in question but sure makes for some interesting context ht
@beccalew
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There are some mildly interesting details in here but presenting it as some new and shocking and secret finding is either ignorant or disingenuous. There have been whole news cycles about Twitter shadowbans. I know because I’ve written about them multiple times over the years.
THREAD: THE TWITTER FILES PART TWO.
TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS.
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yeah because the newspaper stops to check whether they’re true
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this is the most fun thing i have seen on the web in a while
remember when the web seemed like it was full of fun things like this?
and maybe it still is but we've just been too inundated by all the more hellish aspects to enjoy it
sigh
anyway...
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“You’ll never use that philosophy degree,” they said, but today on the internet someone grossly mischaracterized Immanuel Kant and I chortled derisively to myself
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One thing I appreciate about FB whistleblower Frances Haugen is that her background is in designing algorithms.
Congressional scrutiny of social media until now has focused heavily on speech policy and "censorship." Haugen refocuses the conversation around the platform's design.
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If you consistently find that the best minds of your generation are working on pointless or even societally corrosive projects, consider that maybe they aren't the best minds after all
I unironically miss when the best minds of my generation were thinking about how to show people better ads.
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A man suffered a pulmonary embolism at the wheel—and his Tesla drove him to the hospital.
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The fight playing out now is over whether people like Musk have any accountability at all for their actions, and can be held to any laws or norms or processes, or whether they have near-total impunity because they can simply buy out any institution that stands in their way.
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Musk’s initial public response to the story is not a denial
The attacks against me should be viewed through a political lens – this is their standard (despicable) playbook – but nothing will deter me from fighting for a good future and your right to free speech
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Stop calling everything "fake news." If the president-elect lies, that's not fake news. It's a lie.
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if i were a person who was famous for selling cars that don't exist yet i would probably pick a different example
u can’t sell houses u don’t own
u can’t sell cars u don’t own
but
u *can* sell stock u don’t own!?
this is bs – shorting is a scam
legal only for vestigial reasons
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Since Facebook rebranded to Meta, tech and the media have started talking about "the metaverse" as if it's a real thing that already exists. Here's my friendly reminder that it isn't, and doesn't, and won't anytime soon.
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.
@TomiLahren
Did I hear correctly that you're volunteering to go to Syria to stand up and fight for faith, family, and freedom?
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Pressed by CNN's
@ErinBurnett
, Jerry Falwell Jr. says he would vote for Trump even if he has a record of sexual assault.
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You don't hear a lot about Pinterest's algorithm spreading lies and breaking democracy. I wrote about how the company has sacrificed virality and left some potential growth on the table to keep it that way—and why it's harder than you might think.
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so all this time the first-grade teacher thought the kids were absorbed in their computers bc they were so intent on learning to read, it turns out they were busy learning a very different 21st-century skill: how to game a dumb algorithm and grind for digital goods
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To be clear, Twitter employees were told *last night* they had to be in the office a minimum of 40+ hours per week starting *this morning.* Many do not live anywhere near a physical Twitter office, thanks to the firm's previous "work-from-anywhere" policy.
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Remember all those technical glitches that caused Twitter to keep crashing around the new year, and also took down Musk’s Twitter Spaces with Ron DeSantis? Here’s what actually happened, according to
@WalterIsaacson
’s new book:
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@FastCompany
Ooh this is fun, can I try? "Two ex-LinkedIners want to make family dinners and picnics obsolete."
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Rep. Pramila Jayapal is absolutely eviscerating Mark Zuckerberg—asking him whether he threatened competitors, then after he denies it, reading out loud the transcripts of chats in which he did just that.
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Facebook's first attempt at the "metaverse" — the social VR app Horizon Worlds — is supposedly limited to ages 18+.
Instead, it's teeming with little kids, who are running around chatting with adult strangers with zero safeguards or supervision. My story:
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My 4yo is just starting to learn to read. I asked him what this sign says.
“It says... Netflix!”
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From the moment you slide into in the driver's seat of the futuristic Tesla Model 3, it's clear that a team of brilliant engineers and designers has reimagined every aspect of the automobile from the ground up with one singular goal in mind: How can we make this shit *confusing*
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Top story on
@washingtonpost
this a.m.: Most trans adults say transitioning made them more satisfied.
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ah yes, welcome ad-industry people to this fun game where a rich guy tweets the single most cliche critique of your entire field as if it's his own devastating insight that no one else has thought of before, and then you get to try to explain as he bombards you with poo emojis
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@BullCycles
i follow 3,557 people, many of them for work purposes. putting someone's subcription product at the top of my notifications feed because one (1) person i follow subcribed to them is, well let's just say it's a choice. for all i know it could have been elon himself
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Remember when Zuckerberg had a secret meeting with Trump and neither one will say what they talked about?
Probably just a coincidence but now Trump is banning Facebook's biggest threat just as Facebook releases its copycat product.
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@MattZeitlin
ok but by this logic 50 degrees should be a perfectly comfortable average day instead of a day that makes you agonize over whether you need a coat or just a hoodie
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CONGRESS [angrily]: You've got a lot to answer for, Facebook!
BACEFOOK [wearing fake mustache and VR headset]: Who?
Surprise: Facebook is planning to change its company name next week to reflect its focus on the metaverse.
I’m told Zuckerberg is planning a formal unveil next Thursday at Connect, the company’s annual AR/VR conference
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Donald Trump's new Twitter background is a photo from Obama's inauguration.
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the sudden terror of realizing law enforcement can go after rich white people too
"If they can do it to Trump" is on heavy rotation.
Think about it: the implication is that he's somehow above the law.
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What we heard from
@jack
this morning is what we should be hearing from the CEO of every major Internet platform.
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One of Amazon’s bestselling products is the AmazonBasics AA battery.
Amazon won’t say where it’s made, how, or by whom. But
@SarahNEmerson
tracked its life cycle, starting in Indonesia, and found its environmental footprint shocking. Great story:
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This is news: Zuckerberg just announced Facebook will follow Twitter in putting warning labels on posts by public figures that violate its rules but are deemed "newsworthy" enough to remain on the platform.
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@NaomiNixWrites
Remarkable that we now have a social media exec who makes Mark Zuckerberg look like a paragon of empathy but here we are
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