Jeff Bercovici
@jeffbercovici
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Following
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Managing editor @sfstandard . Journalist and author. Otherwise mostly dad hobbies. FAQ: burr-KOH-veh-see
Berkeley, CA
Joined July 2009
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アイスの日
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自動車税
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Saka
• 45619 Tweets
Guinea
• 44722 Tweets
VISA
• 39553 Tweets
#素のまんま
• 31961 Tweets
Caramelo
• 30317 Tweets
LOREAL PARIS X ML
• 28983 Tweets
#モニタリング
• 27722 Tweets
Rodri
• 25159 Tweets
Foden
• 17986 Tweets
rock 'n' roll
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ブレマイ
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#Masterplan_BF_20M
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Saliba
• 13623 Tweets
#THE夜会
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Isak
• 11395 Tweets
Last Seen Profiles
Boy you’d think a country that can equip every cop like a soldier could equip every doctor like a doctor
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Less than 24 hours after Elon pretended a swastika is an incitement to violence to make Kanye go away, Matt Taibbi is dropping the bombshell that Twitter execs make ad hoc content rulings to solve awkward political problems. Groundbreaking stuff.
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Seems like an apt moment to note it was invasion of privacy grounds that Peter Thiel, Musk's longtime colleague and increasingly his ideological ally, used to kill Gawker. That's the playbook.
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Let me get this straight: Elon Musk thought the Twitter algorithm needed to be more transparent. So now he has changed the algorithm to promote accounts that pay him while letting them hide whether or not they are paying him.
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hot take that's probably true: Peter Thiel finally relinquishing his Facebook board seat suggests he thinks Facebook's influence over politics and culture is on the wane for good
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starting to think the olds torpedoing Bernie wasn't just about Biden's electibility
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How did Bari Weiss become a member of Elon Musk's inner circle? We'll never know.
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A bunch of VCs begged Elon Musk to let them be part of the Twitter turnaround and now they're reduced to personally hawking Twitter subscriptions like they're Mary Kay products
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You don't see a lot of independent centrists playing the RINO card
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So sad and predictable to see the anti-tech media once again taking down hardworking crypto entrepreneurs for the “crime” of being successful, and money laundering
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Getting super mad that airports give people with diabetes a place to toss their used syringes, to show I am a Serious Person
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Inflation is everywhere you look these days -- except on a can of
@DrinkAriZona
Iced Tea, which still advertises "Great Buy! 99¢" as it has ever since 1992. How is this possible?
@SamAugustDean
investigates the greatest mystery in business.
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Listen up: I used to be poor like you. Then I tried...
...folding my arms
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Subscribe to the LA Times! We have furloughed reporters who would love to go back to endangering themselves full-time covering police brutality protests, covid-19 and way more.
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guess we know why the body panels on Teslas never quite fit together right
i dont know what is happening here but uhhhh 3 inches is not 5 centimeters?
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Whenever a New York Times reporter describes something as a shotgun you can be like 98% certain it’s a rifle
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A few thoughts on BAYC & Buzzfeed. The backlash isn’t surprising but it betrays deep ignorance about the function of journalism and an entitled belief that crypto must be covered on its own terms.
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@MattZeitlin
"what if you did a genre story but everyone talked like Chandler Bing" was an important formal innovation
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When Amazon went on a hiring spree in March, Harry Sentoso took a warehouse job to sock away some extra cash for retirement. He worked nine days before COVID-19 killed him.
@samaugustdean
has his story.
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Remember a few years ago when Thiel wrote a thing saying democracy was bad, and everyone was like “that’s crazy, who could be against democracy?” And now it’s the official stance of the Republican Party. You can’t say the guy doesn’t get results
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This assertion by Marc Andreessen probably deserved a follow-up question
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There are basically 2 things normies use Twitter for: keeping up with news/sports and following celebrities. Musk is harassing the biggest news outlets (NYT, NPR, Guardian) and chivvying the biggest celebs/athletes (LeBron, Mahomes) into curtailing their activity. Genius shit.
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Facebook researchers find Instagram makes teenage girls feel bad about their bodies & contemplate suicide.
Zuckerberg is briefed on the research.
Senators ask Zuckerberg if Facebook has research on Instagram & teens.
Zuck says research shows "positive mental health benefits."
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"I don’t want to do what the bread guys and the gas guys and everybody else are doing," Don Vultaggio, the 70-year-old, 6-foot-8 founder and chairman of AriZona said. "Consumers don’t need another price increase from a guy like me."
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This is huge. It would appear Judd solved the mystery of how the Daily Wire is so improbably popular on Facebook and showed Facebook won't enforce its own very clear rules if it means taking on a prominent conservative whom Mark Zuckerberg has dined with.
1. How is The Daily Wire, the toxic right-wing site founded by pundit Ben Shapiro, more successful on Facebook than any other major publication?
It breaks the rules.
And Facebook is going to continue to let them do it.
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AriZona keeps things lean, with a minimal marketing budget and just 1,500 employees. Don Vultaggio runs the company with his large adult sons, Wesley and Spencer. This is them.
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Nowhere does this story mention a major reason no one died: because the shooter was using a handgun, not an assault rifle. In other mass shootings people shot in the arms and legs have died because assault rifle bullets are so much more destructive.
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This is extraordinary. To threaten journalists with punishment for leaking while asking them to solicit leaks from sources is an awkward straddle. That's why serious news organizations almost never undertake them.
Scoop: The New York Times is conducting a leak investigation—a rare move for the paper—following The Intercept's report on a yet-to-air episode of The Daily addressing claims of sexual violence committed by Hamas on Oct 7.
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That a celebrity as big as Aaron Rodgers could say something this deranged to a CNN reporter and she sat on it for over a decade shows why the world needed something like Gawker. One can only imagine how many times she dined out on this anecdote.
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"Travel agents and industry experts say bookings for cruise sailings in 2021 are up considerably compared with pre-coronavirus data."
A few questions:
Why
Why
Why
Why
Why
Why
Why
Why
Why
Why
Why
Why
Why
What the hell
Why
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The Bloomberg campaign broke the rules with its paid social media blitz, says Twitter. It just suspended 70 accounts, some belonging to campaign employees who were copy-pasting messages. Scoop from
@suhaunah
and me.
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I call major bullshit on this.
@samaugustdean
also found the identities of the Bored Ape founders (yeah,
@katienotopoulos
scooped us). It took him one hour of work. Are we to think “very, very dangerous” criminals couldn’t have done the same?
“Releasing their identities…was very, very dangerous for them and their families.”
@nicolemuniz
, CEO of
@yugalabs
, the company behind
@BoredApeYC
speaks about anonymity and accountability after the founders' identities were revealed.
Join Us:
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"Zoom did not respond to a request for comment."
When the company doesn't even try to spin it, you know it's bad.
Scoop: Zoom has closed the account of a group of prominent U.S.-based Chinese activists after they held a Zoom event commemorating the 31st anniversary of the June 4 Tiananmen Square Massacre.
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The odds of being killed by a tiger in your own home are actually higher than in the jungle (if you live with a tiger)
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The author of Time's cover story about the metaverse is a venture capitalist who invests in the metaverse. That's how journalism works.
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@daweiner
I Am Generally Against Killing Half The Universe, But Now I Think We Should Kill Half The Universe, by Thanos
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Hey man, don't blame us, blame Congress. For some reason they just keep writing laws stuffing more money in the pockets of companies like ours. It's weird.
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If I were a famous writer who wanted to portray myself as a free speech martyr, I’d wait more than 10 days after quitting my job to unlock new achievements in public racism and make my former employer look impossibly indulgent
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Piloting tiny robots into someone's brain to attack tumors used to be a science fiction trope. An LA startup expects to be doing it in humans within 2 years, reports
@SamAugustDean
.
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As this was explained to me, Hollywood agencies don't care about Twitter because mostly their clients make no money there. 10% of zero is zero. Plus a client's tweets can lose them jobs.
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The job of journalists is to bring information about powerful entities and public figures into public view. That’s it. There is no requirement that the subjects want that information made public (they often don't!) or that they be guilty of wrongdoing.
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A lawsuit filed against Snap Inc. this morning by the mother of a bullied teen who died by suicide could open a new legal front on social media companies.
@SamAugustDean
has the story.
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the conflicts/tensions stuff is valid but not new. this guy rode out disclosures that he hangs out with white nationalists, funds a literal slavery advocate who's also his pal, etc. - all while FB was supposedly in the thrall of woke employees. his grip on that seat was iron
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I wrote about Sweetgreen and the massive challenge of environmentally-friendly waste disposal. Brace for thread.
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just an independent centrist who believes Democrats should compromise and cross the aisle and Republicans should close ranks and stand their ground
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If you’re mad about Buzzfeed naming the BAYC founders, your beef is with journalism. This isn’t even a close call. If you’re OK with billionaire lists and locker-room reporting but outraged today because crypto, that’s called special pleading.
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Has lecturing the market about what it should want, vs. making something the market wants, ever worked in history?
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also worth remembering that Thiel personally disdains social media, including Facebook. he was in it this long for the opportunity to exert influence over something that play(s/ed) a huge role in shaping culture and politics
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There are 2 possibilities here:
-Cops can't reasonably be expected to challenge a shooter with a semiautomatic rifle
-The "good guys with guns" can't be depended on to do their jobs
You can argue about which one it is, but either way the implication is an assault rifle ban
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POINT: "We don't have a mission to burn down Wall Street."
COUNTERPOINT: “I would buy magic beans on the street from a stranger if he said they had the potential to ruin a billionaire’s life.”
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"Doctors walk off the job" is obviously sexier framing than "Off-duty doctors do a press conference" so that's the framing that took. Everyone was so busy coming up with a take that confirmed their priors that they didn't bother to ask if it actually happened.
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Jack hearting “Pfizer did this to me” guy does not inspire confidence in twitter’s ability to police vaccine misinformation
why the FUCK am I seeing this propaganda from an account I dont follow and why is ceo of Twitter liking it!!?!!?!!!
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Delivery workers are helping us avoid coronavirus exposure, but they say the companies they work for aren't doing enough to keep them safe. Another example: Just days ago, Amazon was telling drivers to keep 3 feet of distance, not the 6 feet CDC recommends.
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Under Trump, the U.S. highway safety agency was largely asleep at the wheel, nowhere more so than on self-driving. Even automakers are hoping Biden's NHTSA does more, reports
@russ1mitchell
.
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If you've wondering why Instacart workers are mad enough to go on strike, or whether it's ethical to ask them to deliver your groceries during a pandemic, or what they really get paid, this
@JMBooyah
piece is an absolute must-read.
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Anecdotes like this from 2018 make me wonder to what degree Musk’s hard right heel turn grew out of a psychological need to have a ready-made way to dismiss criticisms. Normal people do not find it this upsetting to be challenged.
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Elon Musk's jokes are bad. The
@latimes
assembled a tiger team of humor professionals to help us understand exactly why, comicologically speaking, they suck so hard. Important work from
@_B_Contreras_
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It’s purely a coincidence that Facebook finally banned Trump the day after Democrats took full control of the government, don’t even think about that
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Sad to say I'm included in this layoff, and several members of my incredible team. The talent level of those who are leaving is sky-high, please read on if you want to make LAT's loss your news org's gain.
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If there's one reason AriZona hasn't raised its price in 30 years (!), it's because the company is entirely controlled by Long Island's Vultaggio family. With a combined net worth of over $4 billion, per
@Forbes
, they can afford to take the hit.
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Want a record of every strange car on your block, and all your neighbors' comings and goings too? Advanced license-plate readers are now part of our paranoid suburban lifestyle, reports
@SamAugustDean
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Cristina Balan was an engineer at Tesla with glowing performance reviews. Now she's about to face off against the company's lawyers before the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in what could be a landmark employment law case.
@russ1mitchell
has her story.
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As a journalist I’m pro-leak but there’s no way to understand Elon Musk’s decision to amplify the leak of his future employees’ internal communications except as an act of retaliation for criticizing him
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You ever think about the fact that two of the world's three richest people are building spaceships because they think our planet's going to become uninhabitable?
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just called a farm that's doing a pumpkin patch to see if they're doing pony rides this weekend and was told they're undecided because "we've gotten really negative feedback on the woman who was doing the pony rides and that's all I can say"
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SOME!
PERSONAL!
NEWS!
I've been blown away by how quickly
@sfstandard
has become a force in local news, in a market where that often means national news. So psyched for the opportunity to help build it into my beloved Bay Area's best and most sustainable news source.
Excited to share that
@jeffbercovici
will be joining our fabulous
@sfstandard
team in March as our managing editor. Welcome! We also have some new reporting and editing job postings up at
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It’s kind of funny that Peter Thiel thought Gawker had to die in large part because it was too mean to his peers in tech, and then he killed it, and within a year journalistic scrutiny of the tech industry increased by 10x
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This by
@russ1mitchell
is one of the most important stories I've worked on at
@latimes
. Distracted driving is an epidemic that kills thousands per year. Yet automakers keep finding new ways to encourage drivers to interact with technology behind the wheel.
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SpaceX's giant rocket blasted concrete bits over a 13-mile radius of protected wetlands because the steel launchpad it was developing "wasn't ready in time," said Elon Musk. "In time" meant to launch on 4/20, a weed joke.
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@JMBooyah
The Tenderloin isn't some far-flung neighborhood. It's adjacent to SF's busiest business and tourist districts. The only thing that makes it different from them is the extreme poverty and related social ills of its residents.
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Economists say prices ending in a 9 tend to be more rigid in the face of inflation. Don Vultaggio has his own explanation for why it's so sticky: "It’s been like that since cavemen, the 99-cent price point was exciting then, and it’s exciting today."
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I'm sure these guys value their privacy and don't like having their names out there. Being a public figure is hard sometimes. But saying Buzzfeed's reporting put them in danger is a flat out lie. It makes me think this company needs more scrutiny, not less.
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writer: hey I have this story I want to do but it's kind of a conflict of interest in a way that might destroy our credibility
editor: is it also a complete mess that creepily overidentifies with some kids and sexualizes others?
writer: yep
editor: let's rock
update on the canceled teen: turns out the writer's kid went to the same school
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@oneunderscore__
@JeffThorpe7
perhaps more urgently, why would someone with 27 followers and no pfp pay for twitter blue?
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this story contains maybe my all-time favorite work faux pas anecdote, about a junior ad exec who had to do a pitch in VR, to an audience that included a centaur.
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If I ever murder someone the decor in this Airbnb is why
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@bcmerchant
What if we made a gas station where, instead of having to bother with a pump, they just sprayed a jet of gas at the gas tank hole? I bet eventually a lot of it would get into the tank
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Balan was working on Tesla's interior fittings team when she tried to alert Elon Musk about concerns she had about sketchy contracts and unsafe floor mats. Just a few weeks earlier, Musk had urged employees to come to him with concerns if they saw fit.
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Amazing true fact: "If you could run your car on cans of AriZona Green Tea with Ginseng and Honey" -- and let me say here it's a goddamn crime you can't -- "it would be cheaper than L.A. gas by nearly 40 cents a gallon."
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@Bernstein
what I see now over and over is shows that feel like they were written by writers whose primary experience of life is watching other TV shows. so many writing choices made because that's what would happen next on a TV show. Americans never did that.
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@Jason
People of good faith can disagree about whether something is a doxxing. Happens all the time. Elon’s claim was he would use the 1st Amendment/the law to adjudicate such disagreements. This is very, very far from that.
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TikTok's fate gets all the attention, but Trump's WeChat ban could be far more disruptive to the lives of the Chinese-Americans and Chinese nationals living in the U.S. who use it for basically everything. Great reporting by
@suhaunah
and Taylor Avery.
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Everyone's wielding this walkout as a club to hammer their own agenda. Ron DeSantis is a monster! No, doctors are heartless elites!
The problem is, there was no walkout. No one walked off their jobs. There was just a press conference. My father-in-law was one of the doctors.
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this one's not wrong per se but there are only a handful of news orgs in a position to shoulder new expenses and they already have credibility and reach to spare. certainly more than Twitter can offer. your market timing sucks, bub.
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Young people who have grown up speaking crypto & web3 see money laundering as a new social norm, journalists who don’t understand that will become irrelevant
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One thing this story underscores is what a huge, history-making deal it is that Facebook’s top policy person is a Republican. So many of its key decisions come down to Joel Kaplan going to bat for his team.
"As Trump grew in power, the fear of his wrath pushed Facebook into more deferential behavior toward its growing number of right-leaning users, tilting the balance of news people see on the network, according to the current and former employees."
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There is a straight line from Peter Thiel calling Valleywag/Gawker a terrorist organization rather than a newsroom and Musk doing what he’s doing
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It's good to see Bari Weiss's guest essays (this one by an a16z partner) are as rigorously edited as the stuff she does under her own byline
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@BrandyLJensen
it was an amazing time for writers who had seen lots of movies but never read a book
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Are BAYC’s founders powerful? Yes. Wealth is power. That’s why Forbes and Bloomberg publish lists of ultra-wealthy individuals and families. The people on those lists would often rather keep their wealth a secret. Where’s the outcry when they are named?
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In 2019
@BernieSanders
was the most popular Democratic candidate with donors who work at the biggest tech companies, reports
@SamAugustDean
. His base was also the most diversified between blue- and white-collar tech workers.
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Yes Brooks Barnes cut some journalistic corners in his profile of a Koch heir but in his defense he also has repeatedly quoted the same college friend in his trend stories.
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The only good thing about this story is it’s trending on a day when the tech cognoscenti are once again blathering about how Gawker deserved its fate because it was uniquely bad. Tabloids have always been like this, Gawker was just the one that went after rich tech types
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@pareene
He is supposed to issue daily calls for them to be respectful, and then when they don’t listen, you can talk about how he’s an ineffectual leader. That’s how this works
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When I say we should let incels commit child rape, that's obviously a joke. When someone I don't like says we should eliminate venture capitalists, that's obviously a literal call for murder, and also Nazi.
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“It would be put me in danger if you reported this” is a claim we'll always consider, but it requires proof or at least specificity. Otherwise people would use it all the time to bury stories they don’t want out.
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