Olivia Solon
@oliviasolon
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Tech journalist at Bloomberg. Tips: osolon2 @bloomberg .net (no press releases) Signal: oliviasolon.13 Mail: 3 Queen Victoria Street, London, EC4N 5AA
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Joined April 2010
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A surgeon removed my left kidney last week.
It could have been saved if doctors had taken my complaints of stabbing flank pain + history of UTIs more seriously.
But, as studies have shown, women’s pain isn’t taken as seriously as men’s.
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Wearing an item of clothing twice does not give you “eco credentials”
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My husband’s ingenious idea: a screensaver for cutting back on cellphone use
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FB India is currently censoring posts calling for the resignation of the Prime Minister
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Google funded a lawsuit (now dropped) to prevent journalists from finding out that the company uses 29% of an Oregon city's water to cool its data centers
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Journalists: what's the most absurd follow-up call you've received from a PR after the publication of an article? Mine was the time IBM called up to try to convince me that the Nazis weren't all that bad before 1939
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Elon Musk has decimated the specialist global team dedicated to tackling child sexual exploitation, leaving behind an overwhelmed skeleton crew.
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Had it been taken more seriously sooner, the kidney could have been surgically unblocked and very likely saved.
Thankfully I am recovering well and my other kidney is cleaning my blood just fine, but it’s still incredibly frustrating.
Take women’s pain more seriously.
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I like how Silicon Valley has rebranded "skipping breakfast" as "intermittent fasting"
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1. Cardiologist alleges White Helmets faked photos because EEG pads are misplaced: 12,000 retweets
2. Cardiologist admits he was mistaken & the EEG pads are placed correctly: 22 retweets
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TED sponsor Facebook claimed
@carolecadwalla
's TED talk contained “factual inaccuracies” & demanded to see her script. What factual inaccuracies, we both wondered. “Let’s see what they come back with in the morning,” she said. Spoiler: they never did.
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Hipster whines at tech mag for using his pic to imply hipsters look the same, discovers pic was of an entirely different hipster
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It is extraordinary how society tolerates the much larger risk of blood clots in women taking the contraceptive pill but not the very small risk from Covid vaccines
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Wondering how many tech workers have realized, in the absence of all the perks and corporate coddling they get on campus, that their company’s mission is meaningless
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This was just after a doc told me my pain was probably “residual irritation” from a UTI and before another excellent doctor decided to send me for the scan that identified the problem
If men got UTIs as often as women I swear doctors would take them a hell of a lot more seriously
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For years I’ve told doctors I thought my intermittent was kidney-related.
I was repeatedly told it was probably trapped wind, ovulation pain or residual irritation from a UTI.
In fact, my kidney was blocked & over years became swollen to the point where it was nonfunctional.
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It's striking that
@jack
hasn't tweeted anything about what's going on, even if to offer platitudes to former colleagues.
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NBC has obtained thousands of pages of leaked internal documents show that Facebook wasn’t just spitballing about selling access to user data - the plans had buy-in among Zuck, Sandberg and were pitched to the board of directors
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NEW: Under Facebook's own rules, high-profile accounts get their reach and advertising restricted if they have two misinformation "strikes" within 90 days.
Leaked internal documents show FB repeatedly bent these rules for conservative partners
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Something many sources within tech companies aren't aware of is that they have a legal right (under the National Labor Relations Act) to talk to journalists about their working conditions. That right isn't removed by an NDA.
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Earlier this year IBM released a dataset of 1 million photos of people's faces designed to reduce bias in facial recognition software. I was surprised that the pictures were taken from Flickr & so investigated the origins of facial recognition datasets
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NEW: Contracted call center workers for tech companies including Apple, Amazon and Uber were pressured to consent to intrusive surveillance in their homes, including consenting to their children being filmed
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NEW: Palantir planned to buy its way in to the NHS by acquiring small companies on the condition they used Palantir’s Foundry data-mining software
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To add:
- No I’m not going to sue. People make mistakes and it’s not clear who I would sue anyway as I saw several docs
- We need digital portable medical records. Mine are all over the place
- I wish I had advocated for myself better but I started to believe it was gas pain
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Palantir launched a paid influencer marketing campaign to counter criticism of its £330m deal with the NHS.
Influencers were instructed not to mention Palantir in their posts - but one of them ratted the company out to
@GoodLawProject
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NEW: Female journalists and activists say they had their private photos shared on social media by governments seeking to intimidate and silence them
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“Here’s how to have a productive meltdown” is the most hilariously WSJ thing
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Instagram is using one of my most "engaging" posts to advertise its service to others on Facebook 😂
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I find the implication that mosquitos adhere to US border policy so diligently a little hard to swallow
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LinkedIn is flooded with posts from thinkfluencers outlining, with hackneyed military metaphors, what startup CEOs can learn from Zelensky and it’s 😬😬😬
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I cannot think of any field with a lower qualification threshold than "royal expert"
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Shit's going down in the world of bridge
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Some personal news:
After 3.5 years working on tech investigations at
@nbcnews
I am leaving to take up a role in Bloomberg’s London-based tech team. I can’t wait to get started.
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Bloody hell. 600 law enforcement agencies have been quietly using a face recognition app that has scraped 3bn images from YouTube, Facebook, Venmo and other sites -
@kashhill
's latest
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Workers at Activision Blizzard are staging a walkout today to demand better working conditions for women and other marginalized groups & to protest the company's dismissive response to sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuit
#actiblizzardwalkout
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Surveillance capitalism’s new normal: lure unsuspecting consumers to give you their photos with warm and fuzzy branding & then use those photos without informed consent to train face recognition tech you market to police and military
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In your months of reporting did you stumble across the fact that the Guardian, Propublica and Motherboard had published most of this material already?
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The same person also tried to argue that it was unfair to call IBM's business dealings with the Nazis "shameful". He preferred the word "disappointing"
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Zuck: "Facebook doesn't influence elections"
Facebook sales team: "We got
@SenToomey
re-elected"
(via
@AlanYuhas
)
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NEW: For several weeks I've been talking to FB employees and ex-employees who say that efforts to study and address racial bias on the platform have for years been ignored, slow-walked and, in some cases, suppressed
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Here’s an investigation I’ve been working on for a while. It’s about a face recognition startup that is putting Microsoft’s public claims about ‘ethical AI’ to the test
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The tech industry's conflation of "want" with "are more likely to click on" is the root of so many of its problems
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Microsoft told residents in North Holland that its data centre would only use 12 to 20 million litres water a year.
A Dutch newspaper has discovered it used 84 million liters of water in 2021.
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While Facebook refused to touch Trump's posts to protect free speech it's culled dozens of accounts of activists and journalists outside of the US
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The second best conversation was an Amazon policy comms person trying to argue that Amazon is not a technology company
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My fav moment is at the very end where he turns around and thanks the horses
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Update from Facebook on this: "We temporarily blocked this hashtag by mistake, not because the Indian government asked us to, and have since restored it.”
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My husband got a new phone number and has been receiving a fascinating glimpse into the life of the previous owner, "Emma," whose friends are texting to congratulate her on her new baby and asking where to buy molly in Tahoe.
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Having spent a long time going through the leaked FB docs it’s clear pockets of FB are painfully aware of how its platform can harm people. It has also conducted countless experiments to try to mitigate those harms.
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Researchers from Berkeley and the University of Copenhagen estimate that close to 40% of multinational profits (close to $1 trillion in 2019) are shifted to tax havens each year
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The best stories are coming to my DMs from the poor PRs whose clients made them call up journalists with crazy requests
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Wow. Per this analysis, 30% of a Google dataset intended to categorize emotions in comments (for training AI) mislabeled.
This is likely due to Google outsourcing the data-labelling work to non native US English speakers:
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First time I have seen such a striking prerequisite in a journalism job ad
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I just used a VPN to check and this is still active. Outside of India, most posts using this hashtag are about the censorship
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I spoke to people who were frustrated to see that Musk is getting credit for the takedown of some hashtags associated with child sexual abuse -- a move that had been in the works for months
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conversation with the claims department of my health insurer going well
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Unintended consequence of schools closing and everyone sheltering in place: flute rage
Cc.
@bestofnextdoor
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BRB, intermittent fasting my way to home ownership
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"Facebook blunders its way through the world like a giant, uncoordinated toddler that repeatedly soils its diaper and then wonders where the stench is coming from"
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This builds on
@WIRED
's reporting that it has just one staff member focused on this issue in Asia.
The teams in Ireland and the US are also heavily affected.
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@jessesingal
haha. sure, sure.
The more Idris Elba I can absorb through my eyeballs, the better
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....and here come the “actually the Nazis were OK before 1939” tweets
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The NHS said it's investigating whether Palantir breached the terms of its £330 million contract to build a data platform by running a PR campaign about it without the health service's prior consent
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*In relation to this article
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I am not at CES but can't wait to hear about the internet-connected tampon that's going to leak your personal data in new and horrifying ways
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It's official!
NEW:
@oliviasolon
has joined
@NBCNews
’ Business, Media & Tech Unit as editor of tech investigations based in San Francisco.
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an awful lot of VCs are using this pandemic to innovate in the self-own space
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@KalhanR
WHAT? OK, I have questions. Does the rat come up from the sewer or fall into the bowl from your apartment?
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"Palantir said it must hide the number of women and people of color it employs so competitors won’t 'steal' them" 😂
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It's striking to see how Facebook appears to be cracking down on -- or ignoring -- research that reflects badly on the platform.
Internally it has ignored hate speech & disinfo research & hobbled CrowdTangle.
& now it's shutting down external researchers' access to FB data.
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Leaked internal Facebook posts sees employees ask "are we the baddies?"
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US-based hate groups, including white nationalists, anti-LGBTQ+ groups and militia are using mainstream tech platforms such as Stripe, Facebook fundraisers, Amazon and PayPal to raise funds -- even when those companies have policies against hate groups
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Facebook already excludes certain hashtags associated with misinformation (eg
#adrenochrome
) from search results.
There's a possibility this hashtag was excluded in error, but given the company's history in India it doesn't look great.
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NEW: The number of charges filed with the National Labor Relations Board accusing Amazon of interfering with workers’ right to organize more than tripled during the pandemic
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The division of Trust & Safety focused on child sexual exploitation was already massively overstretched, and worked very long hours to crack down on CSAM, grooming and other abusive behaviors.
Musk claims child safety is a priority for Twitter.
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Instagram head
@mosseri
just announced Facebook is stopping work on Instagram Kids
It's something child safety groups have been demanding for months
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NEW: Water-guzzling data centers are becoming even thirstier with the rise of generative AI — exacerbating tensions in the communities where they are located
With
@clarahenz
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has anyone outside the diet pages of magazines been satisfied by eating a single square of dark chocolate as a treat?
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Some researchers who found signs of racial bias in the automated content review systems at Facebook and Instagram presented their work to the management team & they were told to immediately stop all research into race and not to share it with co-workers
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Police are increasingly turning to cars' infotainment systems to destroy suspects' alibis
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There is a special place in hell for people who don’t remove their trays from the conveyor belt at airport security and stack them
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"Carl Stewart, 39, was identified through his fingerprints after police analysed the image [of a piece of cheese] he posted in an online chat."
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