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Up until two weeks ago, Facebook was a place where QAnon conspiracy groups flourished, aided by its recommendation algorithms; where you could pay to promote anti-vaccine misinformation; where Holocaust denial was treated as a legitimate political opinion; and where conservative news outlets were known to get a pass on rule enforcement to avoid upsetting the right.
As of today, none of those things are true. A series of dramatic policy reversals by the dominant social network, followed by an aggressive crackdown on a dubious New York Post story alleging corruption by the Biden family, amount to a transformation in the company’s official posture toward online speech (if not the underlying dynamics that make it such a potent vector for misinformation). One year after Mark Zuckerberg delivered a full-throated defense of free speech at Georgetown University, emphatically rejecting calls to broaden restrictions on what views Facebook users can express, his company has done just that. …
OneZero’s General Intelligence is a roundup of the most important artificial intelligence and facial recognition news of the week.
Like every big tech company, Apple is in dire need of A.I. programmers. These algorithms serve as a foundation for everything from processing photos to make them look brighter and sharper to powering Siri to maybe even driving that Apple car.
So, in 2016, the company hired a well-known Carnegie Mellon professor named Ruslan Salakhutdinov to lead its A.I. division and, in a surprising move by the typically tight-lipped company, launched a research blog to publish some of its own work.
Apple makes some of its work public because the backbone of the A.I. …
Over at Future Human, our senior staff writer Emily Mullin writes that a crop of new biotech companies have sprung up to provide better alternatives to breastfeeding. While infant formula, which is based on animal milk, has been around for decades, it differs from human breast milk in many ways. Harnessing advances in biotech, researchers are finding ways to create milk that’s as close as possible to the real thing. Companies are finding ways to synthesize humanlike nutrients, “grow” breast milk in the lab, and even use it to deliver medication.
The advances are cool, but they don’t address the core issue: that new mothers in the United States don’t get enough time off work to spend with their babies. As one expert told Emily, “Even as these new and improved baby formulas are developed, people who want to breastfeed must feel supported.”
Read more below:
On Wednesday, Facebook and Twitter faced their first major test of the 2020 election. The New York Post published a story with illicitly obtained emails from Hunter Biden’s hard drive, obtained in the most sketchy of methods: Rudy Giuliani shared the material after a computer repairman gave it to his lawyer. Steve Bannon had tipped off the Post to its existence.
The story made questionable claims about Biden and his father based on improperly obtained documents, and the platforms took action. Facebook almost immediately decreased its distribution. Twitter blocked the link. And then conservatives went ballistic.
“The most powerful monopolies in American history tried to hijack American democracy by censoring the news & controlling the expression of Americans,” said Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, distilling the wave of criticism into a tweet. …
At the height of summer last year, Sophie received an Instagram DM on her phone from an account she didn’t follow. …
OneZero is partnering with the Big Technology Podcast from Alex Kantrowitz to bring readers exclusive access to interview transcripts with notable figures in and around the tech industry.
This week, Kantrowitz sits down with Ben Smith, the Media Equation columnist at the New York Times and former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
To subscribe to the podcast and hear the interview for yourself, you can check it out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Overcast.
As the Media Equation columnist at the New York Times, Ben Smith is covering an industry going through transformation and turbulence. And as the former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News — a place I worked until this June — he lived that change while managing a newsroom of reporters who lived online in a VC funded media company. …
A story in the New York Post Wednesday morning guaranteed a wild day in both Washington and the nation’s newsrooms. These days, that tends to make for a chaotic day in the executive offices of Silicon Valley-based social networks, too. But the chaos unfolds in slightly different ways at Facebook and Twitter.
The story, which revolved around supposedly incriminating emails found on a laptop that may or may not have belonged to Hunter Biden, tested the internet platforms’ misinformation policies at the most critical time. Facebook responded first. It left the story up but limited the speed at which it could spread while awaiting a verdict from its fact-checking partners. …
Pinterest is the latest platform to enact a moderation policy specifically geared at QAnon, the far-right cult that began as an online conspiracy theory. On Wednesday, a spokesperson for Pinterest told Insider that it will “proactively look for and remove content related to QAnon, in addition to taking action on content reported to us.”
As OneZero previously reported, Pinterest’s strategy for limiting the reach of problematic material stops at its search engine filter, which acts as a semi-porous wall for hiding such content, without always removing it. …
The near-total shutdown of air travel during the coronavirus pandemic could have been an existential crisis for Clear, a company best known for ferrying travelers to the front of the airport security line.
But despite massive downturns in the number of people flying, the coronavirus pandemic only had a temporary impact on Clear’s airport business, according to revenue documents obtained by OneZero from airports around the country. And at the same time, Clear has set its eyes on expansion in other areas like health and biometric payments, as OneZero reported on Tuesday.
These documents also detail how the company treated its own frontline workers, promising that their jobs would not be lost and paying for health insurance even while some workers were asked to go on temporary leave. …
Earlier this year, OneZero senior editor Sarah Kessler talked to independent sellers about how they operate on Amazon’s “artisanal” Handmade platform. They revealed that it’s a major challenge: Amazon does little to support them, and their bespoke offerings are forced to compete against mass-produced items sold by large manufacturers.
All of this came to mind on the occasion of Amazon’s Prime Day event, which actually stretches across two days this year. The Raven Book Store, a shop in Lawrence, Kansas, and the publisher of How to Resist Amazon and Why, took aim at the company’s promotional material — which touts the Handmade program — with a barbed tweet: “Support small businesses on Prime Day by shopping at small businesses, not Amazon.”
Read Kessler’s full story here:
