Business, Spoken

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Facebook’s New Content Moderation Tools Put Posts in Context Jul 10, 2019

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Facebook has begun pilot tests of new content moderation tools and policies after an external audit raised numerous issues with the company’s current approach to tackling hate speech.

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'Mirror Worlds' Creator Wants to Displace Facebook—With Blockchain Jul 09, 2019

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David Gelernter’s giant macaw, Ike, has taken a tumble. One moment he was there, offering agreeable squawks as Gelernter spoke, and then, in a flash of lightning, he wasn’t. Ike is fine, the 64-year-old Yale computer scientist assures me, simply stunned. “Luckily he’s as light as a bird. So he can fall great lengths and it doesn’t bother him,” he says.

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Health Brands Hims and Hers Flout Facebook’s Rules on Drug Ads Jul 05, 2019

Show notes

On television and radio, the ads are fairly innocuous: “Hey guy,” a female narrator says playfully in one TV spot for Hims, a men’s wellness brand that sells prescription drugs to treat erectile dysfunction, oral herpes, social anxiety, hair loss, and other conditions. “Hi there. Welcome to Hims.” The ad invites viewers to “get ED treatment started for only $5,” next to a close-up of a young man pressing a white pill seductively to his lips.

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Twitter Will Quarantine Politicians’ Tweets If They Violate Rules—Finally Jul 03, 2019

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The next time a public official, politician, or a certain president violates Twitter’s rules, the company says users will notice. The offending tweet will either be removed from the platform entirely, or quarantined behind a new gray interstitial that warns users that it ran afoul of the platform’s content guidelines and limits its reach.

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The One Free Press Coalition Spotlights Journalists Under Attack Jul 03, 2019

Show notes

In May 2019, WIRED joined the One Free Press Coalition, a united group of pre-eminent editors and publishers using their global reach and social platforms to spotlight journalists under attack worldwide. Today, the coalition is issuing the fifth monthly “10 Most Urgent” list of journalists whose press freedoms are being suppressed or whose cases are seeking justice.

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Surprise! Huawei Can Actually Innovate—and Win Fans Jul 02, 2019

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Huawei doesn’t leap to mind as an innovative company. In the US, the Chinese telecom giant is best-known for the government’s national security concerns---and allegations that it stole intellectual property from companies like Cisco and Motorola. Yet Huawei was the fifth-biggest research and development spender in the world in 2017, according to a European Union report. Its €11.3 billion ($12.9 billion) R&D spend that year outpaced Intel (€10.9 billion), Apple (€9.

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Greed Is to Blame for the Radicalization of Social Media Jul 02, 2019

Show notes

Last week, Reddit quarantined "r/The_Donald," a pro-Trump message board, after the company determined that the subgroup had encouraged and threatened violence. Likewise, Twitter is signaling that it will flag—but not remove—posts by government officials who violate its rules. As with YouTube’s demonetization (rather than deletion) of anti-gay videos, these are welcome, but insufficient measures.

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Big Data Supercharged Gerrymandering. It Could Help Stop It, Too Jul 01, 2019

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The Supreme Court’s conservative justices ruled Thursday that the highest court doesn’t have the power to address partisan gerrymandering, the practice in which politicians redraw district maps to help their own party win more elections. In two cases, Lamone v. Benisek and Rucho v. Common Cause, the court split along ideological lines 5 to 4. Chief Justice John G.

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The Cypherpunks Tapping Bitcoin via Ham Radio Jun 28, 2019

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Every six hours, at his home in the high desert outside Kingman, Arizona, midway between Phoenix and Las Vegas, Brian Goss downloads the latest blocks from the bitcoin blockchain via satellite. He receives the transmission through a dish he installed this January; it arrives with messages, too---tweets, blogs, odes to Satoshi---sent by bitcoiners around the world. Goss rebroadcasts them from a radio device perched on his roof, in case the neighbors care to tune in.

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Wayfair Employees Are Walking Out. Here's Why Jun 27, 2019

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A group of workers at the ecommerce company Wayfair staged a walkout in Boston Wednesday afternoon, to protest the company’s sale of furniture to a government contractor that manages detention centers amid an ongoing humanitarian crisis at the southern border. The walkout is taking place in Copley Square, near Wayfair’s headquarters.

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