Thoughts and links on the intersection between media and technology
“What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.”
– Philip Larkin, “Days”
from Whitsun Weddings. Copyright © Estate of Philip Larkin
Thanks to a novel coronavirus that I’m sure many of you have heard of, we haven’t been able to make our annual pilgrimage to Italy for two years now. Obviously, other people have had much bigger problems, so I don’t want anyone to cry me a river because I haven’t been able to go to Italy (which is like a duke complaining that the Black Plague has made it difficult to go stag hunting). But I have definitely missed it a lot. So this year, we decided to throw caution to the winds and head to Perugia for the journalism conference we’ve been going to since about 2012. We’ll take N95 masks and be really cautious, we thought. 🙂 We wound up getting COVID, of course, but luckily it was relatively mild (click the photos for a larger version).
A big part of the reason we wanted to go — apart from seeing all of our international friends again, and enjoying Perugia’s ancient Etruscan architecture and amazing food — was to take a break after the conference and head south to Puglia, to stay at a BnB run by the daughter of our Italian friend Anna, a trip that we had all booked in 2020 before the conference was cancelled and everyone went into lockdown. So we dusted off our passports and luggage and flew off to Italy — after getting a COVID test first, since we had to connect in Washington, and the US still required a negative test to enter.
Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer. On Monday April 25, Twitter accepted Musk’s $44 billion takeover offer
On April 4, Elon Musk filed a notice with the Securities and Exchange Commission stating that he had acquired enough shares in Twitter to give him a 9.2 percent stake in the company (“Oh hi lol,” he tweeted.) What followed was a somewhat bewildering series of announcements. Musk’s initial filing implied that he likely wouldn’t be an activist investor or push to join the company’s board, but that filing was later amended, at which point Twitter said he was joining the board (Musk also filed his documents late, which some said enabled him to acquire shares more cheaply). Then, just as suddenly, Twitter said Musk wouldn’t be joining the board after all. This led to rumors that he might be planning to acquire the company, and on April 14, Musk sent a letter to Twitter and filed a statement with the SEC detailing his plans to do exactly that.
The hostile nature of Musk’s bid soon became obvious, when Twitter filed a shareholders’ rights plan, often called a “poison pill.” Under the terms of the plan, if anyone acquires more than 15 percent of Twitter’s shares without the approval of the board, other shareholders will be allowed to purchase more shares at a discount. Musk responded by taking to the platform itself in an attempt to win support for his bid, asking users whether shareholders should decide on his takeover offer rather than the board (close to three million people voted, with almost 84 percent agreeing that shareholders should be able to choose.) Yesterday, Musk put even more money where his mouth is, by telling the SEC he has $46.5 billion in financing lined up for his bid, and that he is considering a tender offer that would be open to all Twitter shareholders.
In classic Musk fashion, all of these machinations have been accompanied by a series of joking tweets, in what appears to be an attempt to troll either the board or all of Twitter, or both. On the same day he filed a statement that he owned nine percent of the company, Musk polled his followers to see if anyone wanted Twitter to add an edit button; almost 4.5 million people answered, with about 74 percent of them saying they did (Twitter said it was already working on an edit function). On April 7, when it still appeared that he might join Twitter’s board, Musk posted a photo of himself smoking marijuana during an interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast, with the caption: “Twitter’s next board meeting is going to be lit.” On April 9, he posted a list of celebrity users he said hadn’t posted any tweets in months, and asked: “Is Twitter dying?”
Continue reading “Elon Musk puts his money where his mouth is”Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer
On Tuesday, the New York Times named a new executive editor. A.G. Sulzberger, the newspaper’s publisher (the fourth member of the Sulzberger family to hold that title) said Joseph F. Kahn has been given the role, and will replace Dean Baquet, who held the position for eight years. Kahn, 57, is a former international and managing editor of the paper, and also a Pulitzer Prize-winning former China correspondent. He starts his new job in June. A profile in New York magazine describes Kahn as “the ultimate inside man” at the Times, someone for whom being named to the top job was almost a foregone conclusion. But some believe his status as a long-time company man could make it difficult for him to navigate the political and cultural challenges the paper faces.
Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, wrote in a piece about Kahn’s appointment that the choice of a new executive editor has drawn even more scrutiny than it usually would, because “the residue of the Trump years, and fears that the former president will return for another campaign, have put the Times in the bull’s-eye of the journalistic debates over objectivity and both-sides coverage.” In picking Kahn, Pope argues that the paper has sent a clear message that it “has no plans to rethink its approach.” Sulzberger tried to describe the paper’s approach to its coverage of Trump and other related topics in 2018, saying: “We won’t be baited into becoming ‘the opposition.’ And we won’t be applauded into becoming ‘the opposition.'”
What those within the paper see as a commitment to independence is seen by some outside the Times as a failure to address reality. Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU, wrote in 2018 that some “want Times journalists to see what they see—an assault on democratic institutions, the corruption of the American Republic.” Inside the Times, however, Rosen says these kinds of people “are perceived as a threat.” The paper’s piece on Kahn’s appointment says the Times is “grappling with shifting views about the role of independent journalism in a society divided by harsh debates over political ideology and cultural identity.” But Rosen said this should read: “The Times is struggling with a model of political coverage that assumes a rough symmetry between the two parties at a time when one of the two has turned anti-democratic.”
Continue reading “New editor at the Times faces the same old questions”
Andy Baio, who has been blogging under the name “Waxpancake” for the past couple of decades or so, writes about meeting with Ghyslain Raza, who gained internet fame — none of which he wanted — as the “Star Wars Kid” in 2003, after some students at his school uploaded a video clip of him pretending to be a Star Wars character in a light-sabre battle.
Baio talks about his role in helping the video go viral — one of the first to do so — and how bad he felt about the whole affair once he realized how Raza had been ridiculed (he left his school and eventually ended up in therapy, and more or less stopped using the internet for years).
I’ve never talked about it publicly, but I regret ever posting it. From the start, it was obvious it was never meant to be seen, and mirroring it on my site without consent was wrong in a way that I couldn’t see when I was in my 20s, one year into blogging. I removed the videos once it was clear how it was affecting him, but I never should have posted them in the first place.
Meeting Ghyslain gave me the opportunity to tell him all of that in person, as well as in my interviews, some of which made it into the finished film.As a side note, it was fascinating to get answers to questions I’ve wondered about for 20 years. Yes, Ghyslain actually received the iPod we sent him from the fundraiser, and used the gift cards we sent him to buy an iMac G4, both of which he kept to this day. He managed to avoid most of the remixes and media coverage, except for Arrested Development, which he watched live as it aired.
But more than anything, it was great to finally talk to him in person and see that he’s doing well. By all accounts, he handled everything that happened back then with a profound emotional maturity, despite how painful it was, and emerged on the other side with a uniquely interesting perspective that’s worth listening to.
Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer
On March 10, a Reuters headline announced that Facebook would temporarily allow users to post calls for the death of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, and also “calls for violence against Russians” (Reuters later modified its headline to clarify that only posts calling for “violence against invading Russians” would be allowed under the new rules). These kinds of posts would normally fall into what Meta calls “T1 violent speech,” which is automatically removed, without exception. A few days later, Nick Clegg, head of global affairs for Meta, the parent company of Facebook, said the new rules would not allow users to call for the death of Putin or Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus. Clegg also said that calling for violence against Russians would only be allowed for users in Ukraine, and only when “the context is the Russian invasion.”
Ryan Mac, Mike Isaac, and Sheera Frenkel pointed out in a New York Times story on Wednesday that the rules about allowing calls for violence against Putin and Lukashenko were actually changed on February 26, two days after Russian troops first entered Ukraine, according to documents that the newspaper had access to. “After reports suggesting the policy reversal would allow users to call for violence against all Russians—which Russian authorities called “extremist”—Meta reversed itself,” the Times reported. According to an internal memo seen by Bloomberg, Clegg told staff “circumstances in Ukraine are fast moving. We try to think through all the consequences, and we keep our guidance under constant review because the context is always evolving.”
Allowing users to post calls for violence isn’t the only example of normally forbidden content that platforms like Facebook now allow because there is a war in Ukraine. As Will Oremus noted in a Washington Post piece, if you posted content praising a neo-Nazi militia before the Russian army invaded Ukraine, Facebook would probably have blocked your post, or even suspended your account. But not now: the company changed the rules so that supporters of Ukraine could post about that country’s Azov battalion, a unit of the Ukrainian army that has a history of being associated with neo-Nazis (which has helped fuel Putin’s claim that his aim is to de-Nazify Ukraine).
Continue reading “War in Ukraine is the latest platform moderation challenge”Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer
On Tuesday, Mark Schoofs, the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, told staff that he and two other senior editors—Tom Namako, deputy editor-in-chief, and Ariel Kaminer, the executive editor of the investigations unit—are leaving the company, and the news division is being downsized via buyouts and/or layoffs, with most of the reductions coming in investigations, science, politics, and inequality. Schoofs said that BuzzFeed, the parent company, had “subsidized BuzzFeed News for many years,” and that the newsroom needed to “accelerate the timeline to profitability.” Jonah Peretti, CEO of BuzzFeed, said in a separate staff email that jobs would also be lost on the video team and the editorial team at Complex Networks, a company BuzzFeed acquired last year just after going public via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company or SPAC. Peretti said the newsroom needed to “prioritize the areas of coverage our audience connects with the most.”
During an all-hands meeting on Tuesday, following the resignations of Schoofs and the two other top editors, Peretti talked about leadership changes and said BuzzFeed was looking at “the addition of a dedicated business development group,” Laura Wagner of Defector reported. However, Peretti left the meeting abruptly and took no questions from staff, which seemed to irritate more than a few of those present. Julia Reinstein, a senior reporter at BuzzFeed News, said on Twitter: “I have worked at this company for nearly 7 years and I’ve never felt so disrespected than seeing my CEO log off without answering a single question about why he wants to gut my newsroom.” A staffer who was at the all-hands meeting described the atmosphere as “acrimonious.”
The cuts announced on Tuesday are nothing new for BuzzFeed. Last year, the company laid off 70 employees, including 47 HuffPost staffers based in the US, as part of what Peretti said was an attempt to “drive longterm sustainability” (BuzzFeed acquired HuffPost from Verizon in 2020). In 2019, BuzzFeed laid off more than 200 reporters, editors, and other editorial staff, including entire teams and large chunks of its international bureaus in the UK and Australia. Some wondered whether Facebook had helped cause the reductions by changing its news recommendation algorithms. But as I wrote for CJR then: “If the giant social network is partly to blame, it is mostly because editors at BuzzFeed yoked themselves so tightly to Facebook’s wagon, even after the Zuckerberg empire provided ample evidence it would move the goalposts at a moment’s notice.”
Continue reading “BuzzFeed and the demands of being public”
Sometime in his adolescence, in the 700s, Lu Yu, an aspiring writer and professional clown, had his first taste of tea soup. This probably occurred not far from Lu’s childhood home: a Buddhist monastery that overlooked a scenic lake in Central China. But Lu was unimpressed; he called the soup “ditch water.”
What bothered Lu was not the tea, but all the other ingredients. The offending brew contained scallions, ginger, jujube dates, citrus peels, Dogwood berries, and mint, all of which cooks “threshed” together to make a smooth paste. The result was a chunky soup, or even a sauce.
Lu Yu, in fact, adored tea—he’d go on to become the “tea god” and the world’s greatest tea influencer. But the tea he loved—brewed only from powdered tea leaves, without any other flavoring—was, in the grand sweep of human history, a recent invention. People in Asia, where tea trees are native, ate tea leaves for centuries, perhaps even millennia, before ever thinking to drink it. And it is Lu Yu who is chiefly responsible for making tea drinking the norm for most people around the world.
via Atlas Obscura
Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer
As soldiers and civilians in Ukraine continue to resist an invasion by Russian troops. a very different kind of war is being fought on a separate front: namely, the internet. Within hours of Russian troops attacking cities and government facilities in Ukraine, hackers—including some who claimed to be affiliated with the underground group known as Anonymous—went after a number of Russian government sites and systems. Some of these cyber-attacks appeared to be designed just to cause annoyance, while others were aimed at shutting down the Russian government’s operational abilities, or revealing what military intelligence officials in Russia might know. Along with the hacking of computer systems, the battle has also seen attempts by Russia to hack information networks, by using propaganda and misinformation on social and traditional media.
Some of the cyber-hacking attempts are from random vigilantes trying to have some impact on the broader conflict, but some were invited by the Ukrainian government itself. Messages started to appear on a variety of hacker forums starting Thursday morning asking for volunteers to protect critical infrastructure and conduct cyber missions against Russia, according to a report from Reuters. “Ukrainian cybercommunity! It’s time to get involved in the cyber defense of our country,” the posts read, asking hackers to apply via Google docs. Yegor Aushev, co-founder of a cybersecurity company in Kyiv, told Reuters he was asked to write the post by a senior Defense Ministry official.
Groups of pro-Ukrainian hackers have also come together to launch a variety of attacks on Russian infrastructure and command-and-control systems, Politico reported. And a group of “hacktivists” based in Belarus who are opposed to Russia’s invasion, known as the Belarusian Cyber Partisans, said they have created a tactical organization to help Ukraine’s military fight against Russia. The group claimed in January that it had encrypted parts of the computer systems used by the state railway in Belarus, in an attempt to slow down the movement of troops by rail, since the government in Belarus is friendly towards Russia and attacks on Ukraine might begin there (which they did).
Continue reading “Ukraine, Russia, hacking, and misinformation”Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer
Within days of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol building, most of the leading social networks—including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube—had banned Donald Trump from their platforms, since they said he used his social accounts to amplify the anti-democratic conspiracy theories that led to the attack, and to cheer on the right-wing groups that planned it. In March, a spokesman said Trump would be launching his own social network very soon: “We’re going to see President Trump returning to social media in probably about two or three months, with his own platform,” Jason Miller, a Trump advisor, told Fox News. Miller said the service was going to be big, and that Trump was “gonna bring tens of millions of people to this new platform.”
Two or three months came and went, but no Trump-led social network launched. When Trump launched a blog in May of last year, there was some speculation that maybe it was the social app Miller and others were talking about, but they said it was not (the blog was unceremoniously shut down in June due to low traffic numbers). When Gettr, a Twitter-like network aimed at right-wing users, launched in August of last year, some thought it was the new Trump-led social network, since Miller was at the helm of it. But it was not. In October, Trump announced that he would be launching his new social app—to be called Truth Social—in November, and that it would be part of a media conglomerate called Trump Media & Technology Group, which he planned to create by merging with a special-purpose acquisition company or SPAC.
Trump Social didn’t launch in November, or December, or January. Finally, this week, the new network actually launched—but it wasn’t the kind of debut some were expecting, given that the Trump team had been working on it for a year. The service opened Monday, but was “almost entirely inaccessible in the first days of its grand debut because of technical glitches, a 13-hour outage and a 300,000-person waitlist,” the Washington Post reported. Even some Trump supporters made jokes about the teething pains of the new service: Jenna Ellis, a former member of Trump’s legal team, posted a photo to Instagram showing Trump sitting at a desk with his finger hovering over a laptop, which Ellis said was the former president “letting us on to Truth Social one at a time.”
Continue reading “Trump’s long-delayed social network off to rocky start”