Author: Mathew Ingram

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).

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.”

At first, it looks as though the woman in this video is opening a small door leading down into a basement, but then she flips up a hidden panel in the floor that reveals steps down and around the corner is a tiny, two-storey theatre that dates back to the mid-1800s sometime. As far as I can tell, a wealthy family who lived above the theatre — which is in Ragusa, in Sicily, and is known as the Teatro Donnafugata (Theatre of the Missing Woman) — had a private entrance built that led to their private balcony. Could be related to the nearby Castello Donnafugata, a royal palace that was built by a baron and has 122 rooms.

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

At first, it looks as though the woman in this video is opening a small door leading down into a basement, but then she flips up a hidden panel in the floor that reveals steps down and around the corner is a tiny, two-storey theatre that dates back to the mid-1800s sometime. As far as I can tell, a wealthy family who lived above the theatre — which is in Ragusa, in Sicily, and is known as the Teatro Donnafugata (Theatre of the Missing Woman) — had a private entrance built that led to their private balcony. Could be related to the nearby Castello Donnafugata, a royal palace that was built by a baron and has 122 rooms.

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).

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.”

Manipulating and enhancing images may seem something that is particular to the current digital age, but as researcher Anna Dlabacová describes, some medieval manuscripts such as The Kattendijke Chronicle, a late fifteenth-century manuscript from the Low Countries, contain fascinating examples of analogue image editing. In one image of people in a boat, for example, both the people and the land the boat is headed towards have been taken from other manuscripts.

At first sight, the image of a group of people in a boat might appear to be a straightforward woodcut that was pasted into a manuscript (fig. 1). Since single leaf prints – woodcuts and engravings – were used more often in handwritten books from the second half of the fifteenth century (see e.g., Rudy 2019), this example might not seem particularly special. A closer look, however, reveals several indications that there is much more to this image than meets the eye. 

The so-called Kattendijke Chronicle derives its name from its seventeenth-century owner, Johan Huyssen of Kattendijke (1566-1634). In the 1990s his descendants made the manuscript available to a small team of researchers, which in 2005 resulted in an edition with an in-depth introduction that focused on textual, heraldic and codicological aspects, and explored the profile of the author of the Chronicle (Janse et al. 2005). The latter worked in Holland (possibly Haarlem?) and completed the book in or shortly after 1491.

The 1960s and ’70s were a time for many things — moon landings, peace and love, Watergate, etc. — and one of those things was the rise of TV pitchmen selling snake oil of various kinds, like the old K-Tel and Popeil commercials in which they hawked pocket fishing rods and record-flipping gizmos (which were created by old carny and Vegas pitchmen Phil Kives and Ron Popeil). Along with all the other pitchmen was a pitchwoman: Evelyn Wood, a grandmotherly type who pitched her magic Speed Reading course.

Evelyn claimed that she could teach anyone how to read at thousands of words per minute with perfect comprehension (the average person reads at about 100-200 words a minute). The only problem with Evelyn’s pitch is that her process didn’t work — but she, and the business types she hired managed to turn it into a profitable business anyway, thanks to endorsements and cheesy commercials.

A Utah school teacher and a member of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, Evelyn did a master’s degree in speech at the University of Utah, and this was what set her off on the path to speed reading. “I turned in my thesis to Dr. Lowell Lees,” Wood would recount, “and watched in amazement as he read my eighty-page paper as fast as he could turn the pages.” Inspired by this feat, Wood dived into the business of teaching people to read