Category: Uncategorized

Hannah Soyer, who has a condition called Spinal Muscular Atrophy that affects her lungs, writes about trying to negotiate friendships and other relationships with people for whom COVID has been largely a nuisance:

“Before COVID, I’d never faced such blatant disregard for disabled and chronically ill life. I watched friends and family members — people who said they loved and cared about me — take part in activities clearly linked to spreading the virus, like eating in crowded restaurants and attending large parties. These choices felt like betrayals, and each new one stung.

I believe I have a right to exist safely in public spaces. Do others have an obligation to make that happen? What do we owe each other, as humans, as friends? Do we owe each other a chance at living, and how much should we change our lives to do that? Alternatively, do we owe each other forgiveness and the benefit of the doubt, and if so, to what extent?”

This is from a recent instalment of Ann Friedman’s great newsletter, about the new images of deep space taken by the new James Webb telescope — images of hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies, whose light has only just reached us after billions of years:

“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena,” wrote Carl Sagan in 1994 about an image of our home planet, seemingly alone in the vastness of space, captured by Voyager 1. “Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light,” he continued. “Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.” Now we can see, thanks to the mind-bending chaos of deep space revealed by the Webb telescope, that we aren’t alone in a vast cosmic emptiness. We are alone in a crowd.

But the effect is the same: Our terrestrial problems have been placed in appropriate context once again. “My life is meaningless!” exclaimed my friend Agatha, in a relatable post about the Webb photos. “I’m so relieved!” Is there a word for this feeling? The comfort of knowing you are a brief speck? I feel it when I’m in a deep gorge or at the base of a giant tree. When I connect with a work of art created in a lifetime that never touched my own. When I behold a thumping rave of faraway galaxies as they existed billions of years ago. 

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

On July 8, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google, the search-engine subsidiary of Alphabet, had offered concessions to the US government, in an attempt to stave off a potential antitrust lawsuit targeted at its advertising business. “As part of one offer, Google has proposed splitting parts of its business that auctions and places ads on websites and apps into a separate company under the Alphabet umbrella,” the Journal reported. If this were to take place, the entity created would be worth tens of billions of dollars, according to the sources the Journal spoke with. The proposal was described as a “sign that legal and regulatory pressures on the tech giant are coming to a head.” Over the past two years alone, Google and Alphabet have been the target of half a dozen antitrust actions led by both state and federal authorities, aimed at the company’s control over both the search market and the digital ad market, and members of Congress have proposed a law that would break up Google’s digital ad business. The European Union’s antitrust regulators are also investigating the company’s advertising operations.

Google’s proposal to split its ad operations doesn’t seem to have been warmly received by the US Department of Justice, however. On Thursday, a report from Bloomberg said that antitrust authorities are “likely to reject concessions offered by Alphabet, clearing the way for an antitrust lawsuit over Google’s dominance of the online advertising market.” Bloomberg said a lawsuit could be filed against the company as early as August, according to its anonymous sources. The lawsuit would join a similar suit that was launched by the Department of Justice in 2020, aimed at Google’s dominance of the online search market. According to Bloomberg, the digital ad lawsuit is being handled by Doha Mekki, the second most powerful official in the Department of Justice, which makes the likelihood of a quick settlement remote at best. “You’re going to see a lot more litigation from the antitrust division,” Mekki said at an event in April. “The division’s position is we are not planning to take settlements. Settlements suggest compromise.”

Google’s advertising business is also the subject of an antitrust suit by a number of state attorneys general, led by Ken Paxton, Attorney General for Texas. That lawsuit was filed in December 2020 and remains ongoing in New York federal court. It was recently updated with an unredacted document that details how Google allegedly uses its control of all aspects of the ad market to rig auctions in its favor, boosting its revenue by potentially hundreds of millions of dollars (online ads generated more than $30 billion in revenue for Google last year). Like most of the other lawsuits and regulatory actions against Google for its dominance of the digital ad business, the one from the state attorneys general focuses on one thing: the fact that Google simultaneously controls the world’s largest digital ad buying platform, the largest online advertising exchange, and the largest platform for displaying ads on publishers’ websites. According to Wired, one unnamed employee who was quoted in the state attorneys general lawsuit compared it to “if Goldman or Citibank owned the New York Stock Exchange.”

In May of this year, a group of congressmen led by Mike Lee, a Republican senator from Utah, introduced a bill called the Competition and Transparency in Digital Advertising Act, which would effectively prevent Google from controlling all aspects of the online ad market. Although it doesn’t mention the company by name, it says that any company with more than $20 billion in digital advertising revenue—in other words, Google and Facebook—would be forbidden from owning multiple parts of the online ad sales infrastructure. These digital giants could choose to own the ad sales end of the market, or an online ad exchange, or the ad buying and display business, but not all of them at the same time. The lack of competition in digital ads, Lee said in a statement when the bill was tabled, “means that monopoly rents are being imposed upon every website that is ad-supported and every company that relies on internet advertising to grow its business.”

Among the companies that rely the most on internet advertising are digital news publishers. Instead of selling their own ads, most use ad networks and ad exchanges, the largest of which (in both cases) belong to Google. This allows them to take advantage of both the reader targeting such networks offer, and tools such as “real time bidding,” in which a split-second virtual auction for ad space is held when a page is loaded. The Paxton lawsuit alleges Google uses its control of both the buy side and the sell side of the ad market to rig these auctions. The Competition Markets Authority in Britain, a central regulatory body, recently announced that it is concerned that Google may “illegally favour its own ad exchange services.” One of the dangers of Google’s control over the market, the CMA says, is that it could “reduce the ad revenues of publishers, who may be forced to compromise the quality of their content” or put it behind paywalls.

Google initially succeeded by building a better search engine, the CMA stated in an overview of the online ad market it published in 2020, but “they are now protected by such strong incumbency advantages – including network effects, economies of scale and unmatchable access to user data – that potential rivals can no longer compete on equal terms.” Google disagrees, not surprisingly. In a response to Paxton’s lawsuit in January, Google maintained that the suit was filled with “inaccurate and inflammatory allegations,” and that it “fails to acknowledge that ad tech is a highly dynamic industry with countless competitors.” Google has responded in the past to allegations about the effect it has on publishers by pointing out that its ad technology “helps news organizations make money by showing ads on their websites, apps and videos” and that every year Google pays “billions of dollars directly to the publishing partners in our ad network.”

Here’s more on Google and advertising:

Ad nauseam: An analysis of the online ad market by Digiday, published in February, predicted that Google, Facebook, and Amazon will account for more than half of the global ad market this year—not just digital ads, but all ads. According to one estimate, last year the three companies took in almost three quarters of all global digital ad spending. Google’s ad business, including ads sold on its own sites as well as ads sold through third-party networks, brought in more than $200 billion in revenue, while Facebook accounted for $115 billion. According to a report in the Financial Times, the three tech giants have doubled their share of ad revenues in the past five years.

OpenTube: Google offered in June to let rival ad networks and agents place ads on YouTube, as part of an attempt to settle an investigation by the European Union into its advertising dominance. As part of the case, “the EU competition watchdog singled out Google’s requirement that advertisers use its Ad Manager to display ads on YouTube and potential restrictions on the way in which rivals serve ads,” Reuters reported. If Google can’t find a way to settle the case, it could wind up having to pay a fine equivalent to 10 percent of its global revenue, or about $26 billion.

Bedfellows: Oles Andriychuk, director of the Centre for Internet Law and Policy at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, wrote about how traditional media chose to get in bed with Google and Facebook instead of trying to fight them. “The current structure of digital advertising markets makes the Google-Facebook duopoly an unavoidable trading partner for every party in the content consumption supply chain,” he wrote. “The media industry remains the only meaningful market force potentially capable of mitigating the duopolistic order of digital advertising, but traditional media appear to be more interested in partnering with Big Tech than competing with it.”

Other notable stories:

Chinese hackers sent a flood of malicious emails to White House correspondents and other prominent US journalists in the days leading up to the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, according to an analysis by Proofpoint, a US cybersecurity firm, as reported by CNN. The hackers were “scrambling to ascertain whether there would be a peaceful transfer of power in the US,” according to the report, so they used email subject lines about Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, pandemic relief legislation, and other key US political topics. “Proofpoint attributed the hacking efforts to a group that has been linked to China’s civilian intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security,” CNN reported.

Tech platforms such as Facebook and Twitter seemed intent on removing misinformation about the war in Ukraine when the attacks first started, but their commitment to do so has waned, according to a report in the Washington Post, based on research from a European nonprofit. “Ukrainian officials who have flagged thousands of tweets, YouTube videos and other social media posts as Russian propaganda or anti-Ukrainian hate speech say the companies have grown less responsive to their requests to remove such content,” the Post reported, and “accounts parroting Kremlin talking points, spewing anti-Ukrainian slurs or even impersonating Ukrainian officials” remain active on social networks.

Britain’s proposed Online Safety Bill is expected to be delayed until the fall, due to the ongoing impact of the resignation of Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, as leader of the Conservative Party, Politico reported. “The bill would impose a legal duty of care on internet companies such as Twitter and Facebook to keep users safe [but] moves to include some legal but harmful content in the scope of the bill have been controversial,” Politico reported. One of the candidates to replace Johnson as leader of the Conservative party, and therefore a potential prime minister, has said that he doesn’t agree with some aspects of the Online Safety Bill as it has been drafted.

A new study authored by a group of social scientists at Stanford, Cambridge, and the University of Pennsylvania suggests that American TV audiences are far more polarized politically than online audiences are. The researchers said they analyzed “billions of browsing and viewing events between 2016 and 2019,” and came to the conclusion that 17 percent of TV-watching Americans are “partisan-segregated” in their content consumption, compared with roughly 4 percent of online news readers. TV news consumers are also “several times more likely to maintain their partisan news diets month-over-month,” the group found. “Our results suggest that television is the top driver of partisan audience segregation among Americans.”

The Guardian announced Thursday that Betsy Reed will be the new editor the Guardian’s US operations. She was previously the editor-in-chief of The Intercept, a position she took n 2015, just a year after the site was founded. While she was the editor, The Intercept won a number of journalism awards, including a Polk Award. Prior to joining the site, Reed was executive editor of The Nation. Reed replaces John Mulholland, editor of Guardian US since 2017, who announced earlier this year he was stepping down. She will be replaced as editor-in-chief of The Intercept by Roger Hodge, formerly deputy editor, and Nausicaa Renner, a former editor at CJR, becomes deputy editor.

A Chinese woman “spent years writing alternative accounts of medieval Russian history on Chinese Wikipedia, conjuring imaginary states, battles, and aristocrats in one of the largest hoaxes on the open-source platform,” Vice reported. The hoax was exposed last month by Yifan, a Chinese novelist, who was doing research for a book. The user, known as Zhemao, wrote more than 200 articles on the Chinese edition of Wikipedia since 2019, and many had elaborate (but fake) footnotes and citations to books and documents. “The content she wrote is of high quality and the entries were interconnected, creating a system that can exist on its own,”John Yip, a Chinese Wikipedian, told Vice. “Zhemao single-handedly invented a new way to undermine Wikipedia.”

Reporters, editors, and producers who work at PBS NewsHour announced that they are attempting to unionize with SAG-AFTRA, which already represents the news unit’s anchors and correspondents, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “The workers, who are calling their group the NewsHour Union, announced their organizing attempt on Tuesday,” the magazine reported. The organizing committee representing the staffers said in a statement that “as the creative engine behind one of the most trusted news institutions in the country, our goal is to strengthen this pillar of American television news by creating a better, healthier and more transparent workplace.”

Greg Burns writes for the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University about a number of small investment groups that have been snapping up local newspapers over the past year or so, as chains like Gannett, Lee Enterprises, and Alden Global restructure their portfolios. “Since 2020, three companies have led the way,” he writes, including CherryRoad Media of New Jersey, which owns 63 papers in 10 Midwestern states; Paxton Media, which is based in Kentucky and owns 115 newspapers in 10 Southern and Midwestern states; and Ogden Newspapers, based in West Virginia, which owns 101 papers in 18 states stretching from New Hampshire to Hawaii.

While plumbing the archives at the Cincinnati Art Museum, curator Hou-mei Sung uncovered what appeared to be an ordinary bronze mirror (prior to the development of glass mirrors, people often used polished bronze to see their reflection). After closer inspection, she realized that when a light was shone on it, the mirror revealed a hidden image of a spiritual figure surrounded by rays. Often called a “Magic Mirror,” this extremely rare work is part of a small collection of similar objects that date back to the Han dynasty (202 BCE to 220 CE)—only a few similar Buddhist pieces from China and Japan are thought to exist.

via Colossal

The Statue of Liberty’s disembodied arm stood in Madison Square from 1876 to 1882. It had been agreed that Frédéric Bartholdi would create the statue while the United States paid for the pedestal. Americans were a bit behind in offering donations, so Bartholdi sent along the arm and torch to help inspire contributions. It took six years of benefit concerts, auctions, souvenir photos, and other mementos, but the full statue was finally dedicated on Liberty Island on October 28, 1886.

via Futility Closet

Also, I learned that the structure holding up the various pieces of the statue was designed by a guy named Gustave Eiffel, who later built a pretty famous tower in Paris. And the arm of the statue was damaged in a massive explosion at a munitions depot on nearby Black Tom Island in 1916 — an explosion that much later was proven to be an act of sabotage by German secret agents.

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

On May 13, a month to the day after Elon Musk filed a notice with the Securities and Exchange Commission saying he intended to acquire Twitter for $44 billion, Musk announced that the deal was on hold, “pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users.” At the time, some observers said they saw Musk’s concern as an excuse to either back out of the takeover deal or negotiate a lower price, since the value of Twitter’s stock had already fallen by more than 30 percent between when he announced his acquisition plan and when he put the deal “on hold.” On Friday, Musk filed a new statement with securities regulators saying the offer had been terminated because Twitter was “in material breach of multiple provisions of [the purchase agreement,] including making what Musk alleges were “false and misleading representations” about the state of Twitter’s business. The termination notice also states that Musk believes Twitter could suffer a “material adverse effect” on its business because of its under-counting of spam accounts.

On Tuesday, Twitter fired off its own salvo in the ongoing battle over the company’s future: a lawsuit in the Chancery Court of Delaware, where the company is registered, aimed at getting Musk to follow through on his offer. In the complaint, Twitter alleges that Musk “refuses to honor his obligations to Twitter and its stockholders because the deal he signed no longer serves his personal interests.” Despite a legal commitment to buy the company, Twitter says Musk “apparently believes that he—unlike every other party subject to Delaware contract law—is free to change his mind, trash the company, disrupt its operations, destroy stockholder value, and walk away.” The Twitter lawsuit doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to Musk’s behavior: among other things, it says his attempt to get out of the deal is “a model of hypocrisy,” because he said one reason he wanted to buy the company was to get rid of spam, but then suggested in his termination notice that the amount of spam was the reason he was cancelling the deal.

“When the market declined and the fixed-price deal became less attractive, the lawsuit states, “Musk shifted his narrative, suddenly demanding ‘verification’ that spam was not a serious problem on Twitter’s platform, and claiming a burning need to conduct ‘diligence’ he had expressly forsworn.” The claims that Musk makes in his termination notice, about Twitter allegedly misrepresenting the state of its business, “are pretexts and lack any merit,” the company’s lawsuit adds. Twitter also accuses Musk of breaching the merger agreement repeatedly, alleging that he has “purported to put the deal on ‘hold’ pending satisfaction of imaginary conditions, breached his financing efforts obligations in the process, violated his obligations to treat requests for consent reasonably and to provide information about financing status, violated his non-disparagement obligation, [and] misused confidential information” provided by Twitter.

Continue reading “Twitter takes Elon Musk to court over failed acquisition”

Here’s a handy service — only hires atheists and non-Christians. via Bruce Sterling’s Tumblr

A fascinating sociological study of what happened when Queen Victoria became a widow and her mourning period interrupted the London Season — the period in which eligible bachelors tried to find eligible young ladies to marry. That interruption led to more intermarriage between peers and commoners, and that in turn helped change the economic landscape in Great Britain forever.

Peers courted in the London Season, a matching technology introducing aristocratic bachelors to debutantes. When Queen Victoria went into mourning for her husband, the Season was interrupted (1861–1863), raising search costs and reducing market segregation. I exploit exogenous variation in women’s probability to marry during the interruption from their age in 1861. The interruption increased peer-commoner intermarriage by 40 percent and reduced sorting along landed wealth by 30 percent. Eventually, this reduced peers’ political power and affected public policy in late nineteenth-century England.

On Sunday, June 26th at about 4 in the morning, I became a grandfather. It seems strange to type those words, in part because it makes me feel really old 🙂 but it’s true. And as soon as I saw little Quinn Leanne Hemrica, I fell in love! I know every parent and grandparent says this, but she was and is perfect — even when she is crying. Caitlin had a pretty rough labour, but she toughed her way through it, and I thought she looked fantastic even after all that.

Continue reading “Introducing Quinn Leanne Hemrica”

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 reported that Twitter had filed a lawsuit against the government of India in the Karnataka High Court in Bangalore, challenging a recent decree that ordered Twitter to take down content and block a number of accounts. Twitter obeyed the order, removing the content and blocking the accounts, according to the Times, but then filed the suit in an attempt to overturn the order. A source who spoke with the Times said Twitter isn’t trying to invalidate the law under which the order was issued, but instead argues that the government interpreted it too broadly. A TV network in New Delhi reported that the suit alleges the order was “overbroad, arbitrary, and disproportionate,” and that the content in question is either political commentary, criticism, or otherwise newsworthy, and therefore should not be removed.

It’s not known which specific tweets or accounts are the subject of the order, in part because India’s laws forbid platforms from talking about the takedown orders they receive, or any of the content they refer to, or the reasons for the order. Last year, the Indian government ordered Twitter to remove tweets by Freedom House, a US-based nonprofit group that promotes democracy around the world. The group noted that internet freedom was declining in India, and included maps whose borders the government of India disputes. Tweets from Rana Ayyub, an Indian journalist, and Mohammed Zubair, the co-founder of a fact-checking organization, were also subject to a similar order, as were accounts belonging to a number of political parties and groups.

Other accounts ordered to be blocked allegedly made “fake, intimidatory, and provocative tweets” that some took to be accusing the Indian government of genocide. In a number of cases, Twitter simply blocked access to tweets from within India, using what it calls its “country withheld” tool, a form of geo-blocking. In February of last year, in one of the largest such moves, Twitter removed more than 500 accounts (after initially refusing the order) and used geo-blocking to hide others, because of remarks those accounts made about Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India. At the time, Twitter said it refused to remove any accounts belonging to journalists, politicians, or activists because it believed doing so “would violate their fundamental right to free expression.”

Continue reading “Twitter goes to court in India over free speech”

Public Domain Review highlights a document from 1875, written (and illustrated) by the ship’s surgeon on a British Arctic expedition

When the British Arctic Expedition set sail from Portsmouth on May 29, 1875, the explorers hoped to reach the highest latitude, and perhaps even approach the ever-elusive North Pole. It was believed that, should they successfully pass through Smith Sound, between Greenland and Canada’s Ellesmere Island, they would encounter an Open Polar Sea free from troublesome ice. With this primary goal, three steamships set out across the stormy Atlantic only to immediately become separated by a violent cyclone, reconvening at Disko Bay on the western coast of Greenland some weeks later. Perhaps they could have interpreted this early inconvenience as a sign of the winter to come, or a warning that the Arctic waters are rarely kind. Regardless, the captains pressed on.

In Shores of the Polar Sea, Edward L. Moss, an artist and esteemed Royal Navy Surgeon, records this journey from his first-hand seat in the belly of HMS Alert. A mixture of intimate journal entries, miscellaneous engravings, and sixteen chromolithographs, the book provides a unique, often surreal, retelling of life on the ice. Moss prefaces his work with a modest appeal: “Whatever may be the artistic value of the Sketches — and they lay claim to none — they are at least perfectly faithful efforts to represent the face of Nature in a part of the world that very few can ever see for themselves.”

We went to a wedding that was held at the Notawasaga Inn north of Toronto, so of course I brought my kayak and put it in just south of the resort, near a dam. I didn’t have time to go downstream and have Becky come and get me afterwards, so I paddled upstream through the golf course that is part of the resort. It was pretty shallow, but it was a great paddle.

My aunt, who lives in Burlington, was out of town so she let us stay at her place after Quinn was born, so that we could be close (but not too close). And since the Burlington bay was right there, I thought I might as well throw the kayak in there and paddle up the coast a bit. Beautiful calm day.

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Last Friday, the US Supreme Court handed down a decision nullifying Roe v Wade, the almost 50-year-old court case that enshrined legal access to abortions in the United States. The decision was widely expected, thanks to a story that Politico published in May, based on a draft opinion that was leaked anonymously. The advance notice allowed more than a dozen states to pass “trigger laws,” which in some cases made abortion illegal as soon as the official Supreme Court decision was released. This has raised the potential for legal action against women who are seeking to terminate a pregnancy, and fears that content shared via social apps—including apps designed to help women track the progress of their menstrual cycle and their potential fertility—and through social platforms, and even web searches, could be used to try to incriminate them.

This isn’t an idle fear: In 2017, Latice Fisher, a Black woman, went to a hospital in Mississippi after losing a pregnancy at home in the thirty-sixth week. Because she admitted during a gynecological exam that she was pregnant, but never returned for a followup visit, medical staff gave police her medical records, and they started an investigation. Since Fisher had also voluntarily given police her phone, Wired noted that prosecutors were able to access her search history on the device, including a web search she conducted for misoprostol (medication that can be used to trigger an abortion). Although there was no evidence that Fisher had ever used the medication, the district attorney’s office nevertheless used the search as evidence that she had killed her fetus, and she was charged with second-degree murder (the case was eventually dropped).

“Those seeking, offering, or facilitating abortion access must now assume that any data they provide online or offline could be sought by law enforcement,” the EFF wrote in a statement following the court’s ruling nullifying Roe. The Washington Post noted that “a Google search for a reproductive health clinic, online order for abortion pills, location ping at a doctor’s office and text message about considering ending a pregnancy could all become sources of evidence.” The Post advised those searching for abortions to use encrypted private messaging apps such as Apple’s iMessage, WhatsApp and Signal. The latter was the most secure, the paper said, because Apple has a key that allows it to decrypt iMessages, so law enforcement could force it to do so, and WhatsApp shares data with its parent company, Meta. The paper also recommended using web browsers in incognito mode, and leaving a phone at home when visiting clinics.

Continue reading “Tech platforms, data, and the aftermath of Roe v Wade”