Social Media Distortion | They Made Your Bed | Dark Money
May 28, 2020
“People get addicted to feeling offended all the time because it gives them a high; being self-righteous and morally superior feels good.”
“Life is essentially an endless series of problems. The solution to one problem is merely the creation of another.”
― Mark Manson
The second quote above reminds us of the following: “Busy, busy, busy, is what we Bokononists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
Zuckerberg Almost Feels A Human Emotion. Almost.
Samuel Corum via Getty Images
Facebook’s founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg had expressed concern both in public and private about “sensationalism and polarization” happening on his social media creation. So a while back an internal effort was made to understand how the company’s platform shaped user behavior, and how the company might address potential harms.
In 2018 the research team made its presentation; it had concluded that the company’s algorithms weren’t bringing people together, they were driving people apart. “Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” read a slide from the 2018 presentation. “If left unchecked,” it warned, Facebook would feed users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention and increase time on the platform.”
So Zuckerberg had his answer. But in the end, his interest was fleeting. According to previously unreported internal documents and people familiar with the effort, Zuckerberg and other senior officials largely shelved the basic research, and weakened or blocked efforts to apply its conclusions to Facebook products. (WSJ)
- Social Media And Disinformation: What To Expect For 2020 (NPR)
- Trump to sign executive order on social media amid Twitter furor (Politico)
- White House organizes harassment of Twitter employee as Trump threatens company (The Verge)
- Twitter Tsks, and Trump Fumes (NYT, $)
- Social media bias lawsuits keep failing in court (The Verge)
- YouTube is deleting comments with two phrases that insult China’s Communist Party (The Verge)
- Democrats urge probe of allegations regarding TikTok and children’s privacy (Reuters)
They Made Your Bed, Now They Lie In It
- The coronavirus pandemic brought global travel to a standstill and meant the loss of rental income for thousands of Airbnb hosts. When that comes on top of salary contractions, job losses, maybe multiple mortgage payments, and future uncertainty, it’s a burden too far for many people. A number of Airbnb hosts have decided to sell some of their rentals, along with the furniture they bought to deck out their houses.
- And as the pandemic has stretched on, even Airbnb’s business model has come into question. After reportedly planning to make its splashy Wall Street debut this year, the company instead had to lay off about 25 percent of its workforce. At the same time, it has struggled to appease the hosts who are the backbone of its service.
- In late March Airbnb announced it would pay hosts 25 percent of what they would typically get back through their individual cancellation policies. But some hosts felt the policy didn’t go far enough to help, or that they received smaller payments than expected. (CNN)
Literally Vote Or Die
- President Trump has repeatedly voiced a desire to remove American troops from Afghanistan sooner than the timeline laid out in the February 29 peace agreement with the Taliban, which stipulated US troops would leave in 12 to 14 months if the insurgent group met certain conditions. The Pentagon is drawing up plans and senior military officials are set to brief the president in coming days on options for pulling all American troops out.
- The concern is that Trump may want troops home before the election. Officials hope to persuade him to adhere to a slower timeline, but Trump has regularly surprised the military with his seemingly off-the-cuff decisions. The Pentagon doesn’t want a repeat of situations like the one in December 2018 and again in October 2019, when the president surprised officials by ordering the complete withdrawal of US troops from Syria.
- Diplomatic chaos and violence followed those decisions, and Trump subsequently modified each announcement. Senior military officials believe a quick withdrawal from Afghanistan would effectively destroy the peace deal reached this year with the Taliban. (NYT)
- ISIS Prisoners Threaten U.S. Mission in Northeastern Syria (NYT, $)
Additional World News
- How the free press worldwide is under threat (Guardian)
- How Taiwan changed its attitude to landfills (BBC)
- China and India move troops as border tensions escalate (Guardian)
- Hong Kong crisis: at least 360 arrested as China protests grow (Guardian) & ‘No Reasonable Person Can Assert’ Hong Kong Has Autonomy From China, Pompeo Says (NPR)
- India Faces Swarm of Locusts (NYT, $)
- A Boy, a Bear and a Close Call in the Mountains of Italy (NYT, $)
COVID-19
- Coronavirus deaths in US top 100,000 (BBC)
- What we mean by a ‘second peak’ of coronavirus (CNN)
- Here’s How Wuhan Tested 6.5 Million for Coronavirus in Days (NYT)
- Sweden’s Covid-19 policy is a model for the right. It’s also a deadly folly (Guardian)
- U.S. Bans Flights From Brazil, Where Pandemic Is Raging (NYT)
- A Virus-Hunter Falls Prey to a Virus He Underestimated (NYT)
- Reopening too soon: Lessons from the deadly second wave of the 1918 flu pandemic (WaPo, $)
COVID-19 & Money
- Fed finds new challenge for the economy: Workers who don’t want to come back to their jobs (CNBC)
- Congratulations, you have just survived COVID-19, here’s a great way to lose money: MGM Resorts to re-open its Las Vegas casinos on June 4 (Reuters)
- Why the Economy Is Headed for a Post-Coronavirus Depression (NY Mag)
- The Price of a Virus Lockdown: Economic ‘Free Fall’ in California (NYT)
- Pay Cuts Become a Tool for Some Companies to Avoid Layoffs (NYT, $)
- US Jobs News: Salaries Get Cut for Many Who Kept Their Jobs (Bloomberg, $)
- ‘Just Sitting in Limbo.’ For Many Professionals, Careers Are on Hold. (NYT, $)
- Pride is different for everyone this year, but there are still so many ways you can show your support and give back to the LGBTQ+ community.
- One way is with the Bombas Pride Collection. Inspired by the bright, diverse LGBTQ+ community, these socks are a reminder to live colorfully and always be true to yourself. And for every pair you purchase, Bombas will donate a pair to someone experiencing homelessness in the LGBTQ+ community through The Ally Coalition.
- These donations will give someone the dignity of putting on clean clothes and allow Bombas to give people three things everyone deserves: Love. Compassion. Comfort.
- Shop the Bombas Pride Collection now and use code PNUT for 20% off your first purchase.
Now, He Might Not Be The Best… That’s It. That’s The Title.
- President Trump’s new Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, is the least-qualified DNI in history. Not only is the three-term Texas congressman manifestly unqualified for the job, he’s a staunch partisan, he embellished his résumé, only a minority of the US Senate would vote to confirm him, and the first time he was floated for the post last summer he was so soundly rejected that he withdrew almost immediately. Worst of all, years before just 49 senators of the 116th Congress — all Republicans — voted to confirm him last week as the head of the nation’s 17 intelligence agencies and the president’s top intelligence adviser, the 108th Congress tried to stop a man like Ratcliffe from assuming that very role in the first place.
- They wrote into the law that created the job, 50 US Code § 3023, the following: “Any individual nominated for appointment as Director of National Intelligence shall have extensive national security expertise.” Ratcliffe definitely doesn’t.
- The Trump loyalist is best known for his fiery hearings performances cross-examining witnesses like Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and others during the impeachment hearings last fall. Ratcliffe was a long-time personal injury and medical malpractice lawyer, and a part-time mayor of Heath, Texas, before being elected to Congress on the Tea Party wave in 2014.
- He will soon take over the most powerful intelligence gathering operation ever assembled, an enormously difficult and complex job. Yet he’s no more qualified today than he was last summer. What could possibly go wrong. (Wired) Drain the swamp of incompetents.
Additional USA News
- ‘We’re Running Out Of Time’: Census Turns To Congress To Push Deadlines (NPR)
- Just half of Americans plan on getting Covid-19 vaccine, poll shows (Guardian)
- Protests, looting erupt in Minneapolis over racially charged killing by police (Reuters)
- Opinion | America Can Beat the Coronavirus (NYT)
- Campaigning in a Crisis: Obama, McCain, Trump and Biden (NYT, $)
- Frustrated and struggling, New Yorkers contemplate abandoning the city they love (WaPo, $)
- Opinion | Mike Pompeo Is the Worst Secretary of State Ever (NYT, $)
- Larry Kramer, Pioneering AIDS Activist And Writer, Dies At 84 (NPR)
All Work And No Play Makes Jack Question His Role In The Big Picture
- In 1955, British naval historian and author Cyril Northcote Parkinson wrote a line for an essay in the Economist that still lives on today as Parkinson’s Law: “It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
- In his slightly satirical essay, Parkinson uses the example of an elderly lady writing a postcard to her niece. Since she has nothing else to do with her time, the otherwise simple task takes up her entire day. The actual inefficiency Parkinson was trying to illustrate wasn’t that of old lady letter writers, but of the British Civil Service.
- In his original essay Parkinson pointed out that although the number of navy ships decreased by two thirds, and personnel by a third between 1914 and 1928, the number of bureaucrats had ballooned by almost 6 percent a year. There were fewer people and less work to manage — but management was still expanding.
- Parkinson pointed to two critical elements that lead to bureaucratization:
- The tendency of managers to hire two or more subordinates to report to them so that neither is in direct competition with the manager himself.
- The fact that bureaucrats create work for other bureaucrats.
- Stefan Thurner is a scholar who read Parkinson’s book and was inspired to turn it into a mathematical model that could be manipulated and tested. “Parkinson argued that if you have 6 percent growth rate of any administrative body, then sooner or later any company will die. They will have all their workforce in bureaucracy and none in production.” The same is true for governments: the bigger the size of a government or organization, the more bureaucracy, and hence, the less effective it is.
- As for individuals, setting deadlines can increase productivity. But there are drawbacks. “If your deadline is too short and you’re panicking, you will have sacrificed other things and you might work inefficiently, and things might go badly anyway,” one psychologist said. (BBC)
- Why Remote Work Is So Hard—and How It Can Be Fixed (New Yorker, $)
- The surprising perks of isolated work (BBC)
- Is the pandemic ending hustle culture? (Vox)
- Victory gardens: A war-time hobby that’s back in fashion (BBC)