Host of The Bigger Picture, a show exploring big questions about our world. Author of The Chaos Machine, an NPR and New Yorker best book of 2022.
New York
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Thrilled by this: NYT call my new book, The Chaos Machine, an "authoritative and devastating account of the impacts of social media."
"Utterly convincing and should obliterate any doubts about the significance of algorithmic intervention in human affairs" nytimes.com/2022/09/01/booksâŚ
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Reminder: 139 Republican Congressmen and 8 Senators voted to certify Trumpâs attempted coup
In South Korea the presidentâs party gave him zero votes for his coup
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This dropped hearing aid prices by 90%+. Countless people who couldnât afford hearing aids can hear now. Biden has done a ton of stuff like this. Donât listen to the doomposters who tell you it doesnât matter whoâs in office. It does.
This Apple hearing aid feature exists because the government broke a hearing aid cartel with an FDA rule
whitehouse.gov/briefing-roomâŚ
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The single most important article yet published on Trump's second term, by two scholars who since 2016 have been consistently correct in anticipating Trump's effect on our political system. Everyone should read it.
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Rushing through federal executions while pardoning war criminals convicted of massacring unarmed Iraqi civilians in a public square
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People really need to understand how mainstream it has become in some tech VC circles to argue that journalism itself is dangerous as an idea and should be abolished, and that it will be up to the tech world to carry this out.
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Only 30% of Americans support overturning Roe, with 69% opposed, according to the most recent polling. Get used to it: everything we know about the trajectory of American democracy suggests that minoritarianism will become the norm.
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legendary film director paul schrader is posting AI slop (?) of himself welcoming the dead japanese fascist yukio mishima (??) to minneapolis-st paul airport (???)
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Jokes aside it's legit hugely unethical to write this while you're having a secret affair with his opponent! I'm very glad Biden's out but jesus
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Jesus. FTC finds companies are exploiting your data â browsing history, location, buying patterns, even âmouse movements on a webpageâ â to gouge you with higher prices shown specifically to you. Just shocking.
Last summer @FTC launched an inquiry into whether people's private data is being used to set the prices they pay & whether firms are charging different people different prices for the same good or service.
Today @FTC published initial findings.
ftc.gov/news-events/news/preâŚ
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It's worth being ultra clear that so much as verbally criticizing the masked state agents occupying our streets is rapidly becoming effectively illegal. The police state is being built right before our eyes.
EXCLUSIVE: Earlier today ICE agents chase after a man in downtown Chicago after he made verbal comments but no physical or threatening contact. The man was able to get away.
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This will get quietly passed over but it's an incredibly significant moment. They do not consider Democratic representatives or their voters to be legitimate participants in our politics. They want a single-party state in place of democracy and are making it so, piece by piece.
This briefing is SOLELY for GOP senators, Iâm told.
Comes as some Republicans have publicly taken issue with the lack of information coming from the Trump administration on the escalating strikes.
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Now live: Our monthslong project on YouTube radicalization.
As YouTube diverts more and more users down far-right rabbitholes, could its algorithm, in a way, radicalize an entire society?
To find out, we went to YouTube's 2nd-largest market: Brazil. nytimes.com/2019/08/11/worldâŚ
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Weâre all worried about the Supreme Court amassing power, but this is why the founders in their wisdom gave us the fourth branch of government: Nancy Patricia Pelosi
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The courts, big business, big law, academia have all caved to Trump. Among the major American institutions, only Tom Cruise holds strong
Tom Cruise has declined a major Kennedy Center Award from Donald Trump. trib.al/bW9YSgn
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I can't think of a clearer signal that aging establishment Democrats are weighing down the party and should retire to make room for new blood immediately
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For years Iâve said that the USâs economic centrality makes it sanctions-proof. Today, the US figured out a way to impose crippling, global sanctions on itself. Weâve self-imposed a level of economic harm normal countries fight wars to escape.
New reciprocal US tariffs
đ¨đł China: 34%
đŞđş European Union: 20%
đťđł Vietnam: 46%
đšđź Taiwan: 32%
đŻđľ Japan: 24%
đŽđł India: 26%
đ°đˇ South Korea: 25%
đšđ Thailand: 36%
đ¨đ Switzerland: 31%
đŽđŠ Indonesia: 32%
đ˛đž Malaysia: 24%
đ°đ Cambodia: 49%
đŹđ§ United Kingdom: 10%
đżđŚ South Africa: 30%
đ§đˇ Brazil: 10%
đ§đŠ Bangladesh: 37%
đ¸đŹ Singapore: 10%
đŽđą Israel: 17%
đľđ Philippines: 17%
đ¨đą Chile: 10%
đŚđş Australia: 10%
đľđ° Pakistan: 29%
đšđˇ Turkey: 10%
đąđ° Sri Lanka: 44%
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Facebook when its platform is a driving force for genocide vs Facebook when it faces possible regulation
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The erosion of abortion rights is extremely rare in the world, and almost exclusively occurs in backsliding democracies. Hereâs my reporting on the link between those two forces: nytimes.com/2021/09/09/worldâŚ
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Dems delivered the most economically populist admin in decades, got handed a massive electoral defeat, and now every pundit is like "hey have you guys considered economic populism"
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One of the Blackwater contractors continued shooting civilians in the crowd even as his colleagues shouted over and over for ceasefire. One had to pull a gun on him to force him to stop. One of the people he shot was a mother clutching her infant.
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A sign of how much US popular and journalistic attitudes have changed. I did this exact chart at Vox during the 2014 war and got screamed at for weeks. David Frum accused me of agitating for murder of Jews. Ted Cruz condemned. Now itâs on the NYT HP without a blip.
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Afghans are starving not because of insufficient aid, but because the US forcibly emptied govt coffers, triggering a currency crisis and shutting down govt salaries and services. This move is a death sentence for untold numbers of civilians, including many kids and unborn babies.
Breaking News: President Biden is moving to split $7 billion in frozen Afghan central bank assets between 9/11 victimsâ families and humanitarian aid in Afghanistan. The highly unusual set of moves is expected to be announced on Friday. nyti.ms/3rHDKz2
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I really feel we have lost touch with how close we came in 2020 to authoritarianism enforced by nationwide, city-by-city state violence. The forces behind that effort remain widely influential in US politics and their return to power in 15 months is entirely plausible.
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YouTubeâs algorithm has been curating home movies of unwitting families into a catalog of semi-nude kids, we found.
YT often plays the videos after users watch softcore porn, building an audience of millions for what experts call child sexual exploitation
nytimes.com/2019/06/03/worldâŚ
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Iâm not saying the outcome will be the same but this is almost word-for-word what went viral on FB in Myanmar and Sri Lanka just before the incitement turned to massive real-world violence. In both cases Facebook did nothing even as innocent people were dying.
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The WSJ story claiming Iranian involvement in the attack is getting knocked down in a way you rarely if ever see
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South Korea and Italy had near-concurrent outbreaks that initially followed a parallel, terrifying trajectory.
Mere weeks later, as Italy reports 793 deaths in one day, Korea has two. Some days it has *zero*.
Me and Choe Sang-Hun report how they did it: nytimes.com/2020/03/23/worldâŚ
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Whatever happens now, we may spend the rest of our lives dealing with the party-wide normalization of:
⢠Refusal to concede losses
⢠Refusal to transfer power
⢠Efforts to overturn election results
⢠Delegitimation of outparty governance
Very hard to unring this bell
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I would really like people to understand the speed and severity with which state-level electoral autocracy is advancing in this country
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I once asked a political scientist whether there was a litmus test for democracy, and they said yes: the power of elections to remove incumbents. If thatâs gone, itâs not a democracy. Itâs just not.
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This blew my mind: YouTube (and Google) divert users who search basic health terms to conspiracy videos that told them to fear vaccines & their doctors
Experts and fomer govt officials told us that "Dr. YouTube" is driving MULTIPLE public health crises, including Zika resurgence
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The importance of this moment goes beyond 2024. We are living in an era of catastrophically weak parties. Yet the Democratic Party, for all its faults, came together to exercise collective authority at a critical moment in exactly the way the GOP failed to do in 2016. It matters.
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Something very Roman about a coup failing because the leader had abused his Praetorian guard to the point that they defy him at the critical moment
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I get why folks are being sort of arch about this, but just to be crystal clear: The president contracting coronavirus, going extended incommunicado, put on experimental treatments, and then airlifted to a military hospital are, taken together, a big deal.
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Dems passed some of the biggest economic measures in history in 2021. The constituency for progressive legislation is erasing itself before our eyes because 100M people decided to get their news from algorithmic social platforms that systematically lie to them.
A dem takes office it takes them 4 years to pass the We Love You bill, Which grants a 1 time $1200 loan to black small business owners. Every time a republican is in office day 1 they pass the all encompassing Nasty Mothafucka Act that kills every living thing on gods green earth
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Trump polls terribly. Trumpâs policies poll terribly. Dem policies poll great. Down ballot Dems poll great. This should be so easy. Thereâs one reason weâre headed for this. Itâs fixable, but only if we choose to fix it.
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These are video game and furry memes. I cannot believe how irresponsible the WSJ was in blasting out a speculative claim that the bullets were inscribed with "transgender and antifascist ideology"(?) as news. A catastrophic failure that could have real and lasting consequences.
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Hamas no doubt has real support but it is also a violently suppressive group that rules Gaza by force. A lot of pro-occupation hardliners, as well as twitter lefty edgelords, want you to believe that âHamasâ and âthe Palestiniansâ are synonymous, but theyâre simply not.
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Couple at airport bar having a pro-tier fight. Openly shouting. Sheâs so mad she keeps taking her coat off and putting it back on. At one point she gave him a sarcastic hug(!!). They took an incoming FaceTime to cheerfully say hi to grandma, hung up then right back to shouting
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Incredibly funny that as long as our garbage nation stands, its history books will reflect that the first-ever federal indictment of a president was announced via an unhinged social media rant about garage doors
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It's hard to overstate how much of the disaster in Gaza is because Netanyahu backed himself into a corner with his far-right minority coalition in order to dodge corruption charges timesofisrael.com/liveblog_eâŚ
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If the GOP not only weathers what was supposed to be a blowout loss over Dobbs but actually gains nationally, they'll conclude they are invincible on the issue. Hard to rule out a federal ban and maybe worse.
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One notion US economic suicide should put to rest: The country is not secretly run by Wall Street or corporations or the military-industrial complex. Itâs run by the median safe-district high-propensity primary voter. Thereâs no one else waiting to grab the wheel.
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They could not be more explicit that this is a hostile militarized occupation intended to disempower Dem city and state governments. Violent deportations are just a side benefit.
Noem: When they say they donât want federal officers on the street and they are not going to partner with usâwe put twice as many there.
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Truly the easiest mark in human history
Trump: "Vladimir Putin said something -- one of the most interesting things. He said 'your election was rigged because you have mail in voting.' He said, 'mail in voting, every election -- no country has mail in voting. It's impossible to have mail in voting and have honest elections.' And he said that to me because we talked about 2020. He said, 'you won that election by so much.'"
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My one consistent plea to fellow journalists covering US foreign policy is to treat the DC think tank circuit as part of why that foreign policy is the way it is, rather than as a source of objective commentary on it
In many respects, #Afghanistan represents the 1st real implementation of the "ending forever wars" doctrine.
The results so far?
- Crumbling of a democratic government;
- #Taliban rule;
- #AlQaeda ecstatic;
- Emergency mass evacuation;
- Unprecedented transatlantic divisions.
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It comes out of a Valley utopianism has said since the 90s that all legacy institutions are ultimately barriers to progress, but that the enlightened minds of the tech world, guided by the pure science of engineering, will one day liberate us by smashing the old ways.
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The US foreign policy establishment had a real opportunity this week to confront and learn from its 20-year failure in Afghanistan. Instead, just like in Iraq, itâs refused, blaming it all on poor execution. American empire can never fail, it can only be failed.
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Always amazing to me how US conventional wisdom treats the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a narrow Hamas issue, as if the rockets went away then there would be no conflict. The occupation simply does not exist in a lot of the American conversation.
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On a personal note, I found reporting this emotionally straining, far more so than I'd anticipated. Watching the videos made me physically ill and I've been having regular nightmares. I only mention it because I cannot fathom what this is like for parents whose kids are swept up.
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We expected, at most, faint hints that YouTube helped inch far-right Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency.
Instead, Bolsonaro allies and far-right lawmakers all told us YT put them in power. Far-right activists gratefully credited YT's algorithm with their "political awakening."
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It's probably not great for us as a country that our predominant information ecosystems are built to incentivize lying and incitement
Charlie tried to have conversations with you on the Left, and you killed him for it.
You're killing us in our churches.
You tried to kill our President.
You celebrate Charlie's death.
It's time for good to fight back against evil.
@MattWalshBlog
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Itâs so strange how these concerns only materialize when the US withdraws, and never when itâs pumping weapons into a conflict zone
NEW: U.S.-made weapons seized by Taliban could lead to regional arms bazaar - POLITICO politico.com/news/2021/08/19âŚ
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everyone talking about the UHC killer having incoherent or contradictory politics has clearly never listened to an episode of lex fridman / tim ferriss / andrew huberman. this is an extraordinarily specific Type of Guy
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Seems not ideal that most American kids now spend huge chunks of their adolescences wired into the same algorithmic social networks that are producing a steadily rising stream of nihilistic meme-poisoned school shooters and political assassins
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I asked YouTubeâ why not just turn off recommendations on videos of kids? Your system can already identify videos of kids automatically.
The recommendation algorithm is driving this whole child exploitation phenomenon. Switching it off would solve the problem and keep kids safe.
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This is a very strange analysis. Much of the country swung R+5. Battleground states swung R+2. If Liz Cheney events yielded local R+0, thatâs one of Harrisâs best showings. If thatâd applied more widely sheâd have won.
Liz Cheney and Kamala Harris traveled to Waukesha County, Wisconsin, for an event specifically designed to benefit Harris by swinging GOP voters away from Trump.
Waukesha County Results:
2020: Trump 59%
2024: Trump 59%
Cheney was a political fiasco!
thenation.com/article/politiâŚ
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Eight months. That's how long it took them to make it effectively a federal crime to so much as protest their illegal abuses of power or to inform the victims of their rights.
Trumpâs EO designating ANTIFA as a domestic terrorist org is worded so that anyone protesting ICE agents, filming or asking them for ID, or informing people of their rights, can be charged as a domestic terrorist.
This isnât an attack on ANTIFA.
Itâs an attack on our rights.
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We talked to child psychologists, sexual trauma specialists, psychologists who work with pedophiles, academic experts on pedophilia, network analysts. They all said YouTube has built a vast audience â maybe unprecedented â for child sexual exploitation, with grave risks for kids.
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When you ask scholars of democratic decline to name the number one red-alarm warning sign, this is almost always what they describe.
In the last two weeks, DOJ has announced the imminent departures of the solicitor general, the Civil Division chief, the Criminal Division chief, and the U.S. attorney for Manhattan.
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You can post as hard as you want about electoral backlash, but our national political institutions are simply not engineered to reflect popular will.
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The idea of rejecting institutions to build a purer society on the internet, in vogue in tech in the 90s, by the 2010s had become a mandate to abolish and remake those institutions in big tech's image
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As I reported last year with @kbennhold, YouTubeâs algorithm does something similar with politics. We found it directing large numbers of Germans news consumers toward far-right extremist videos, with real-world implications. nytimes.com/2018/09/07/worldâŚ
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But the most shocking things we found went beyond politics. Everywhere we lookedâand we looked so many placesâ YouTubers were leveraging the algorithm to sow misinfo and outrage. Schools in chaos, activist groups shuttered by threats, a lot of fear. Always began w a viral video.
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The idea that there was some Messaging or campaign adjustment that could've averted this is, sorry, cope wishcasting denying that >half the country very much sought out and wants far-right strongman rule
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It's the VCs of the 2000s and 2010s, especially Peter Thiel, who came up with a certain Elon Musk via PayPal, who argued that this was the technology industry's destiny
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There's been a movement for a few years now among many of big tech's most powerful VCs to mass block, even try to harass or ban, news reporters as a class. Journalism unwelcome in the new digital utopia. And that's the circle from which a certain new Twitter CEO comes.
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When coronavirus is allowed to spread unchecked, health systems get overwhelmed, deaths rise exponentially, and the case fatality rate jumps to near 10%. I can't believe this has to be said, but that is not any better for the economy than a prolonged shelter-in-place.
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I see a lot of people lamenting the Hunter pardon as undermining the Demsâ case that Trump presents a unique threat to democracy. I donât think people understand: that argument was decisively lost on Nov 5. The country has seen all the evidence and they donât care.
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If you remember the Clubhouse sagas of 2020, you saw how openly this is now discussed among some of the Valley's most powerful. "Why does the press have a right to investigate private companies? Let the market decide." theverge.com/2020/7/16/21325âŚ
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Our story also reveals two new studies on how YouTube shapes your reality, both exclusive, from @ufmg + @BKCHarvard
They independently confirm what many suspected: YouTube has been systematically diverting its millions of Br users toward far-right bloggers + conspiracy theories.
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YouTube's algorithm leveraged the Zika crisis to enormous gain, hooking in users desperate to understand the disease crippling their infant children. In Zika-afflicted areas, we found parent after parent virtually addicted to the platform â and served dangerous misinformation.
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The next Dem president? Theyâre mass purging the justice dept, FBI, and military. Critical parts of the state are already under the direct control of unelected cronies. We need to prepare for the possibility that this was the last free presidential election of our lifetimes.
The next Dem President will almost certainly fire Kash Patel on Day 1 and then the next GOP President will probably fire whoever the Dem appointed. Thanks to Trump the FBI Director will now become an explicitly partisan position
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This is actually crazy. A Democrat hasn't won Miami mayor since 1997. Now Dems are the #1 and #3 vote-getters in the field, by a wide margin.
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Gaza Health Ministry reports have proven reliable in the past, and their numbers so far are consistent with the scale of bombardment and siege in Gaza. This is quite a charge to make without evidence, and it's telling he did not feel compelled to provide any.
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The only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns. nytimes.com/2017/11/07/worldâŚ
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For more on what happens when YouTube and other social networks route an ever-growing global share of human social relations through engagement-maximizing algorithms, read our essay on âthe Algorithmification of the Human Experienceâ: static.nytimes.com/email-conâŚ
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Audible cheers on the UES of Manhattan. And this was one of the least blue parts of NYC.
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The @BKCHarvard study found YouTube's algorithm over & over redirecting users toward far-right and conspiracy videos.
Crucially, the algo is linking the channels together, creating an ecosystem where none had existed. Its pathways just happen to be ideal radicalization vectors.
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We talked to one mother, in Brazil, whose daughter had posted a video of her and a friend playing in swimsuits. YouTubeâs algorithm found the video and promoted it to users who watched other partly-clothed prepubescent children.
Within a few days of posting, it had 400,000 views
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One in three of TikTok's **own users** say they wish the platform didn't exist
Most polls find only ~25% of Americans oppose the ban
The idea that there is some mass popular uprising on behalf of saving TikTok is just not true
Biden & the dems who voted to ban tiktok are responsible for one of the biggest policy blunders in recent memory
banning tiktok & allowing trump to be the one who saves it is going to do irreparable damage to the democratic party's ability to connect with & engage young people
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What blows my mind about Koreaâs coronavirus success:
⢠The speed of its turnaround. The numbers are staggering.
⢠The simplicity of its model. No futuristic gadgets fueled by unobtainium. No China-style mass lockdowns. Itâs mostly political will, public will, and some planning
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Still, few in the Valley wholly shared this view. At least until 2018, when a series of disruptions radicalized â there's no other word for it â elements of the tech world, particularly around the idea that the news media is incompatible with their mission to elevate humanity.
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Equivalency discourse is a trap. Either you believe in human rights and international law or you don't.
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Iâve said this before and will keep saying it:
⢠Korea & Singapore show that covid-19 can be contained and its spread pushed to zero
⢠In the absence of Korea-style measures, you end up like Wuhan, overrun with rapid mass infection. Many countries already on this trajectory.
South Korea shows that it is possible to win against #COVID19
Testing is a big reason for their success ourworldindata.org/covid-tesâŚ
Daily new confirmed cases peaked 12 days ago and are falling since then.
You can see the data for all countries in our entry ourworldindata.org/coronavirâŚ
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To be clear, Facebookâs inaction in Myanmar and Sri Lanka wasnât because they didnât know. Human rights monitors were flying to Menlo Park and cornering FB officials at conferences to plead with them to do something, anything. They knew every step of the way.
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Itâs a distinction without a difference but we may spend years sorting out the degree to which voters affirmatively wanted a far-right strongman vs just wanted to kick out the incumbent party and didnât understand or care what they were replacing it with
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Free speech is dead, I write in a tweet that silicon valley will broadcast to 3 million people at no charge
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Why are European leaders so adamant that Americans kill and die in Afghanistan in perpetuity on their behalf? Every EU foreign policy pro Iâve ever spoken to has been clear on this: to prevent Afghan refugees from coming to Europe.
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There's a deep belief that the defining battle of our time is bw tech companies that want to liberate us and dying institutions like the newsmedia trying to halt that progress out of a desperate bid for survival. Only by destroying those institutions can big tech save humanity.
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Of course there's a lot that got us from the 1990s cyber-revolution manifestos to what we see on Twitter today, and a lot more going on behind the curtain. If you'll forgive the crass plug, I tell that story and its implications for our future in my book: littlebrown.com/titles/max-fâŚ
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