The Smoking Gun in the Facebook Antitrust Case
The government wants to break up the world’s biggest social network. Internal company emails show why.
https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-ftc-antitrust-case-smoking-gun/
At first blush, privacy and antitrust might seem like separate issues—two different chapters in a textbook about big tech. But the decline in Facebook’s privacy protections plays a central role in the states’ case. Antitrust is a complicated field built on a simple premise: When a company doesn’t face real competition, it will be free to do bad things.
a conceptual breakthrough on that front. In a paper titled “The Antitrust Case Against Facebook,” the legal scholar Dina Srinivasan argued that Facebook’s takeover of the social networking market has inflicted a very specific harm on consumers: It has forced them to accept ever worse privacy settings. Facebook, Srinivasan pointed out, began its existence in 2004 by differentiating itself on privacy. Unlike then-dominant MySpace, for example, where profiles were visible to anyone by default, Facebook profiles could be seen only by your friends or people at the same school
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Facebook hit with antitrust probe for tying Oculus use to Facebook accounts
https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/10/facebook-hit-with-antitrust-probe-for-tying-oculus-use-to-facebook-accounts
In recent years Facebook has been pushing to add a ‘social layer’ to the VR platform — but the heavy-handed requirement for Oculus users to have a Facebook account has not proved popular with gamers.
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more on Facebook in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=facebook
Chris Hughes
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2019/05/09/break-up-facebook/
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/22/surprised-about-mark-zuckerbergs-secret-meeting-with-trump-dont-be
Thiel is notorious among Silicon Valley billionaires for explicitly endorsing Trump in 2016 and speaking at the Republican National Convention that year. Thiel, a libertarian who runs a company that enhances government surveillance efforts, has also questioned the value of women voting.
a series of dinners at Zuckerberg’s home in California with conservative pundits and activists like white supremacist Tucker Carlson of Fox News.
It’s safe to say that Zuckerberg’s politics are issue-specific and generally party-agnostic.
Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard after two years. Zuckerberg has enrolled for the past decade at the University of Davos, where rich people pretend they are smart and smart people pander to the rich. If someone chooses to study world politics from Henry Kissinger, you can assume that he will have some twisted views of how the world works.
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More on Siva Vaidhyanathan in this IMS blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2018/04/15/no-millennials-gen-z-gen-x/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/02/chinese-face-swap-app-zao-triggers-privacy-fears-viral
Released on Friday, the Zao app went viral as Chinese users seized on the chance to see themselves act out scenes from well-known movies using deepfake technology, which has already prompted concerns elsewhere over potential misuse.
As of Monday afternoon it remained the top free download in China, according to the app market data provider App Annie.
Concerns over deepfakes have grown since the 2016 US election campaign, which saw wide use of online misinformation, according to US investigations.
In June, Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said the social network was struggling to find ways to deal with deepfake videos, saying they may constitute “a completely different category” of misinformation than anything faced before.
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more on deepfake in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=deepfake
http://lwveducation.com/the-prize-who-is-in-charge-of-americas-schools/
podcast: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/fresh-air/id214089682?mt=2&i=352838278
The Prize is a story about good intentions gone awry. They turn into political struggles, condescending and arrogant management policies, and money wasted. They are thwarted by community mistrust which led to rebellion. Note that none of this mentions the children. It may be an opportunity lost for them. If their parents stay involved, workable strategies to improve schools may emerge.
The Prize gives little insight into what works in schools to break the cycle of poverty. The Newark example explains what did not work. Individual teachers, given adequate support, are effective. Some lessons learned about charter and district collaboration have emerged. Small steps are being taken. I will post them next. What we do know is that, in the last analysis, parents own the schools. Without them, nothing good will happen.