onfocus

"As I scrolled through endless collections of these online, I found it hard to escape the conclusion that America’s police forces are not just unfairly brutal — they also do not seem to care anymore about being caught on tape."

Cameras are capturing what our system with no consequences for bad actors looks like.

By continuing to provide him with a platform, Facebook and Twitter have become a key mechanism in the president’s effort to silence his critics and violate their civil rights — not in their news feeds or timelines, but where they worship, where they gather, and even where they live.

I know I'm a broken record on this, but Facebook is a key piece of infrastructure for our lives and it's doing real harm in the world.

"Facebook’s principles and policies supporting free speech “show that the right action where we are right now is to leave this up,” Mr. Zuckerberg said on the call referring to Mr. Trump’s posts."

I just deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts after reading this. Enough.

Matt Haughey on social media trolls:

“Every bad thing at MetaFilter happened with someone who had been testing the rules for a year or two,” he said. “Those are the ones who tend to blossom into super-trolls over time. They’ll see what they can get away with, they’ll figure out what the limits are, and just stay a step inside. It can go on forever. And when you inevitably break and say, this is a bad idea, they freak out, and try to play the victim.”

Good for Twitter for starting to enforce their terms at this late hour. I can imagine a world where they enforced their terms all along and it makes me disappointed and angry.

“Polarizing divisive content is to Facebook as nicotine is to cigarette makers: a component of their product which their own internal research shows is harmful, but which they choose to increase, rather than decrease, because its addictiveness is so profitable.”

Ethics in social media.

Best summary I’ve read of the Twitter activist investor threat.

"But business ain’t beanbag, and “good enough” clearly isn’t cutting it for Paul Singer. Unless something changes dramatically, it would appear that Jack Dorsey is in for the fight of his life."

After bending over backward to not enforce Twitter policy for politicians, this is the thanks Jack gets?

38 albums of soundtracks are now widely available to stream.

Hooray for more beautiful Studio Ghibli creations more widely available!

Are movies getting more divisive? Rex shows that Rotten Tomatoes audience vs. critics scores are getting further apart.

"Many films from the past year saw huge disparities between audience and critic ratings. For instance, Gemini Man, a deepfake doppelganger thriller starring Will Smith, scored 83% fresh with audiences, but a paltry 26% fresh with critics."

Click through to see many more examples.

I’m enjoying the Recs reboot. I assume you already subscribe because I made subscribing mandatory last year. If not, now is the time!

Your weekend long read that attempts to explain why the US is politically polarized:

"Destructive cherry-picking breeds fear, anger, and cynicism. It’s why we always think crime is getting worse even though it’s almost always getting better."

The most resonant part to me was about media negativity bias and disgust. It's a cliché that we don't hear good news but it's also true and feeds our cognitive biases.

"The new thing here is that Yandex is working not just as a reverse image search tool; it seems to be doing facial matching."

Nelson has an interesting follow-up to the bellingcat guide to reverse image searching I posted recently.

"The warmongers are never ruined by their mistakes."

Justified outrage at the media's willful ignorance of recent history.

The state of reverse image search on the web.

"...if you only use Google for reverse image searching, you will be disappointed more often than not."

As disinformation season ramps up in 2020, finding an image origin is a useful tool to have.