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Sam Biddle
@samfbiddle
technology reporter / sam.biddle@theintercept.com / sambiddle@protonmail.com / Signal: +1 978 261 7389
sambiddle.comJoined June 2009

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NEW: Internal Facebook memos show the company is instructing moderators to make sure graphic imagery of Ukrainians killed in Russian air strikes isn't deleted—meanwhile many Palestinian users doing the same w/ Israeli air strikes were censored this month
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Chances are extremely unlikely that you will ever be in a situation where you are forced to save one drowning person or ten people on fire. Chances are much higher that you'll be in a union-busting situation, but somehow that's less interesting to the longtermist
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I asked @willmacaskill about Elon Musk's support for longtermism - an outlook that emphasizes our moral obligation to future generations - and whether his philosophy helps tech CEOs rationalize ruthless business practices. Think our exchange was clarifying nymag.com/intelligencer/
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“Meta should respect the right for people to speak out, whether in Ukraine or Palestine,” said Shakir, of . “By silencing many people arbitrarily & without explanation, is replicating online some of the same power imbalances & rights abuses we see in the real world.”
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Facebook tells moderators to allow graphic images of Russian air strikes, but censors Israeli attacks interc.pt/3Q8V1u9 by @samfbiddle, @alicesperi
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Great piece by providing yet another example of ’s double standards. While it told moderators to allow graphic images of Russian air strikes in Ukraine, it censored Israeli attacks against Palestinians in Gaza. With comments from me.
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Internal materials show that Meta also instructed moderators to preserve posts sharing Ukrainian state propaganda efforts, for example the "Close the Sky" video Zelensky presented to Congress pushing for a No Fly Zone enforced by the US
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I asked how a pic of a child and a video of a dead old man violated Meta policies against terrorism and did not receive a response. Meta also did not answer when asked what other content policies were allegedly violated by the dozens of other instances of unduly censored posts
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I shared 2 recent examples of censored Palestinian posts w/ Meta—a portrait of a 5 y.o. girl killed in an Israeli missile attack, and a video of a man being pulled from rubble—and a spokesperson said they were deleted per the Dangerous Organizations & Individuals policy
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In fact, the internal materials show that the one time Meta has intervened w/ its moderators in the Israeli military occupation, it was to protect imagery of the occupier under attack
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there's a pretty fundamental problem here: if you want to make an unimpeachable case to the public that the president violated institutional secrecy law, it's going to be hard to do so while still retaining all of your precious institutional secrecy
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watching people whose entire ideology calls for grinding working people into a human paste pretend to be outraged on their behalf is making me feel super insane today
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it's gonna be really funny to watch this completely bogus right-wing pseudo-sympathy for The American Worker last exact 45 seconds after they move on from their tantrum over debt relief
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I just don't know how these people making $100K a year look people in the face who change seniors' bedpans for a living or drive a truck or work the railroad or stock grocery shelves or deliver their Amazon packages and say, "You, yes you, give me $10K." I just don't get it.
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It's worth paying attention to who gets angry whenever people who need help receive even a tiny bit of it from the state, and also to how angry they get about it. Not because it tells you anything about like Rep. Jim Jordan that you didn't already know, but because it is funny.
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Technology innovations do not threaten anyone. They are neutral. Anyone can adopt them. If anyone feels threatened, it's probably because they are mismanaged. In other words, their own mismanagement are threatening themselves.
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this is maybe literally the most dangerous possible thing someone in the business of technology can believe about technology
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Technology innovations do not threaten anyone. They are neutral. Anyone can adopt them. If anyone feels threatened, it's probably because they are mismanaged. In other words, their own mismanagement are threatening themselves.
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so if this post is to be believed it took Meta four weeks and 40 iterations to create a specially custom-made Zuck avatar that didn't look like it was from a gamecube game
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I figured an artist must have been tasked *after* that ill-received Horizon post, but apparently here's the real story behind the latest avatar. 4 weeks and 40 iterations with Zuck himself. What would your avatar look like with dedicated artists and several weeks of iteration?
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i love when NASA just tweets something like “Check this out — space sounds like the wailing of billions of souls trapped forever in Hell! They are calling for your blood! Wow!”
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The misconception that there is no sound in space originates because most space is a ~vacuum, providing no way for sound waves to travel. A galaxy cluster has so much gas that we've picked up actual sound. Here it's amplified, and mixed with other data, to hear a black hole!
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scoop from me: Chevron unrolled a "local news and information" website in Texas this week, and data shows that the author of the "articles" is a San Francisco PR professional who has been running a similar Chevron-funded "newspaper" in CA for years:
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