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
Sam Biddle
@samfbiddle
technology reporter / sam.biddle@theintercept.com / sambiddle@protonmail.com / Signal: +1 978 261 7389
sambiddle.comJoined June 2009
Sam Biddle’s Tweets
I wrote about Amazon Care’s failure, and why it was never going to revolutionize healthcare
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Without any history left to worry about, it's finally time to game
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Alex Hanna, formerly of the Ethical AI team at Google, talks about the AI principles that Google has adopted—after worker pressure—that prevent building tech that may do harm or violate international law.
"Project Nimbus contravene all of these."
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Anthony Ornato, Secret Service official sought by investigators for role in Jan. 6, retires unexpectedly interc.pt/3CCGVxJ by
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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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Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters scrubbed language on campaign website saying the 2020 election was stolen from Trump
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No punishment for use of force for the NYPD officer who ripped down a BLM protester’s face mask to pepper spray him in 2020 — and then bragged about it thecity.nyc/2022/8/29/2332
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Congratulations, this pleases precisely no one except guys that spent their life savings on NFTs in November
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Snoop & Eminem performing at MTV VMAs in @OthersideMeta and using their @BoredApeYC IP
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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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Rights advocates I spoke to ( ) say this is the latest example of a glaring double standard in how Meta treats different populations. Of course the Ukraine imagery is newsworthy and deserving of protection—but so are the deaths of other civilians
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Usually they don’t admit the Poverty Draft exists, let alone endorse it.
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Student loan forgiveness undermines one of our military’s greatest recruitment tools at a time of dangerously low enlistments.
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It's been only 3 months since Israel killed Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh & already the White House has dropped any pretense of pressing for accountability in its meetings w/ Israeli officials. This is a shameful readout, . #JusticeforShireen
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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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obviously nothing will convince a lot of the hardcore bad faith MAGA 'skeptics' on the right but come on
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jamie foxx doesn't get enough credit as potentially most talented living human
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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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the classic conservative trope:
"why do you support [social welfare policy] when there are homeless veterans???"
"ok ,what do you want to do to house homeless veterans then?"
"oh whoa hey is that a gay librarian over there??"
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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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CEO of $3 billion real estate corporation recently told investors a recession could be "good" if "unemployment...puts employers back in the driver seat," per earnings call I found:
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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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gmail lawyer is slightly better than a yahoo mail lawyer I guess
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There's a 0% chance the FBI said this
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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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iOS VPNs have leaked traffic for more than 2 years, researcher claims
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