/04

Technology advances forced the Census Bureau to use sweeping measures to ensure privacy for respondents. The ensuing debate goes to the heart of what a census is
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/21/us/census-data-privacy-concerns.html

Census Block 1002 in downtown Chicago is wedged between Michigan and Wabash Avenues, a glitzy Trump-branded hotel and a promenade of cafes and bars. According to the 2020 census, 14 people live there — 13 adults and one child. Also according to the 2020 census, they live underwater. Because the block consists entirely of a 700-foot bend in the Chicago River. (...) “But in my opinion, producing low quality data to achieve privacy protection defeats the purpose of the decennial census.”

@simplicissimus

College-Educated Workers Help Unionize Places Like Starbucks - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/28/business/college-workers-starbucks-amazon-unions.html

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Over the past decade and a half, many young, college-educated workers have faced a disturbing reality: that it was harder for them to reach the middle class than for previous generations. The change has had profound effects — driving shifts in the country’s politics and mobilizing employees to demand fairer treatment at work. It may also be giving the labor movement its biggest lift in decades.

#travailleurs

Obama Calls for More Oversight of Social Media in Speech at Stanford - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/21/technology/obama-stanford-tech-regulation.html?algo=combo_lda_channelsize5_unique_edim

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PALO ALTO, Calif. — Former President Barack Obama on Thursday called for greater regulatory oversight of the country’s social media giants, saying their power to curate the information that people consume has “turbocharged” political polarization and threatened the pillars of democracy across the globe.

Weighing in on the debate over how to address the spread of disinformation, he said the companies needed to subject their proprietary algorithms to the same kind of regulatory oversight that ensured the safety of cars, food and other consumer products.

“Tech companies need to be more transparent about how they operate,” Mr. Obama said in a speech at Stanford University, long an incubator for the tech sector in Silicon Valley. “So much of the conversation around disinformation is focused on what people post. The bigger issue is what content these platforms promote.”

The former president lent his support to proposals to revise a key legal shield for internet companies: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects social media platforms from liability for content that their users post. Supporters of a change believe it would force companies to do more to curb illegal or dangerous behavior — from drug sales to disinformation with equally harmful consequences.

Mr. Obama, while praising the internet’s transformative benefits, urged companies to put social responsibility ahead of the relentless quest for profits.

“These companies need to have some other North Star than just making money and increasing profit shares,” he said.

Mr. Obama spoke at a conference organized by Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, which is dedicated to the challenges the digital world has created for democracy in the United States and beyond. He cited his own effective use of social media as a candidate but also his frustration with how Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, used social media to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

“What does still nag at me was my failure to fully appreciate how susceptible we had become to lies and conspiracy theories, despite being a target of disinformation myself,” he said, referring to, among other things, the false debate over his U.S. birth certificate. “Putin didn’t do that. He didn’t have to. We did it to ourselves.”

#Médias_sociaux #Barack_Obama #régulation

What Are Elon Musk’s Political Views? - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/16/business/elon-musk-politics-twitter.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20220417&instance

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The billionaire in pursuit of Twitter has often been described as a libertarian, but he has not shrunk from government help when it has been good for business.

But what no one seemed to be able to say with any certainty was what kind of political philosophy the enigmatic billionaire believes himself.

That’s because Mr. Musk, 50, who was born in South Africa and only became an American citizen in 2002, expresses views that don’t fit neatly into this country’s binary, left-right political framework.

He is frequently described as libertarian, though that label fails to capture how paradoxical and random his politics can be. He has no shortage of opinions on the most pertinent and divisive issues of the day, from Covid-19 lockdowns (“fascist,” he called them) to immigration restrictions (“Very much disagree,” he has said).

There is not much consistency in the miscellany of his public statements or his profuse Twitter commentary — except that they often align with his business interests. And despite the intense partisan reaction to his unsolicited bid to buy Twitter, his opaque politics make it difficult to say whether the elation and fear about how he would run the company are justified.

He has railed against federal subsidies but his companies have benefited from billions of dollars in tax breaks and other incentives from federal, state and local governments. He has strenuously opposed unionization, criticizing the Biden administration for proposing a tax credit for electric vehicles produced by union workers.

His concerns about the way Twitter now censors content echo those of conservative activists and politicians who have argued that social media companies are poor arbiters of truth and should not be engaged in policing speech. One person who has worked closely with Mr. Musk said that it is Mr. Musk’s firmly held belief that in a functioning democracy, it is anyone’s right to say “whatever stupid thing you want.” This person, who spoke anonymously to not violate Mr. Musk’s trust, added dryly, “Which he occasionally does.”

If he should become Twitter’s owner, Mr. Musk said he would scrap the current program of content monitoring and censoring. Conservatives were elated. “Elon Musk seems to be our last hope,” declared Tucker Carlson of Fox News.

Mr. Musk tends to give only a few thousand dollars at a time — nothing like the tens of millions that Mr. Thiel has given this year to support candidates like J.D. Vance for Senate in Ohio, for instance. And his giving is fairly evenly distributed to candidates in both political parties. He has donated to stalwarts in the Democratic Party, including Hillary Clinton and former President Barack Obama. But he has also cut checks to Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, and to the Republican National Committee.

Here, too, his actions appear to reflect the moves of someone who is not thinking ideologically but pragmatically. Many of his donations were funneled to politicians in states where Tesla has manufacturing operations like Texas and California. He has given to both Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, and Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat.

#Elon_Musk #Libertarianisme

A Billionaires’ World - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/26/briefing/elon-musk-twitter-sale.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/04/26/multimedia/26-the-morning-lede1-promo/26-the-morning-lede1-facebookJumbo.jpg

This wealth conveys vast power on a small group of people. They can attempt to shape politics, as the Koch family has done. They can create a global charity, as Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates have done. They can buy a national media organization, as Jeff Bezos has done.

Or they can buy a social media network when its policies annoy them, as Elon Musk is in the process of doing.

Twitter announced yesterday that its board had accepted a $44 billion bid for the company from Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX and currently the world’s richest man. He is using $21 billion of his own cash in the deal.

Musk, who calls himself a “free speech absolutist,” has suggested that he will be less aggressive than Twitter’s current management about blocking some content — including misinformation, in all likelihood. He plans to take the company private, which will give him tighter control than he would have over a public company.

The deal is the latest example of how extreme inequality is shaping American society. A small number of very wealthy people end up making decisions that affect millions of others. That has always been true, of course. But it is truer when inequality is so high.

#Elon_Musk #Twitter

The Perils of Legalization - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/24/briefing/drug-legalization-opioid-crisis-week-ahead.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/04/24/multimedia/24THE-AM-Sun-promo/24THE-AM-Sun-lede-Youngstown-facebookJumbo.jpg

Drug overdose deaths in the U.S. reached their highest point ever recorded last year, with more than 100,000 deaths over 12 months. Deaths are up nearly 50 percent since the start of the Covid pandemic.

Whenever I write about deadly overdoses, some readers ask: Why not legalize and regulate drugs? They argue that the government causes more harm by outlawing drugs and enforcing those bans through policing and incarceration. They suggest that legalization and regulation could better minimize the risks involved.

So today I want to explain why that argument goes only so far — and why many experts are skeptical.

“Drug warriors said we should have a drug-free nation, which was totally bogus,” Jonathan Caulkins, a drug policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University, told me. “But it is totally bogus on the other side to say we can legalize and all the problems will go away.”

In fact, we are living through a crisis that shows the risks of legalization: the opioid epidemic.

The problem began with a legal, regulated drug: prescription painkillers. Pharmaceutical companies promised the drugs would help address pain, a major public health issue. But when the pills were made widely available in the 1990s, their use skyrocketed — along with addiction and overdoses. And instead of carefully regulating the drugs, officials consistently gave in to profit-minded pharmaceutical companies, which sold opioids to millions of people.

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As we now know, those opioids were not as safe or as effective as claimed.

But federal agencies consistently failed to act as painkiller overdose deaths quadrupled, the drug policy historian Kathleen Frydl argued:

After approving OxyContin with faulty data, the Food and Drug Administration did not explicitly restrict its use until the 2010s.

The Drug Enforcement Administration sets limits on how many opioids can be produced, but it increased those limits for years, until the mid-2010s. The quota for oxycodone was nearly 13 times higher at its peak in 2013 compared with 1998. Without higher quotas, “we wouldn’t have an opioid crisis,” Frydl told me.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not publish guidelines calling for stricter prescription of opioids until 2016, more than two decades after OxyContin was approved.

The bottom line

No one drug policy is perfect, and all involve trade-offs. “We’ve got freedom, pleasure, health, crime and public safety,” the Stanford drug policy expert Keith Humphreys has told me. “You can push on one and two of those — maybe even three with different drugs — but you can’t get rid of all of them. You have to pay the piper somewhere.”

#Opioides #Légalisation #Drogues

The YouTube Rabbit Hole Is Nuanced - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/21/technology/youtube-rabbit-hole.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/04/21/business/21OnTech-YouTube-promo/21OnTech-YouTube-promo-facebookJumbo.png

Shira Ovide

By Shira Ovide
April 21, 2022

Perhaps you have an image in your mind of people who get brainwashed by YouTube.

You might picture your cousin who loves to watch videos of cuddly animals. Then out of the blue, YouTube’s algorithm plops a terrorist recruitment video at the top of the app and continues to suggest ever more extreme videos until he’s persuaded to take up arms.

A new analysis adds nuance to our understanding of YouTube’s role in spreading beliefs that are far outside the mainstream.

A group of academics found that YouTube rarely suggests videos that might feature conspiracy theories, extreme bigotry or quack science to people who have shown little interest in such material. And those people are unlikely to follow such computerized recommendations when they are offered. The kittens-to-terrorist pipeline is extremely uncommon.

That doesn’t mean YouTube is not a force in radicalization. The paper also found that research volunteers who already held bigoted views or followed YouTube channels that frequently feature fringe beliefs were far more likely to seek out or be recommended more videos along the same lines.

The findings suggest that policymakers, internet executives and the public should focus less on the potential risk of an unwitting person being led into extremist ideology on YouTube, and more on the ways that YouTube may help validate and harden the views of people already inclined to such beliefs.

“We’ve understated the way that social media facilitates demand meeting supply of extreme viewpoints,” said Brendan Nyhan, one of the paper’s co-authors and a Dartmouth College professor who studies misperceptions about politics and health care. “Even a few people with extreme views can create grave harm in the world.”

People watch more than one billion hours of YouTube videos daily. There are perennial concerns that the Google-owned site may amplify extremist voices, silence legitimate expression or both, similar to the worries that surround Facebook.

This is just one piece of research, and I mention below some limits of the analysis. But what’s intriguing is that the research challenges the binary notion that either YouTube’s algorithm risks turning any of us into monsters or that kooky things on the internet do little harm. Neither may be true.

(You can read the research paper here. A version of it was also published earlier by the Anti-Defamation League.)
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Digging into the details, about 0.6 percent of research participants were responsible for about 80 percent of the total watch time for YouTube channels that were classified as “extremist,” such as that of the far-right figures David Duke and Mike Cernovich. (YouTube banned Duke’s channel in 2020.)

Most of those people found the videos not by accident but by following web links, clicking on videos from YouTube channels that they subscribed to, or following YouTube’s recommendations. About one in four videos that YouTube recommended to people watching an extreme YouTube channel were another video like it.

Only 108 times during the research — about 0.02 percent of all video visits the researchers observed — did someone watching a relatively conventional YouTube channel follow a computerized suggestion to an outside-the-mainstream channel when they were not already subscribed.

The analysis suggests that most of the audience for YouTube videos promoting fringe beliefs are people who want to watch them, and then YouTube feeds them more of the same. The researchers found that viewership was far more likely among the volunteers who displayed high levels of gender or racial resentment, as measured based on their responses to surveys.

“Our results make clear that YouTube continues to provide a platform for alternative and extreme content to be distributed to vulnerable audiences,” the researchers wrote.

Like all research, this analysis has caveats. The study was conducted in 2020, after YouTube made significant changes to curtail recommending videos that misinform people in a harmful way. That makes it difficult to know whether the patterns that researchers found in YouTube recommendations would have been different in prior years.

Independent experts also haven’t yet rigorously reviewed the data and analysis, and the research didn’t examine in detail the relationship between watching YouTubers such as Laura Loomer and Candace Owens, some of whom the researchers named and described as having “alternative” channels, and viewership of extreme videos.

More studies are needed, but these findings suggest two things. First, YouTube may deserve credit for the changes it made to reduce the ways that the site pushed people to views outside the mainstream that they weren’t intentionally seeking out.

Second, there needs to be more conversation about how much further YouTube should go to reduce the exposure of potentially extreme or dangerous ideas to people who are inclined to believe them. Even a small minority of YouTube’s audience that might regularly watch extreme videos is many millions of people.

Should YouTube make it more difficult, for example, for people to link to fringe videos — something it has considered? Should the site make it harder for people who subscribe to extremist channels to automatically see those videos or be recommended similar ones? Or is the status quo fine?

This research reminds us to continually wrestle with the complicated ways that social media can both be a mirror of the nastiness in our world and reinforce it, and to resist easy explanations. There are none.

#YouTube #Influence #Extrêmiste #Recommandation

Opinion | They Are the Heirs of Nazi Fortunes, and They Aren’t Apologizing - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/19/opinion/bmw-porsche-nazi-germany-quandt-flick.html

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The backbone of Germany’s economy today is the car industry. It’s not just that it accounts for about 10 percent of G.D.P.; brands like Porsche, Mercedes, BMW and Volkswagen are recognized around the world as symbols of German industrial ingenuity and excellence. These companies spend millions on branding and advertising to ensure they are thought of this way. They spend less money and energy on discussing their roots. These corporations can trace their success directly back to Nazis: Ferdinand Porsche persuaded Hitler to put Volkswagen into production. His son, Ferry Porsche, who built up the company, was a voluntary SS officer. Herbert Quandt, who built BMW into what it is today, committed war crimes. So did Friedrich Flick, who came to control Daimler-Benz. Unlike Mr. Quandt, Mr. Flick was convicted at Nuremberg.

Apple’s Zipped Lips on Chips - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/19/technology/apple-computer-chips.html

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Intéressant cet article sur la géopolitique des puces et les délais d’autonomie des entreprises et des Etats.

U.S. and European officials talk incessantly about making more of the world’s advanced computer chips anywhere other than Taiwan, which they consider vulnerable to Chinese invasion or influence. They’re on a mission to make more chips in the U.S. and Europe and want to spend taxpayer dollars to do so.

Apple doesn’t seem so worried. For years to come, Apple has planned for devices rolling off assembly lines to continue relying on chips made largely in Taiwan.

Apple has a track record of bending global technology manufacturing to its will, and the company has lobbied for more computer chips to be made in America. But Apple and other big buyers of chips do not seem to have made it a priority and are not seriously using their influence over suppliers to speed up the building of chip factories in the U.S., Japan or Europe.

“The industry is not raising this as something that they need to see some action on immediately,” said Brett Simpson, a computer chip specialist and partner at the investment firm Arete Research.

The apparent disconnect between Western governments and the biggest buyers of chips, like Apple, raises a question for both companies and policymakers: Who is right about the urgency of the economic and geopolitical risks of concentrating chip-making in Taiwan — the people who need votes or the companies that vote with their wallets?

Government officials might be overstating the risks of concentrating chip-making in Taiwan, or chip buyers like Apple might be underestimating them. Or maybe these companies find it too daunting to shift more quickly away from the expertise of Taiwan’s chip factories. Whatever the reason, it’s as if elected leaders and the companies that need chips the most are working from a different sense of what is possible and necessary for the future of this essential industry.

Let me recap why big businesses and big governments want to keep computer chips flowing but aren’t moving in lock step on how and how quickly to achieve that.

Many important products — including smartphones, medical devices and fighter jets — need computer chips to function as their brains or memory. Some of us have become keenly aware of these teeny components because the manufacturing of computer chips hasn’t kept up with the demand of people who have wanted to buy cars, computers and other goods during the pandemic.

The shortages of some products, and the increasing tensions between the U.S. and China, have turned the spotlight onto the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC. It makes most of the world’s cutting-edge computer chips, including for Apple’s products, almost entirely in factories in Taiwan.
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TSMC is expanding into other places, including Arizona, but it takes years to get new factories up and running. It’s in everyone’s interest to keep factories churning out computer chips without interruption, because the global economy sputters otherwise. The Biden administration and many tech experts also say that it’s strategically important to preserve America’s know-how in chip-making and counter China’s ambitions in chip-making and other essential tech areas.

Changing the world’s reliance on chips made in Taiwan won’t be easy, and industry officials told me that Apple has been working behind the scenes to support legislation to manufacture more chips in America.

Some big chip buyers also have said that they’re helping TSMC pay for its chip factories outside Taiwan and will buy chips manufactured there. The question is whether all this could move faster if influential customers put more of their muscle into it.

Simpson told me that if Apple and other big customers such as Qualcomm and Nvidia wanted to more quickly spread manufacturing away from Taiwan, they could press TSMC to get new factories ready to go all at once rather than in phases, as TSMC has been doing. They could also commit to buying more chips from other manufacturers such as Samsung and Intel with factories outside Taiwan. Instead, Apple and others have mostly been doubling down on contracts with TSMC.

When Washington and Silicon Valley don’t seem to share the same sense of urgency, it’s tough for all of us to know if it’s worth the collective effort to create a new world order in computer chips.

#Puces #Géopolitique #Economie_numérique

Before Giving Billions to Jared Kushner, Saudi Investment Fund Had Big Doubts - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/10/us/jared-kushner-saudi-investment-fund.html

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Le cadeau saoudien à Jared Kushner | Le blogue de Richard Hétu
▻https://richardhetu.com/2022/04/11/le-cadeau-saoudien-a-jared-kushner

La transaction soulève plusieurs questions. L’investissement saoudien constitue-t-il un retour d’ascenseur pour les services rendus par un ancien conseiller présidentiel ? Après tout, Kushner a joué un rôle important pour défendre MBS après l’assassinat du journaliste Jamal Khashoggi ainsi que pour protéger les ventes d’armes à l’Arabie saoudite remises en question par le Congrès après la catastrophe humanitaire engendrée par les bombardements saoudiens au Yémen.

Ou les 2 milliards de dollars représentent-ils une sorte d’acompte pour assurer la bienveillance de Kushner au cas d’un retour de Donald Trump au pouvoir ?

Jared Kushner, faut-il préciser, n’est pas accusé d’avoir enfreint la loi en recevant ce cadeau, euh… cet investissement saoudien. Mais il y a quelque chose de profondément troublant dans cette transaction conclue quelques mois seulement après un séjour à la Maison-Blanche au cours duquel l’ex-conseiller a noué une relation étroite avec MBS, allant même jusqu’à communiquer avec lui via WhatsApp. Imaginez un peu quelle aurait été la réaction du New York Post et de Fox News si Hunter Biden avait réussi le même coup après avoir conseillé son père de président.

#états-unis

A Violent Crisis - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/17/briefing/violent-crime-ukraine-war-week-ahead.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/04/17/multimedia/17THE-AM-Sun-promo/17THE-AM-Sun-lede-01-facebookJumbo.jpg

Three explanations help explain the increase in violence. The Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns disrupted all aspects of life, including the social services that can tame crime and violence. The high-profile police killings of 2020 and the protests that followed strained police-community relations. And Americans bought a record number of guns in recent years.

Another explanation, covered in this newsletter before, ties these issues together: a growing sense of social discord and distrust. As Americans lose faith in their institutions and each other, they are more likely to lash out — sometimes in violent ways, Randolph Roth, a crime historian at Ohio State University, told me.

Besides Covid and police brutality, the country’s increasingly polarized politics and poor economic conditions have also fueled this discord. That helps explain the murder spike, as well as recent increases in drug addiction and overdoses, mental health problems, car crashes and even confrontations over masks on airplanes.

#Violence #Etats-Unis

New Drug Slashed Deaths Among Patients With Severe Covid, Maker Claims - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/11/health/covid-sabizabulin-veru.html

An experimental drug halved the death rate among critically ill Covid patients who were receiving supplemental oxygen and were at high risk for serious lung disease and death, the drug’s developer announced on Monday.

There is a pressing need for new treatments for critically ill patients. Drugs like Paxlovid, made by Pfizer, are aimed primarily at patients who have mild or moderate disease. Other treatments administered to hospitalized patients in serious condition have shown limited effectiveness.

The new drug, #sabizabulin, reduced deaths among hospitalized Covid-19 patients so drastically in a clinical trial that independent safety monitors recommended stopping it early, officials at Veru Inc., the drug’s maker, said. The trial was halted on Friday.

Elon Musk Is a Digital Citizen Kane - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/14/technology/elon-musk-is-a-digital-citizen-kane.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/04/15/business/14OnTech-MuskTwitter-NL-GIF/14OnTech-MuskTwitter-NL-GIF-facebookJumbo.jpg

By Shira Ovide

What if one of the world’s important tools for information was owned by a mercurial billionaire who could do whatever he wanted with it?

Yes, I am talking about Elon Musk’s proposal to purchase Twitter for himself, which he disclosed on Thursday. His offer works out to more than $43 billion, which is a lot of money, even for Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and the owner of SpaceX. (Musk’s letter offering to buy Twitter said that his purchase would be conditioned on finding help in paying for the acquisition. It didn’t say where the money might come from.)

Will Musk actually have the cash and attention span to follow through on his proposed acquisition, and will Twitter say yes? Who knows? The word “unpredictable” doesn’t do justice to this moment. We’re already in Week 2 of Musk and Twitter’s very public and rocky romance, and there may be more weirdness to come.

But imagine that Musk eventually buys Twitter from the stockholders who own it today. The closest comparison to this might be the 19th-century newspaper barons like William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer and the fictional Charles Foster Kane, who used their papers to pursue their personal agendas, sensationalize world events and harass their enemies.

We have not really had a Citizen Kane of the digital age, but Musk might be it. And Twitter’s global influence is arguably larger and more powerful than that of any Hearst newspaper of its day.

Jeff Bezos’ purchase of The Washington Post and Rupert Murdoch’s news media empire are close, perhaps, but this would be a milestone: A 21st-century tech baron’s purchase of a digital platform of global importance, with the purpose of recasting it in his image.

“He would be a throwback to the ‘Citizen Kane’ days of press barons using their newspapers to advance their favorite causes,” Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan’s business school, told me.

Musk’s favorite idea is a Twitter that operates the way he uses Twitter: no holds barred. He imagines a social network transformed, by him, into a paragon of expression without theoretical limits.

It’s basically the same pitch that former President Donald J. Trump has for his app, Truth Social. Several other social media sites also promised to build internet gatherings without the arbitrary rules imposed by companies like Twitter, Google and Facebook. But those sites remain relatively small and unimportant compared with Twitter.
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Musk’s proposed purchase of Twitter, then, would amount to a real-world experiment in a parallel social media app without restrictions on what people can do or say. I don’t know what this would look like when applied.

Truth Social does not permit absolute free expression. Few people want to have their social media feeds clogged by spammy advertisements for cryptocurrency, terrorist recruitment pitches or harassment of children. No one is sure what a Twitter that is accountable to no one but Musk would be like. (One intriguing question: Would Musk restore Trump’s Twitter account?)

I also wonder if Musk actually wants to own Twitter. It’s fun to imagine what you’d do if you were the boss of Twitter, but it’s not so fun actually being the boss of Twitter. Look at Mark Zuckerberg running Facebook. That guy does not seem like he’s having fun.

“My guess is that Musk enjoys being able to tell Twitter what to do and does not care very much about it actually getting done,” the Bloomberg Opinion writer Matt Levine said Tuesday in an eerily prescient column.

If Twitter were solely owned by Musk, he wouldn’t have to worry about the vagaries of a stock price or shareholders’ demands, as Zuckerberg does. But that doesn’t mean Musk would be free from irritations.

When you own a powerful internet site, you might be on the receiving end of threats from the Russian government to imprison your employees over posts they don’t like or a family member asking why a stalker is allowed to harass them in their private messages. Musk might not want to deal with the ugly details of owning a tool of global influence, but he wouldn’t have a choice if he were Twitter’s sole proprietor.

I want us to save a small measure of pity for the executives and directors of Twitter. They are in an impossible situation. (The company said that its board would “carefully review” Musk’s proposal and decide what it believes is in the best interests of Twitter and its stockholders.)

Twitter’s board of directors could agree to Musk’s offer, and he could decide that finding the cash to buy Twitter and turn it into an imagined free-speech haven is not a great use of his money, time and energy. Then, Twitter would have a worthless acquisition offer, the company’s share price would most likely tank, and angry stockholders would probably sue the board.

Twitter’s board could say no to Musk on the theory that the company has a long-term plan that would make it far more valuable than what Musk is offering. In that case, Musk has said, he might sell the billions of dollars in Twitter shares that he recently bought. Twitter’s stock price would most likely tank, and angry stockholders would probably sue the board.

Twitter’s relatively new chief executive, Parag Agrawal, might prefer to yank out his toenails than to deal with weeks of messy drama over Musk. Maybe it’s not great for Musk, either, to continue engaging in messy drama over Twitter — although … OK, that is what he does in his leisure time.

What if Musk achieves what he thinks he wants? I won’t spoil the movie “Citizen Kane” if you haven’t seen it, but here is the short version: Kane achieved his wildest dreams, and he was miserable.

#Elon_Musk #Twitter #Libertarien #Idéologie #Richesse

Videos Show Grand Rapids Police Officer Fatally Shooting Patrick Lyoya - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/13/us/grand-rapids-police-shooting-michigan-patrick-lyoya.html

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Voilà ce qui nous attend. Pour ce qui est du soft power (au service du hard power, évidemment) les USA sont toujours un pas en avance.

A New York Times investigation last fall revealed that American police officers, over the previous five years, had killed more than 400 motorists who were not wielding a gun or knife or under pursuit for a violent crime. The Times found that police culture and court precedents significantly overstated the danger to officers at vehicle stops.

Police killings of Black men have dominated national discussions about law enforcement in recent years, particularly after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020 touched off protests across the country, including in Grand Rapids. Already this year, more than 250 people have been fatally shot by on-duty police officers nationwide, according to a Washington Post database, close to the pace from both 2020 and 2021, when more than 1,000 people were shot dead by the police.

#Police #USA

Will Substack Go Beyond Newsletters? A Company Weighs Its Future. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/13/business/media/substack-growth-newsletters.html?algo=combo_lda_channelsize5_unique_edimp_f

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Not long ago, Substack haunted mainstream media executives, poaching their star writers, luring their readers and, they feared, threatening their viability. Flush with venture money, the start-up was said to be “the media future.”

But now, Substack finds itself no longer a wunderkind but a company facing a host of challenges. Depending on whom you talk to, those challenges are either standard start-up growing pains or threats to the company’s future.

Tech giants, news outlets and other companies have released competing newsletter platforms in the past year. Consumers who loaded up on newsletters during the pandemic began to scale back. And many popular writers left, such as the associate English professor Grace Lavery and the climate journalists Mary Annaïse Heglar and Amy Westervelt, often complaining about the company’s moderation policy or the pressure to constantly deliver.

“Substack is at a pivot point where it needs to think about what it’s going to be when it grows up,” said Nikki Usher, an associate journalism professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

The good news for the company, five years old this summer, is that it is still growing. Paid subscriptions to its hundreds of thousands of newsletters exploded to more than one million late last year from 50,000 in mid-2019. (The company won’t disclose the number of free subscribers.) A hiring spree hopes to net more than a dozen engineers, product managers and other specialists. Executives hope to eventually take the company — which has raised more than $82 million and is said to be valued at $650 million — public.

But to maintain that growth, Substack executives say, the company must offer more than newsletters.

In practice, that means Substack will be not just a delivery channel for written newsletters but more of a multimedia community. Executives want users to create “personal media empires” using text, video and audio, and communicate with subscribers through expanded comments that could feature GIF images and profiles for readers. This week, Substack announced new tools for writers to recommend other newsletters.

But as Substack evolves beyond newsletters, it risks looking like another social network or news publisher — which could make it less appealing for writers.

Ben Thompson, whose tech-focused Stratechery newsletter inspired Substack, wrote last month that Substack has gone from being a “Faceless Publisher” behind the scenes to trying to put “the Substack brand front-and-center,” building up its app as a destination on the backs of writers.

“This is a way for Substack to draft off of their popularity to build an alternative revenue model that entails readers paying for Substack first, and publishers second, instead of the other way around,” Mr. Thompson wrote.

Publishing on Substack is free, but writers who charge for subscriptions pay 10 percent of their revenue to Substack and 3 percent to its payment processor, Stripe. The company also offers hefty advances to a small group of writers, whose identities it refuses to divulge.

Substack has one key difference from most other media companies: It refuses to chase advertising dollars. “Over my dead body,” Mr. McKenzie once wrote. “The antithesis of what Substack wants to be,” Mr. Best said.

But Substack’s biggest conflict has been over content moderation.

Mr. McKenzie, a former journalist, describes Substack as an antidote to the attention economy, a “nicer place” where writers are “rewarded for different things, not throwing tomatoes at their opponents.”

Critics say the platform recruits (and therefore endorses) culture war provocateurs and is a hotbed for hate speech and misinformation. Last year, many writers abandoned Substack over its inaction on transphobic content. This year, The Center for Countering Digital Hate said anti-vaccine newsletters on Substack generate at least $2.5 million in annual revenue. The technology writer Charlie Warzel, who left a job at The New York Times to write a Substack newsletter, described the platform as a place for “internecine internet beefs.”

Substack has resisted pressure to be more selective about what it allows on its platform. Employees of Twitter who worried that its content moderation policies would be relaxed by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the platform’s largest shareholder, were told to not bother applying for jobs at Substack.

“We don’t aspire to be the arbiter of saying, ‘Eat your vegetables,’” Mr. Best said. “If we agree with or like everything on Substack, that would be falling short of what a healthy intellectual climate looks like.”

Substack makes it easy for writers to break away, and defectors have a fast-growing collection of competitors waiting to welcome them.

#Edition #Substack #Newsletter #Modération

Spurred by Putin, Russians Turn on One Another Over the War - The New York Times

▻https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/09/world/europe/putin-russia-war-ukraine.html

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In the western city of Penza, another English teacher, Irina Gen, arrived in class one day and found a giant “Z” scrawled on the chalkboard. The Russian government has been promoting the letter as a symbol of support for the war, after it was seen painted as an identifying marker on Russian military vehicles in Ukraine.

Ms. Gen told her students it looked like half a swastika.

Later, an eighth grader asked her why Russia was being banned from sports competitions in Europe.

“I think that’s the right thing to do,” Ms. Gen responded. “Until Russia starts behaving in a civilized manner, this will continue forever.”

“But we don’t know all the details,” a girl said, referring to the war.

“That’s right, you don’t know anything at all,” Ms. Gen said.

A recording of that exchange appeared on a popular account on Telegram that often posts inside information about criminal cases. The Federal Security Service, a successor agency to the K.G.B., called her in and warned her that her words blaming Russia for the bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, last month were “100 percent a criminal case.”

#ukraine #russia_invade_ukraine #crime_against_humanity #russian_form_of_fascisme

Dead Lay Out in Bucha for Weeks, Refuting Russian Claim, Satellite Images Show
►https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/04/world/europe/bucha-ukraine-bodies.html

An analysis of satellite images by The New York Times rebuts claims by Russia that the killing of civilians in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, occurred after its soldiers had left the town.

Fake news in Kiev heralds cruel April
Posted on April 4, 2022 by M. K. BHADRAKUMAR - Indian Punchline
▻https://www.indianpunchline.com/fake-news-in-kiev-heralds-cruel-april

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An indignant Moscow has angrily demanded a United Nations Security Council meeting on Monday over the allegations of atrocities by Russian troops in areas around Kiev through the past month. Prima facie, this allegation is fake news but it can mould misperceptions by the time it gets exposed as disinformation.

A Tass report says: “The Russian Defense Ministry said on Sunday that the Russian Armed Forces had left Bucha, located in the Kiev region, on March 30, while “the evidence of crimes” emerged only four days later, after Ukrainian Security Service officers had arrived in the town. The ministry stressed that on March 31, the town’s Mayor Anatoly Fedoruk had confirmed in a video address that there were no Russian troops in Bucha. However, he did not say a word about civilians shot dead on the street with their hands tied behind their backs.”

Even more surprising is that within minutes of the “breaking news”, western leaders — heads of state, foreign ministers, former politicians — popped up with statements duly kept ready and only based on the videos, seconds-long videos and a clutch of photos, ready to pour accusations. No expert opinion was sought, no forensic work was done, no opportunity given to the accused to be heard. (...)

#Ukraine