schoolinfosystem.org
Chris Michael: The controversial claims stem in part from Donovan’s publication of the Facebook papers, a bombshell leak of 22,000 pages of Facebook’s internal documents by the whistleblower Frances Haugen, who used to work at the company. Donovan, believing them to be of huge public interest, began publishing them to Harvard’s website for anyone to […]
Chris Morris: Threads is leaving the knot tied in COVID-related searches for the foreseeable future. The social media company has blocked terms including “COVID,” “vaccines,” and “long COVID” as it focuses its resources on fighting misinformation about the war in Israel and Gaza. The search filters have been in place since mid-September. In a statement on […]
There is a big debate over who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline. Instead of allowing the debate, Facebook has decided to take a side. It is censoring Pulitzer-winning journalist Seymour Hersh. And instead of explaining, Facebook sends readers to an article in Norwegian. Watch pic.twitter.com/nN18HovBPR — Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) April 19, 2023
Mike Snider: “This is clearly a very complex issue, and a lot of people have a lot of different opinions,” Zuckerberg said. “At the end of the day, I just think that in a democracy that people should be able to see for themselves what politicians are saying. … I think that people should be […]
David Harsanyi: In a recent op-ed, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg implored the state to get more involved in governing the internet. “Every day, we make decisions about what speech is harmful, what constitutes political advertising, and how to prevent sophisticated cyberattacks,” he began. “These are important for keeping our community safe. But if we were […]
Konstantinos Kakaes: By narrowly construing privacy to be almost exclusively about end-to-end encryption that would prevent a would-be eavesdropper from intercepting communications, he manages to avoid having to think about Facebook’s weaknesses and missteps. Privacy is not just about keeping secrets. It’s also about how flows of information shape us as individuals and as a […]
Ryan Mac: Facebook spent most of 2018 embroiled in one scandal or another. But there was a point early on in the year when Mark Zuckerberg thought he could turn down the heat by offering a fix for the public’s privacy concerns. It was just weeks after the news broke that political consultancy Cambridge Analytica […]
Valerie Strauss: Though there is no consensus definition of “personalized learning,” and though it seems to make intuitive sense to enable students to move at their own pace, in practice, this has amounted to computer-based learning programs of varying quality that require kids to sit in front of screens for a good part of the […]
Cathy O’Neil: That leaves hiring humans to filter everything that emerges from the firehose of meaningless updates, cat pictures and lies, possibly with an automatically generated list of ranked things to worry about (which, to be clear, is not AI, it’s just an automatically generated list of things to worry about). Yet there are major […]
Megh Wright: Remember when news broke earlier this year that Elon Musk had poached several Onion staffers for a mysterious new comedy project, then the Onion and ClickHole retaliated by publishing a ton of articles like “I Did Everything I Could To Buy ClickHole, But Their Editorial Integrity Won Out Over My Billion-Dollar Offers, And […]
Marlene Melchior: In Part 2: Diehm discusses the “echo chamber” effect of Facebook’s interface. He says that while Zuckerberg made “apologetic commitments” and rolled out an interface with new privacy controls, ultimately “there’s no transparent way of actually assessing whether or not this interface either works better or even has any meaningful effect on the […]
Griffin Connely: Facebook will tighten its requirements to place political advertisements on its platforms and officially endorsed bipartisan legislation in the Senate that would regulate online ads, Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, announced Friday. Zuckerberg’s announcement came four days before he is scheduled to speak to lawmakers in Washington. In a Facebook post Friday, […]
Karissa Bell: Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for AI was initially somewhat creepier than what he shared in his epic 6,000-word manifesto about the future of Facebook. In the post, Zuckerberg briefly touches on how artificial intelligence can be used to detect terrorist propaganda.
Alison Griswold: Yet another reason to wonder about Mark Zuckerberg’s political aspirations: His philanthropic organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, just hired the guys who helped elect Barack Obama and George W. Bush. Former Obama campaign manager and Uber board member David Plouffe is joining the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative as president of policy and advocacy. So […]
CNN.com A legal tug-of-war between Ugandan authorities and a for-profit international chain of schools has led to the education provider being ordered to shut down in a matter of weeks, leaving the lives of thousands of pupils in limbo. Uganda’s High Court has described the Bridge International Academies (BIA) — which is funded by the […]
Naomi Mix: That the students are in the same class tackling the same subject at the same time but not at the same level of difficulty or with the same approach is the point of what’s called personalized learning. The academy, part of the public school system in this industrialized city of 125,000, is one […]
Olivia Lowenburg: The school is not a charter school, according to its website, but is “a private, non-profit school” that will partner with the Ravenswood Family Health Center, a nearby health clinic, to provide free healthcare services for students and their families. When The Primary School opens in August 2016, it will offer parent-and-child classes […]
Sharon Noguchi: The school — announced just as the couple expects the birth of their first child — is the latest Zuckerberg-Chan donation to education, including a controversial $100 million gift to New Jersey schools, $7.5 million for college scholarships to undocumented students, and a $120 million pledge to schools in low-income Bay Area communities. […]
Dale Russakoff: Late one night in December, 2009, a black Chevy Tahoe in a caravan of cops and residents moved slowly through some of the most dangerous neighborhoods of Newark. In the back sat the Democratic mayor, Cory Booker, and the Republican governor-elect of New Jersey, Chris Christie. They had become friendly almost a decade […]
When you set out to create Facebook (then “The Facebook”) you didn’t work within the confines of what was already there. You built what should be there.
You could easily have volunteered to work with the powers at Myspace, or funnel your venture capital into their infrastructure. After all, they had already built the full site, found an audience, and created a monopoly of sorts in the market for social networking. You could have simply recognized their dominance and bowed before it, but you didn’t. You, my friend, are an inventor. You have been endowed with a natural affinity for understanding what the public needs… even when that doesn’t yet exist. This is why its so surprising to see what you’ve done with your charitable giving.
What about the current public school system made you think an injection of $100 million would be beneficial? School spending per pupil has risen dramatically over the last 25 years with almost no resulting gain in achievement. Non-teacher staff positions in public schools have grown by almost 200 percent while enrollment has pushed up no more than 9 percent. Public schools are increasingly bureaucratic, increasingly resistant to change, and decreasingly useful.
Everyone’s abuzz over Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s donation of $100 million to Newark Public Schools on the condition that the State turn over control to Mayor Cory Booker. Here’s some choice quotes:
From detractors of the donation:
Joseph Del Grosso, president of the Newark Teachers Union, (fresh from his guest appearance on Jersey Shore [JK!]): “Vouchers is not going to happen.”
David Sciarra, Executive Director of Education Law Center: “It would be improper under the law for the governor to try to delegate authority to the mayor.”Related: Number of Kids on Waiting Lists for Newark Charter Schools and
Tyler Cowen: We, the undersigned, wish to express our deep concern about the ongoing attacks by Big Tech companies and their allies against Brazil’s digital sovereignty. The Brazilian judiciary’s dispute with Elon Musk is just the latest example of a broader effort to restrict the ability of sovereign nations to define a digital development agenda […]
CRA: The Center for Renewing America (“CRA”),1 a recognized tax-exempt 501(c)(3) charity, hereby respectfully requests that the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) immediately investigate Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan for unlawful personal income tax deduction(s) tracing to non-exempt Section 501(c)(3) activity.
Paul Thacker: In the recent Supreme Court ruling, judges skipped over claims of whether the Biden administration had actually censored Americans, arguing that the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue the White House. Swisher could have learned this by reading an article on the decision in the New York Times, the very publication where she was a […]
David Hansson: The only way to defend free speech is to nuke the idea of benevolent censorship from orbit. Nobody has a monopoly on the truth, nobody can discern “misinformation” from truth consistently or without bias, and nobody can define “hate speech” in universally acceptable terms that don’t recall blasphemy laws of centuries past. The […]
House Judiciary: Zuckerberg’s letter. Nicole Shanahan: Facebook can start by making every government contract and request for speech suppression public and open source. Nothing should be hidden. Alex Berenson: Aside from @finkd himself, no one deserves more credit for Meta’s new commitment to free speech than @elonmusk – his speech advocacy stiffened Zuck’s backbone and […]
Discovery Brief: FILED UNDER SEAL May 31, 2023 Via CM/ECF Re: Klein v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 3:20-cv-08570-JD (N.D. Cal.) Dear Judge Donato: Advertiser Plaintiffs (“Advertisers”) respectfully request that the Court find that a prima facie case exists under the crime-fraud exception with respect to certain communications currently being withheld by Defendant Meta Platforms, Inc. […]
Emma H. Haidar and Cam E. Kettles Four veteran alumni endorsed by Ackman — one of the University’s most vocal online critics — staged a public petition campaign under the moniker “Renew Harvard” centered around campus antisemitism and free speech issues. The slate included A. Zoe Bedell, Alec D. Williams, Julia I. Pollak ’09, and […]
Lindsay Ellis: Govind Gnanakumar was in diapers when Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard. Like the Meta founder, he won’t wait for a university diploma to start his business. The 19-year-old dropped out of the Georgia Institute of Technology in May to focus full time on his artificial-intelligence startup, Automorphic. He is among a swarm […]
Andy Kessler: Sen. Chuck Schumer, who’s never seen a camera he didn’t want to jump in front of, held a closed-door meeting last week on artificial intelligence. What? Closed? To me, it suggests an agenda beyond paving the path to a fantastic future. At the meeting, Elon Musk warned that AI is a “civilization risk.” […]
Scott Wong, Frank Thorp V and Ryan Nobles “I think the idea that it is some great breakthrough to hear from the biggest monopolists in the world — and that they are going to share with us their great wisdom — I just think the whole framework is wrong,” said Hawley, who announced a bipartisan AI framework with […]
Glenn Reynolds: More establishment-connected companies, like Boeing and United Launch Alliance, have suffered various technical issues that leave them essentially incapable of doing half what SpaceX does, despite much higher prices. I can’t help but feel that Musk’s sheer effectiveness, in comparison to establishment failures on everything from COVID to Afghanistan to China, serves as […]
Sandra: Since 2015, our understanding of what’s possible in the world of education — and in our world more generally — has changed. And so, at CZI, our education efforts must change too. Navigating these changes is humbling and challenging, but ultimately, necessary. The truth is, the depth of needs and the complexity of our […]
Matt Taibbi: In one damning email, an unnamed Facebook executive wrote to Mark Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sandberg: We are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the White House and the press, to remove more Covid-19 vaccine discouraging content. We see repeatedly in internal communications not only in the email above, but in the Twitter […]
Mark Zuckerberg says it was challenging to censor COVID misinformation because the scientific establishment was frequently wrong, which ultimately undermined public trust: “Just take some of the stuff around COVID earlier in the pandemic where there were real health… pic.twitter.com/y0ZaX4kmCE — KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) June 9, 2023 Related: Dane County Madison Public Health mandates.
Richard Phelps: EWA’s income from contributions dwarfs that from membership dues by a ratio of about 150 to one (Internal Revenue Service, 2015–2019). Its contributors overwhelmingly supported Common Core. As of 2019, EWA’s five “Officers, Directors, Trustees, Key Employees, and Highest Compensated Employees” all enjoyed six-figure salaries. Current Sustaining Funders: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, […]
Joseph Simonsen Senate and House staff received emails from a researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies starting in July asking them to confirm their “racial and ethnic identity” as part of an alleged data collection effort. In at least two cases, senior congressional staffers who declined to provide their races were […]
Hayden Ludwig A newly filed complaint with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) alleges that three tax-exempt organizations—the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL), Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), and National Vote at Home Institute—unlawfully intervened in the 2020 election in order to aid Democrats. Under IRS rules, 501(c)(3) nonprofits that engage in partisan election intervention are subject to loss […]
Ross Douthat: For many people, dynamism is contingent — on how invested you are in the world as it is, whether you stand to lose or benefit from innovations, and where your moral intuitions lie. (I am personally a dynamist about Musk’s Mars colony but not Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse; flying cars, yes, sex robots, not […]
Gray Mirror: We are terrible at seeing power. Or in other words: power is great at not being seen. Because power is a human universal, all thinking is within the field of some power. Thoughts that go along with the field are obvious and soar up instantly like birds. Thoughts that flow against the field […]
Victor Davis Hanson These “new orders” and “resets” always entail far bigger government and more unelected, powerful bureaucracies. Elites assume that their radical changes in energy use, media reporting, voting, sovereignty, and racial and ethnic quotas will never quite apply to themselves, the architects of such top-down changes. So we common folk must quit fossil fuels, but […]
Wall Street Journal: At his first big political rally of 2022, President Trump was again focused on 2020. “We had a rigged election, and the proof is all over the place,” he said. Mr. Trump was apparently too busy over Christmas to read a 136-page report by a conservative group in Wisconsin, whose review shows […]
Thomas Claburn: The alleged 2017 deal between Google and Facebook to kill header bidding, a way for multiple ad exchanges to compete fairly in automated ad auctions, was negotiated by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and endorsed by both Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (now with Meta) and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, according to an updated complaint […]
Matt Stoller: It was an immensely slick and effective public relations campaign, and devastating to the firm’s image. Haugen offered a lot of great information, and she was compelling, articulate, composed, and authoritative. She was impressive, even if you are somewhat skeptical of her motives. Along with these documents, she also offered some a good […]
Mike Isaac, Sheera Frenkel and Ryan Mac: Facebook has been in an uproar over the past few weeks, which the meetings were held to quell. The tumult began after The Wall Street Journal published a series of articles last month that showed Facebook knew about the harms of its services, including teenage girls saying that […]
Jeff Horwitz: “We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly,” said the confidential review. It called the company’s actions “a breach of trust” and added: “Unlike the rest of our community, these people can violate our standards without any consequences.” Despite attempts to rein it in, XCheck grew to include at least […]
Kyle Smith: Excellence. It’s a thing. And to sort out who is excellent requires competition in various tests with measurable outcomes. Competition sadly exposes failure. But it also steers everyone to the most fitting role for them. I competed and failed at being a baseball player, soccer player and tennis player before I finally found […]
Rachel Kraus: Former Google engineer Manu Cornet describes his time at Google in two phases. First, there were “glitches in wonderland.” Then, there was “disillusionment.” Those two descriptions are actually the sub-headings for Cornet’s two volumes of comics he has published about his former employer, which he called Goomics. Though Cornet was an engineer, he also […]
The woke industrial complex at its finest: Mark Zuckerberg (Big Tech) effectively teams up with Dr. Fauci (Big Government) to decide what counts as “misinformation.” They effectively covered up the Chinese lab leak last year: Fauci dismissed it, Facebook censored it. pic.twitter.com/tNkbrjeLpp — Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) June 7, 2021
MD Kittle: As the new complaint filed Monday against Madison lays out, the Center for Tech and Civic Life showered the WI-5 cities with more than $8 million in grant funding, with Madison receiving more than $1.27 million of the cut. The complaint, filed Tuesday, names Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway, a Democrat, and City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl. […]
Daniel Oliver: All the News That’s Fit to Click Above all, though, we have to factor in the enormous social cost of leaving our entire public discourse in the hands of a censorious few. There may be tremendous social advantages provided by, e.g., Amazon: with the click of a button, a shopper can satisfy almost […]
Emily Oster, Rebecca Jack, Clare Halloran, John Schoof, Diana McLeod: This paper reports on the correlation of mitigation practices with staff and student COVID-19 case rates in Florida, New York, and Massachusetts during the 2020-2021 school year. We analyze data collected by the COVID-19 School Response Dashboard and focus on student density, ventilation upgrades, and […]
Ben Castleman: I like to think of it as my Mark Zuckerberg moment: I was a graduate student and it was a sweltering summer evening in Cambridge. Text messages were slated to go out to recent high school graduates in Massachusetts and Texas. Knowing that thousands of phones would soon start chirping and vibrating with […]
Henry Olsen: President Biden and congressional Democrats seem determined to raise taxes on the rich, especially the rate paid on capital gains. If they’re really serious about this, there’s one sector of American wealth that is undertaxed even by today’s standards: universities and foundations. The amount of wealth held by major colleges and large grant-making foundations […]
Will Flanders: In the last few days, a debate has jump-started regarding grants from the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) following reporting from Wisconsin Spotlight on questionable activities in Green Bay. CTCL is a foundation heavily funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It describes its mission as “ensur(ing) elections are secure, voters have confidence in election outcomes, and democracy thrives as civic engagement grows.” However, […]
Jeremy Merrill: Facebook this week said it would bar political ads in the seven days before the presidential election. That could prevent dirty tricks or an “October surprise” and give watchdogs time to fact-check statements. But rather than responding with glee, election officials say the move leaves them worried. Included in the ban are ads […]
Lucas Kunce: Last night (Thursday), President Trump signed an executive order banning the Chinese owned video-sharing app TikTok from the United States over national security concerns. This announcement came on the heels of a House Antitrust Subcommittee hearing on the power of Big Tech, where the CEOs of Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Apple faced scrutiny […]
David Kaye: Today, Facebook announced the first panelists – the judges of what Mark Zuckerberg once, perhaps to his regret, called the Facebook Supreme Court – of its newly created Oversight Board. An external body with the power, according to its draft charter, “to reverse Facebook’s decisions about whether to allow or remove certain posts on […]
Amy Wang: As crucial as a university degree has become for working in the modern economy, it is not the only route forward into a wildly lucrative and satisfying career—just ask famous dropouts Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Dell, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg. In the future, a single bachelor’s degree in a particular subject will […]
Katrina Gulliver: The film The Life of Others (2006) is set in East Germany in the early 1980s and features a government agent who spends his days wearing a headset, listening to private conversations in the homes of suspected dissidents. He feels sympathy for his subjects – and guilt for his actions. He knows that […]
Thomas Geoghegan: Here’s a little thought experiment: What would happen if, by a snap of the fingers, white racism in America were to disappear? It might be that the black and Latino working class would be voting for Trump, too. Then we Democrats would have no chance in 2020. We often tell ourselves: “Oh, we […]
Jeffrey Tucker: Young founders of businesses fail, almost certainly, and at a much greater rate that people who are much older, wiser, more skilled, and more knowledgeable about the industry. It turns out that succeeding in business is extremely difficult. It takes maturity above all else to achieve it. We know this now thanks to […]
Amy Wang: As crucial as a university degree has become for working in the modern economy, it is not the only route forward into a wildly lucrative and satisfying career—just ask famous dropouts Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Dell, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg. In the future, a single bachelor’s degree in a particular subject will […]
Continuations: Here we are again in 2019 debating speech online and specifically the case of Facebook. Zuckerberg speaks at Georgetown trying to invoke the civil rights movement and to draw a sharp distinction to China. Warren quickly fires back on Twitter. Pundits everywhere weigh in. And yet hardly anyone gets to the heart of the […]
Siva Vaidhyanathan: However, Zuckerberg himself argued against free speech in his own speech. He defended Facebook’s practice of removing or impeding the circulation of material he considers noxious, such as pornography and hate speech. Now, that’s a fine policy (even if it fails in practice) because a company should do what’s good for the company […]
Sarah Frier: When Facebook Inc. agreed to settle a privacy complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for $5 billion last month, both parties acted like the news was a big deal. The FTC noted it was a record federal penalty, while the company released a video of Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg solemnly telling […]
Sarah Frier: When Facebook Inc. agreed to settle a privacy complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for $5 billion last month, both parties acted like the news was a big deal. The FTC noted it was a record federal penalty, while the company released a video of Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg solemnly telling […]
Karen Hao: Experts agree AI will be important in 21st-century education—but how? While academics have puzzled over best practices, China hasn’t waited around. In the last few years, the country’s investment in AI-enabled teaching and learning has exploded. Tech giants, startups, and education incumbents have all jumped in. Tens of millions of students now use […]
SammBiddle: But only months after Zuckerberg first outlined his “privacy-focused vision for social networking” in a 3,000-word post on the social network he founded, his lawyers were explaining to a California judge that privacy on Facebook is nonexistent. The courtroom debate, first reported by Law360, took place as Facebook tried to scuttle litigation from users […]
Kyle Sammin: The race to the far left in the Democratic primaries has been a sight to behold. Socialized health care, higher taxes on the rich, reparations for the descendants of slaves, abortion on demand, packing the Supreme Court, and more: all were once fringe issues. But once one candidate raises them, the rest fall […]
Chris Hughes: The last time I saw Mark Zuckerberg was in the summer of 2017, several months before the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke. We met at Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif., office and drove to his house, in a quiet, leafy neighborhood. We spent an hour or two together while his toddler daughter cruised around. We […]
Casey Johnston: “The future is private,” Mark Zuckerberg declared at Facebook’s F8 conference keynote yesterday. He went on to discuss the importance of building “private” online “living rooms,” an analog for direct messages and Facebook Groups, to contrast the “public square” of the News Feed. Zuckerberg described a number of new initiatives in this “future […]
Jeffrey Tucker: A commentator on Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance before the Senate observed that the event seemed like a 5-hour tech-support call. Truth. If you have ever had to do tech support, you know the way it happens. The user is hopeless, frustrated, and essentially ignorant of the product. That’s the Senate. The support employee tries […]
Ryan Broderick: As it comes under increasing pressure from lawmakers and public health advocates that it take action to clamp down on anti-vaccine messaging, Facebook continues to allow people and groups to run ads promoting it. On Thursday, California Rep. Adam Schiff sent Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai a letter outlining […]
Sarah Frier: Facebook Inc., under pressure to reduce harmful, misleading and fake content, said it is exploring removing anti-vaccine information from software systems that recommend other things to read on its social network. Information discouraging people from getting vaccines for their children, which has gone viral on Facebook, especially in its Groups product, may have […]
John Harris: Thefacebook is an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges. We have opened up Thefacebook for popular consumption at Harvard University. You can use Thefacebook to: search for people at your school; find out who are [sic] in your classes; look up your friends’ friends; see a visualization of your […]
Von Katarina Barley: Another important area is the handling of personal data. It is logical that selling user data to advertisers is contrary to company interests, given that one can earn a lot more money selling ads oneself. But what happens when data is leaked anyway? Facebook doesn’t just bear a responsibility to refrain from […]
Avi Selk: Zach Graves, who regularly commutes between Silicon Valley and D.C. for his work at a free-market tech advocacy group called the Lincoln Network, has been wincing through congressional tech hearings since long before the Google and Facebook spectacles became viral dark comedy. “There’s lot of run-of-the-mill hearings where that’s about par for the […]
Brian Phillips: What’s on your mind? Right now, as I’m writing this, The New York Times is breaking the news that Facebook, after a year of staggering revelations concerning everything from misuse of private data to enabling Russian election interference to knowingly providing inflated metrics publishers used to remake the media landscape, has been caught […]
Jason Koebler and Joseph Cox: This spring, Facebook reached out to a few dozen leading social media academics with an invitation: Would they like to have a casual dinner with Mark Zuckerberg to discuss Facebook’s problems? According to five people who attended the series of off-the-record dinners at Zuckerberg’s home in Palo Alto, California, the […]
Milo Yiannopoulos : Standing at 5’5” and weighing barely 130 lbs — “Just say size eight,” she tells me during fact-checking — Professor Rachel Fulton Brown doesn’t look like the dangerous woman her critics describe. But she has become used to reading outlandish descriptions of herself since June 2015, when she published a blog post […]
BBC: “Facebook has hampered our efforts to get information about their company throughout this inquiry. It is as if it thinks that the problem will go away if it does not share information about the problem, and reacts only when it is pressed,” it will say. “It provided witnesses who have been unwilling or unable […]
Joel Kotkin: Indeed, as researcher Greg Ferenstein suggests, the new oligarchs favor an active state that will subsidize worker housing or even a guaranteed minimum income, and keep their businesses off the hook for providing decent benefits to their ever expanding cadre of gig-economy serfs. He points out that the former head of Uber, Travis […]
Dhawal Shah: The course is taught every fall by David Malan, and sometimes features guest lectures from tech luminaries like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and the previous CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer. In previous years, this class also has been taught in parallel at Yale. Every time the course is taught at Harvard, the lectures […]
The Federalist: Ben Weingarten: As a classicist, you’ve lamented both the corruption of the academy within your own discipline and on the modern campus more broadly — in particular on its repudiation of the Western canon, its lack of adherence to principles of free inquiry and the overall triumph of progressivism. Is there any way […]
Evgeny Morozov: The continuing collapse of public trust in Facebook is welcome news to those of us who have been warning about the perils of “data extractivism” for years. It’s reassuring to have final, definitive proof that beneath Facebook’s highfalutin rhetoric of “building a global community that works for all of us” lies a cynical, […]
Nitasha Tiku: When members of Congress asked Mark Zuckerberg earlier this month who owns Facebook users’ personal data, the Facebook CEO had a convenient response. Eight times during his testimony, he cited a feature called “Download Your Data,” to show that Facebook users really are in control. “Yes, Congressman. We have a ‘download your information’ […]
David Baser: Last week, Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of the US Congress. He answered more than 500 questions and promised that we would get back on the 40 or so questions he couldn’t answer at the time. We’re following up with Congress on these directly but we also wanted to take the opportunity to […]
Joel Kotkin: The public so far still does not disdain the tech oligarchs as they do Wall Street or energy firm but they are clearly threatened, both politically and in their wallets. Their once seemingly unstoppable hold of the capital markets also has started to slip somewhat as investors begin to worry about a potential […]
Peggy Noonan: I have spent the past few days watching old videos of the civil-rights era, the King era, and there is something unexpectedly poignant in them. When you see those involved in that momentous time, you notice: They dressed as adults, with dignity. They presented themselves with self-respect. Those who moved against segregation and […]
Richard Godwin: The Cambridge Analytica scandal has of course been pivotal, prompting, at the time of going to press, shares to crash by 11 per cent, high-profile advertisers such as Mozilla and Commerzbank to withdraw support and Mark Zuckerberg to go to ground for four days before apologising on CNN after the hashtag #WheresZuck went […]
Maya Kosoff: After embarking on exactly the kind of cringe-inducing apology tour one would expect following the revelation that Cambridge Analytica plundered the data of millions of Facebook users, Mark Zuckerberg has yet another mess on his hands. Over the weekend, Android owners were displeased to discover that Facebook had been scraping their text-message and […]
Kashmir Hill: Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock on Mars, you’ve likely heard about a little scandal involving Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. Cambridge Analytica got its hands on millions of people’s Facebook likes in 2014 by getting an academic, Aleksander Kogan, to design an app with a personality test that hoovered up data from […]
Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison: It includes emails, invoices, contracts and bank transfers that reveal more than 50 million profiles – mostly belonging to registered US voters – were harvested from the site in the largest ever breach of Facebook data. Facebook on Friday said that it was also suspending Wylie from accessing the platform […]
Zeynep Tufekci: Also *ahem*. A good number of us had been objecting and pointing out the broader harms of the interaction between Facebook’s business model and politics even when it appeared to benefit Obama/Democrats. Related: “strip mining humanity” The 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns and Facebook. Dan Ball (2013): How the Obama campaign won the […]
Zachary Karabell: In this case, though, Thiel’s criticisms are themselves newsworthy. He may be an imperfect messenger, but his message had best be heard. The size and scale of technology companies now surpasses that of most of the industrial, energy, and finance companies that dominated the American economy during the 20th century. The Valley’s close-knit […]
Nancy Scola: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is quietly cracking open his company’s vast trove of user data for a study on economic inequality in the U.S. — the latest sign of his efforts to reckon with divisions in American society that the social network is accused of making worse. The study, which hasn’t previously been […]
Nicholas Thompson: In any case, Facebook’s move into news set off yet another explosion of ways that people could connect. Now Facebook was the place where publications could connect with their readers—and also where Macedonian teenagers could connect with voters in America, and operatives in Saint Petersburg could connect with audiences of their own choosing […]
Alex Hern: Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t use Facebook like you or me. The 33-year-old chief executive has a team of 12 moderators dedicated to deleting comments and spam from his page, according to Bloomberg. He has a “handful” of employees who help him write his posts and speeches and a number of professional photographers who take […]
Nick Bilton: Years ago, long before Mark Zuckerberg became Mark Zuckerberg, the young founder reached out to a friend of mine who had also started a company, albeit a considerably smaller one, in the social-media space, and suggested they get together. As Facebook has grown into a global colossus that connects about a third of […]