Back in January I wondered if semiconductors were the new oil. The price action this year probably says yes. Just as the Soviet Union tried to cripple the US in the 1970s through helping organise an oil embargo, the US is trying to cripple China through creating a semiconductor embargo. The US “war” with China was always about keeping China as a smaller economy than the US. From that perspective, it has been a resounding success. In dollar terms Chinese GDP has declined last few years.
The problem with embargoes, is that they heavily motivate those suffering from them to initiate policies to counteract and insulate them from a future embargo. In the US, the oil embargo led to reforms that reduced domestic demand, as well as encouraged increased supply from sources other than the Middle East. The end result of all these reforms was that we eventually saw the collapse of the oil price from near USD40 a barrel to USD15. With collapsing oil revenues, Soviet Union went into decline and eventual collapse. The unintended consequences of policy is often called blowback, and for the Soviet Union and OPEC, it was the eventually collapse of oil prices.
Banning high end semiconductor exports to China was meant to cripple development of high end industries in China. There is little evidence of this. China has become the world’s biggest exporter of electric cars. When I look at reviews of Chinese EVs on TikTok, they make Tesla look extremely second-rate.
EVs are not the main use for high end semiconductors – low end semis which China has pre-existing expertise in are probably sufficient. For AI and LLM, the very high end GPUs that NVIDIA sell are necessary. Even without access to high end semiconductors, there is evidence that China was able to approximate high end semiconductor performance through very aggressive use of low end semiconductors. Hence AI has ended up boosting the demand for all semiconductors. This would explain the phenomenal performance of Philadelphia Semiconductor Index. The embargo is creating demand across the entire semi spectrum.
A big driver in demand for semis has been AI and training large language models (LLM). It has been widely reported that a LLM price war has broken out in China. It is hard to understand how this is possible. It would be like seeing a price war among plastic producers in the US in 1974, just as their major inputs were soaring in price. After paying £14.50 for a Pimm’s at the cricket, I am shocked to see anything have a price cut – let alone the 90% prices cuts we have seen below. Some Chinese AI is now pricing at a 99.8% discount to OpenAI’s GTP-4. Whether this is a useful comparison is hard to tell, given the restrictions on access to Chinese internet (otherwise there is a huge arbitrage opportunity).
In a fully open free trading market, I would suggest the price war in China would have negative implications for Nvidia. And it might well end up that way – showing that AI needs a huge consolidation before it can be profitable. But what it does show is that Chinese policy of breaking cartels and fostering competition is producing exactly the results you would expect – lower prices. In the US, Meta, Google, OpenAI and Microsoft look determined to create a lock on high end Nvidia chips to starve out competition.
Increasingly the blowback for US policy to try and slowdown China, has been to spur an even more competitive Chinese tech industry, while creating a domestic tech cartel, with increasingly uncompetitive products : the iPhone continues to charge high prices for out of date tech for example, TikTok was destroying Meta and Google, while Microsoft remains Microsoft, Tesla looks pedestrian. Huawei has begun building an ecosystem completely independent of US tech. It would be no surprise if that system will produce substantially cheaper products.
[Note: This item comes from friend Gary Rimar. DLH]
A guide to Project 2025, the extreme right-wing agenda for the next Republican administration
Project 2025 aims to roll back civil rights and destroy the federal government, among other proposals By Sophie Lawton, Jacina Hollins-Borges, Jack Wheatley, John Knefel & Ethan Collier
Project 2025, a comprehensive transition plan organized by right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation to guide the next GOP presidential administration, is the conservative movement’s most robust policy and staffing proposal for a potential second Trump White House — and its extreme agenda represents a threat to democracy, civil rights, the climate, and more.
Project 2025 focuses on packing the next GOP administration with extreme loyalists to former President Donald Trump.
The plan aims to reinstate Schedule F, a Trump-era executive order that makes federal employees fireable at-will, stripping tens of thousands of employees of civil service protections. Both Trump and others in the conservative movement have said they will clear out the federal government if he is reelected. The project has even set up online trainings and loyalty tests to narrow down potential hires to those who will commit to follow Trump without question. As Project 2025 senior adviser John McEntee has said, “The number one thing you’re looking for is people that are aligned with the agenda.”
The Heritage Foundation’s nearly 900-page policy book, titled Mandate for Leadership: A Conservative Promise, describes Project 2025’s priorities and how they would be implemented, broken down by departments in the federal bureaucracy and organized around “four pillars that will, collectively, pave the way for an effective conservative administration: a policy agenda, personnel, training, and a 180-day playbook.” Written primarily by former Trump officials and conservative commentators connected to The Heritage Foundation, these proposals would severely inhibit the federal government’s protections around reproductive rights, LGBTQ and civil rights, climate change efforts, and immigration.
The initiative is backed by a coalition of over 100 organizations and individuals, at least two-thirds of which receive funding from the Koch network or conservative philanthropist Leonard Leo. The project is also heavily promoted by MAGA-connected media figures such as Steve Bannon, who has called it the “blueprint” for Trump’s second term on his War Room podcast.
The Trump campaign has attempted to distance itself from efforts to promote or speculate about “future presidential staffing or policy announcements.” However, Project 2025 is significantly more developed than the Trump campaign’s analog initiative, called Agenda47. And given that the Heritage plan has the backing of virtually the entire conservative movement and links to numerous former Trump officials and advisers, it appears all but inevitable that Trump and his allies will rely on the policies and personnel assembled by Project 2025 if he is reelected in November.
This resource outlines the specific policy and personnel priorities of Project 2025 for the next Republican administration. For more of Media Matters’ research on Project 2025, click here.
Once you notice it, you’ll see that it’s happening all around us almost everywhere we go.
There’s the woman on FaceTime at the next table in the restaurant, the man scrolling Instagram Reels during the elementary school band concert, the employee in a virtual meeting at the pool sitting next to someone reading, the fellow commuters or travelers enjoying some tunes — all on speakerphone.
It hasn’t been an immediate change, but slowly, more people in public places are foregoing headphones and just loudly sharing their digital dalliances with everyone in their immediate social space.
With so many headphone options available, it’s a baffling choice. Do you really want me to hear all about your mom’s recent doctor’s appointment while we’re both in the cereal aisle at Target? All the best intentions about not eavesdropping are difficult to uphold when a stranger in close radius has the volume turned way up. So what gives?
Doom-scrolling and our phone addictions explain a lot
Smartphones have made it easy to amuse ourselves at even a hint of possible oncoming boredom. Distraction from stresses, worldly worries and other pressures and problems are also right at our fingertips, never mind the side effect of FOMO and doom-scrolling that may worsen your mood.
So why might people choose to watch or listen to something publicly on their mobile phones sans headphones? They aren’t thinking about those around them.
“When we have a narrow focus on the content we’re consuming or the interaction we’re having,” Cohen says, “we’re not thinking very much about how other people might be affected by that and how negatively other people might be affected — that they might not like the noise, that they could even hear it.”
And noisy people doing noisy things in public, disrupting others, is nothing new.
“It just seems now there’s more opportunities for people to do so because we all have technology that makes noise,” Cohen says.
Are we all just selfish and self-centered? Maybe.
The shift in how people are using their mobile phones and personal devices has been acute, but seems to be growing more disruptive.
“People are becoming more self-focused,” Cohen says.
And advances in technology — as well as increased prices — make it easier to choose to go without headphones, too.
Improvements to microphones, speakers and noise-suppressing capabilities on our phones, tablets and laptops allow better filtering of background noise and overall audio.
But where so many of us are generally unbothered by what others are doing, why are loud speakerphone calls so, well, annoying?
“When there’s these stimuli in the environment, we want to attend to it,” Cohen says. “And then it’s hard to suppress that or override that temptation to want to attend to whatever the person is doing. Some people can tune that out better than others, and maybe we get more used to tuning that out. But it still can be a distraction.”
Is reality TV to blame for our awful phone etiquette?
Another influence on our current public behavior may be how phone use is often portrayed on television and in movies, in particular on reality shows. Having phone calls on speakerphone or otherwise sharing whatever is happening on the device out loud captures the exchanges for the audience.
What we’re seeing may also impact our own behavior.
“Once we get an impression that other people are doing something or that they might find it acceptable, that shifts our view of what the norms are,” Cohen says.
Some may change how they interact and have a skewed perception of how others actually feel about the behavior, if it might be seen as rude. There’s a term from psychology for this: pluralistic ignorance.
“So even if the majority of people or most people think a behavior is inappropriate, we might have a sense of pluralistic ignorance where we think other people are more accepting of this behavior than they actually are.”
How to combat phone rudeness
One thing that may not be loud enough is our voices. If something is bothering or distracting us, why are we reluctant to speak up? Why might a person avoid asking someone to turn the sound down or off, to ask someone if they may be able to use headphones, especially if it may help others realize the behavior is negatively affecting those around them?
“People have a reticence to engage in difficult conversations, to communicate honestly,” Cohen says, “and we have misperceptions of how people will respond to honesty, to conflict, to feedback, to even to positive things like compliments.”
People are more likely to go to social media or a friend group to communicate with those who are like-minded, she says, venting a frustration without engaging in a conversation where you may have to express disagreement. But having the difficult conversations may not go as badly as you think, and it also might be better for community.
“We have these mis-impressions or mis-predictions about what honesty in our lives will be like,” Cohen says, “Whether that’s giving feedback or just having a difficult conversation. And it’s not to say it always goes positively, but it’s much less negative than we expect, and it tends to strengthen our relationships.”
Somewhere, there’s a balance between the extremes of narrow focus where we ignore those around us and being too self-conscious and micro-managing our behavior.
IA reported in a blog post this month that publishers abruptly forcing these takedowns triggered a “devastating loss” for readers who depend on IA to access books that are otherwise impossible or difficult to access.
To restore access, IA is now appealing, hoping to reverse the prior court’s decision by convincing the US Court of Appeals in the Second Circuit that IA’s controlled digital lending of its physical books should be considered fair use under copyright law. An April court filing shows that IA intends to argue that the publishers have no evidence that the e-book market has been harmed by the open library’s lending, and copyright law is better served by allowing IA’s lending than by preventing it.
“We use industry-standard technology to prevent our books from being downloaded and redistributed—the same technology used by corporate publishers,” Chris Freeland, IA’s director of library services, wrote in the blog. “But the publishers suing our library say we shouldn’t be allowed to lend the books we own. They have forced us to remove more than half a million books from our library, and that’s why we are appealing.”
IA will have an opportunity to defend its practices when oral arguments start in its appeal on June 28.
“Our position is straightforward; we just want to let our library patrons borrow and read the books we own, like any other library,” Freeland wrote, while arguing that the “potential repercussions of this lawsuit extend far beyond the Internet Archive” and publishers should just “let readers read.”
“This is a fight for the preservation of all libraries and the fundamental right to access information, a cornerstone of any democratic society,” Freeland wrote. “We believe in the right of authors to benefit from their work; and we believe that libraries must be permitted to fulfill their mission of providing access to knowledge, regardless of whether it takes physical or digital form. Doing so upholds the principle that knowledge should be equally and equitably accessible to everyone, regardless of where they live or where they learn.”
Internet Archive fans beg publishers to end takedowns
After publishers won an injunction stopping IA’s digital lending, which “limits what we can do with our digitized books,” IA’s help page said, the open library started shrinking. While “removed books are still available to patrons with print disabilities,” everyone else has been cut off, causing many books in IA’s collection to show up as “Borrow Unavailable.”
Ever since, IA has been “inundated” with inquiries from readers all over the world searching for the removed books, Freeland said. And “we get tagged in social media every day where people are like, ‘why are there so many books gone from our library’?” Freeland told Ars.
In an open letter to publishers signed by nearly 19,000 supporters, IA fans begged publishers to reconsider forcing takedowns and quickly restore access to the lost books.
Among the “far-reaching implications” of the takedowns, IA fans counted the negative educational impact of academics, students, and educators—”particularly in underserved communities where access is limited—who were suddenly cut off from “research materials and literature that support their learning and academic growth.”
They also argued that the takedowns dealt “a serious blow to lower-income families, people with disabilities, rural communities, and LGBTQ+ people, among many others,” who may not have access to a local library or feel “safe accessing the information they need in public.”
“Your removal of these books impedes academic progress and innovation, as well as imperiling the preservation of our cultural and historical knowledge,” the letter said.
“This isn’t happening in the abstract,” Freeland told Ars. “This is real. People no longer have access to a half a million books.”
In an IA blog, one independent researcher called IA a “lifeline,” while others claimed academic progress was “halted” or delayed by the takedowns.
“I understand that publishers and authors have to make a profit, but most of the material I am trying to access is written by people who are dead and whose publishers have stopped printing the material,” wrote one IA fan from Boston.
“These books being available on archive.org is a vital resource for me and many like me,” wrote another from Australia. “A large amount of the Archive was never released in my corner of the globe, meaning I have few if any options for reading on niche subjects.”
Publishers defend takedowns
On a help page, IA explained that half a million books are now gone because the takedown requests went beyond just the books at issue in the lawsuit.
“The Association of American Publishers (AAP), the trade organization behind the lawsuit, worked with some of its member publishers” that “were not named in the lawsuit to demand that we remove their books from our library,” the help page said.
Asked for comment, an AAP spokesperson provided Ars with a statement defending the takedown requests. The spokesperson declined to comment on readers’ concerns or the alleged social impacts of takedowns.
“As Internet Archive is certainly aware, removals of literary works from Internet Archive’s transmission platform were ordered by a federal court with the mutual agreement of Internet Archive, following the court’s unequivocal finding of copyright infringement,” AAP’s statement said. “In short, Internet Archive transmitted literary works to the entire world while refusing to license the requisite rights from the authors and publishers who make such works possible.”
In the open letter to publishers—which Techdirt opined “will almost certainly fall on extremely deaf ears”—the Internet Archive and its fans “respectfully” asked publishers “to restore access to the books” that were removed.
They also suggested that “there is a way” to protect authors’ rights and ensure they’re fairly compensated “while still allowing libraries to do what they have always done—help readers read.”
“We urge you to explore solutions with the Internet Archive that support both authors and the public good, such as selling eBooks to libraries to own, lend, and preserve,” the letter said.
Internet Archive’s fair use defense
If publishers won’t bring back the books, IA plans to fight to restore access to the titles in court. Ars was not immediately able to reach IA for comment, but a court brief filed in April sheds light on how IA plans to convince the appeals court to reverse the lower court’s injunction on its digital lending.
For the appeals court, the “key question,” IA’s brief said, is whether controlled digital lending serves copyright’s purposes and important public interests. IA argues that it does because its open library is used for “purposes of teaching, research, and scholarship.” Publishers cannot dispute that, IA claimed, just because “some books are also borrowed for recreational use (just as they are at all libraries).”
“The record is replete with examples of IA facilitating access to books needed for classroom use and academic research that would not have been possible otherwise,” IA’s brief said.
For IA’s digital lending to be considered fair use, the brief said, the court must balance all factors favoring a ruling of fair use, including weighing that IA’s use is “non-commercial, serves important library missions long recognized by Congress, and causes no market harm.”
Publishers with surging profits have so far struggled to show any evidence of market harm, while IA has offered multiple expert opinions showing that ebook licensing was not negatively impacted by IA’s digital lending.
“Publishers’ ebook revenues have grown since IA began its lending,” IA argued.
And even when IA temporarily stopped limiting the number of loans to provide emergency access to books during the pandemic—which could be considered a proxy for publishers’ fear that IA’s lending could pose a greater threat if it became much more widespread—IA’s expert “found no evidence of market harm.”
“Yet they ask the Court to assume, without support, that their profits could have been even higher without IA’s lending,” IA’s brief said.
The prior court ruling also erred, IA suggested, in basing its commerciality ruling on supposed “benefits” to IA—like donations and small payments from bookseller Better World Books. Donations don’t “render a nonprofit use commercial,” IA argued, and profits from small payments went right back into funding IA’s lending.
“Many nonprofits do the same, and those partnerships do not transform them into commercial entities,” IA argued.
But for IA, the biggest oversight of the prior ruling was “the district court’s failure to consider” that “promoting availability” of knowledge and information is a primary consideration for copyright law.
“To the contrary, the decision barely mentions copyright’s ultimate purpose of promoting broad public availability of literature, music, and the other arts,” it said.
IA hopes the appeals court will agree that publishers’ ebook licenses are in a separate market from the nonprofit’s controlled digital lending, which IA argued serves a different purpose than ebooks. “Publishers’ licenses cannot serve library missions such as preserving permanent collections, widening reach and resources through interlibrary loans, and protecting patron privacy,” IA argued in defense of controlled digital lending.
“IA’s lending is noncommercial, transformative, and supportive of copyright’s purposes,” IA’s brief said, arguing that affirming the prior court’s decision “would harm not only IA but also many other libraries and the publics they serve.”
Freeland told Ars it could take months or even more than a year before a decision is reached in the case.
[Note: This item comes from reader Monty Solomon. DLH]
How Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Failed Children on Safety, States Say
The C.E.O. and his team drove Meta’s efforts to capture young users and misled the public about the risks, lawsuits by state attorneys general say.
By Natasha Singer
Jun 22 2024
Natasha Singer, who covers children’s online privacy, reviewed several thousand pages of legal filings in states’ lawsuits against Meta for this article.
In April 2019, David Ginsberg, a Meta executive, emailed his boss, Mark Zuckerberg, with a proposal to research and reduce loneliness and compulsive use on Instagram and Facebook.
In the email, Mr. Ginsberg noted that the company faced scrutiny for its products’ impacts “especially around areas of problematic use/addiction and teens.” He asked Mr. Zuckerberg for 24 engineers, researchers and other staff, saying Instagram had a “deficit” on such issues.
A week later, Susan Li, now the company’s chief financial officer, informed Mr. Ginsberg that the project was “not funded” because of staffing constraints. Adam Mosseri, Instagram’s head, ultimately declined to finance the project, too.
Mosseri’s email
Unfortunately I don’t see us funding this from Instagram any time soon.
The email exchanges are just one slice of evidence cited among more than a dozen lawsuits filed since last year by the attorneys general of 45 states and the District of Columbia. The states accuse Meta of unfairly ensnaring teenagers and children on Instagram and Facebook while deceiving the public about the hazards. Using a coordinated legal approach reminiscent of the government’s pursuit of Big Tobacco in the 1990s, the attorneys general seek to compel Meta to bolster protections for minors.
A New York Times analysis of the states’ court filings — including roughly 1,400 pages of company documents and correspondence filed as evidence by the State of Tennessee — shows how Mr. Zuckerberg and other Meta leaders repeatedly promoted the safety of the company’s platforms, playing down risks to young people, even as they rejected employee pleas to bolster youth guardrails and hire additional staff.
In interviews, the attorneys general of several states suing Meta said Mr. Zuckerberg had led his company to drive user engagement at the expense of child welfare.
“A lot of these decisions ultimately landed on Mr. Zuckerberg’s desk,” said Raúl Torrez, the attorney general of New Mexico. “He needs to be asked explicitly, and held to account explicitly, for the decisions that he’s made.”
The state lawsuits against Meta reflect mounting concerns that teenagers and children on social media can be sexually solicited, harassed, bullied, body-shamed and algorithmically induced into compulsive online use. Last Monday, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, the United States surgeon general, called for warning labels to be placed on social networks, saying the platforms present a public health risk to young people.
His warning could boost momentum in Congress to pass the Kids Online Safety Act, a bill that would require social media companies to turn off features for minors, like bombarding them with phone notifications, that could lead to “addiction-like” behaviors. (Critics say the bill could hinder minors’ access to important information. The News/Media Alliance, a trade group that includes The Times, helped win an exemption in the bill for news sites and apps that produce news videos.)
In May, New Mexico arrested three men who were accused of targeting children for sex after, Mr. Torrez said, they solicited state investigators who had posed as children on Instagram and Facebook. Mr. Torrez, a former child sex crimes prosecutor, said Meta’s algorithms enabled adult predators to identify children they would not have found on their own.
Meta disputed the states’ claims and has filed motions to dismiss their lawsuits.
In a statement, Liza Crenshaw, a spokeswoman for Meta, said the company was committed to youth well-being and had many teams and specialists devoted to youth experiences. She added that Meta had developed more than 50 youth safety tools and features, including limiting age-inappropriate content and restricting teenagers under 16 from receiving direct messages from people they didn’t follow.
“We want to reassure every parent that we have their interests at heart in the work we’re doing to help provide teens with safe experiences online,” Ms. Crenshaw said. The states’ legal complaints, she added, “mischaracterize our work using selective quotes and cherry-picked documents.”
But parents who say their children died as a result of online harms challenged Meta’s safety assurances.
“They preach that they have safety protections, but not the right ones,” said Mary Rodee, an elementary school teacher in Canton, N.Y., whose 15-year-old son, Riley Basford, was sexually extorted on Facebook in 2021 by a stranger posing as a teenage girl. Riley died by suicide several hours later.
Ms. Rodee, who sued the company in March, said Meta had never responded to the reports she submitted through automated channels on the site about her son’s death.
“It’s pretty unfathomable,” she said.
The Push to Win Teenagers
Meta has long wrestled with how to attract and retain teenagers, who are a core part of the company’s growth strategy, internal company documents show.
Teenagers became a major focus for Mr. Zuckerberg as early as 2016, according to the Tennessee complaint, when the company was still known as Facebook and owned apps including Instagram and WhatsApp. That spring, an annual survey of young people by the investment bank Piper Jaffray reported that Snapchat, a disappearing-message app, had surpassed Instagram in popularity.
Later that year, Instagram introduced a similar disappearing photo- and video-sharing feature, Instagram Stories. Mr. Zuckerberg directed executives to focus on getting teenagers to spend more time on the company’s platforms, according to the Tennessee complaint.
The “overall company goal is total teen time spent,” wrote one employee, whose name is redacted, in an email to executives in November 2016, according to internal correspondence among the exhibits in the Tennessee case. Participating teams should increase the number of employees dedicated to projects for teenagers by at least 50 percent, the email added, noting that Meta already had more than a dozen researchers analyzing the youth market.
Email on Zuckerberg’s goals
Mark has decided that the top priority for the company in 2017 is teens.
In April 2017, Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s chief executive, emailed Mr. Zuckerberg asking for more staff to work on mitigating harms to users, according to the New Mexico complaint.
Mr. Zuckerberg replied that he would include Instagram in a plan to hire more staff, but he said Facebook faced “more extreme issues.” At the time, legislators were criticizing the company for having failed to hinder disinformation during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.
Mr. Systrom asked colleagues for examples to show the urgent need for more safeguards. He soon emailed Mr. Zuckerberg again, saying Instagram users were posting videos involving “imminent danger,” including a boy who shot himself on Instagram Live, the complaint said.
Two months later, the company announced that the Instagram Stories feature had hit 250 million daily users, dwarfing Snapchat. Mr. Systrom, who left the company in 2018, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Meta said an Instagram team developed and introduced safety measures and experiences for young users. The company didn’t respond to a question about whether Mr. Zuckerberg had provided the additional staff.
‘Millions’ of Underage Users
In January 2018, Mr. Zuckerberg received a report estimating that four million children under the age of 13 were on Instagram, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court by 33 states.
Facebook’s and Instagram’s terms of use prohibit users under 13. But the company’s sign-up process for new accounts enabled children to easily lie about their age, according to the complaint. Meta’s practices violated a federal children’s online privacy law requiring certain online services to obtain parental consent before collecting personal data, like contact information, from children under 13, the states allege.
In March 2018, The Times reported that Cambridge Analytica, a voter profiling firm, had covertly harvested the personal data of millions of Facebook users. That set off more scrutiny of the company’s privacy practices, including those involving minors.
Mr. Zuckerberg testified the next month at a Senate hearing, “We don’t allow people under the age of 13 to use Facebook.”
Attorneys general from dozens of states disagree.
State attorneys general complaint
Within the company, Meta’s actual knowledge that millions of Instagram users are under the age of 13 is an open secret that is routinely documented, rigorously analyzed and confirmed, and zealously protected from disclosure to the public.
In late 2021, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, disclosed thousands of pages of internal documents that she said showed the company valued “profit above safety.” Lawmakers held a hearing, grilling her on why so many children had accounts.
Meanwhile, company executives knew that Instagram use by children under 13 was “the status quo,” according to the joint federal complaint filed by the states. In an internal chat in November 2021, Mr. Mosseri acknowledged those underage users and said the company’s plan to “cater the experience to their age” was on hold, the complaint said.
Mosseri’s message
Tweens want access to Instagram, and they lie about their age to get it now.
In its statement, Meta said Instagram had measures in place to remove underage accounts when the company identified them. Meta has said it has regularly removed hundreds of thousands of accounts that could not prove they met the company’s age requirements.
Fighting Over Beauty Filters
A company debate over beauty filters on Instagram encapsulated the internal tensions over teenage mental health — and ultimately the desire to engage more young people prevailed.
It began in 2017 after Instagram introduced camera effects that enabled users to alter their facial features to make them look funny or “cute/pretty,” according to internal emails and documents filed as evidence in the Tennessee case. The move was made to boost engagement among young people. Snapchat already had popular face filters, the emails said.
But a backlash ensued in the fall of 2019 after Instagram introduced an appearance-altering filter, Fix Me, which mimicked the nip/tuck lines that cosmetic surgeons draw on patients’ faces. Some mental health experts warned that the surgery-like camera effects could normalize unrealistic beauty standards for young women, exacerbating body-image disorders.
As a result, Instagram in October 2019 temporarily disallowed camera effects that made dramatic, surgical-looking facial alterations — while still permitting obviously fantastical filters, like goofy animal faces. The next month, concerned executives proposed a permanent ban, according to Tennessee court filings.
Other executives argued that a ban would hurt the company’s ability to compete. One senior executive sent an email saying Mr. Zuckerberg was concerned whether data showed real harm.
In early 2020, ahead of an April meeting with Mr. Zuckerberg to discuss the issue, employees prepared a briefing document on the ban, according to the Tennessee court filings. One internal email noted that employees had spoken with 18 mental health experts, each of whom raised concerns that cosmetic surgery filters could “cause lasting harm, especially to young people.”
But the meeting with Mr. Zuckerberg was canceled. Instead, the chief executive told company leaders that he was in favor of lifting the ban on beauty filters, according to an email he sent that was included in the court filings.
Zuckerberg’s email to executives
It has always felt paternalistic to me that we’ve limited people’s ability to present themselves in these ways, especially when there’s no data I’ve seen that suggests doing so is helpful or not doing so is harmful.
Several weeks later, Margaret Gould Stewart, then Facebook’s vice president for product design and responsible innovation, reached out to Mr. Zuckerberg, according to an email included among the exhibits. In the email, she noted that as a mother of teenage daughters, she knew social media put “intense” pressure on girls “with respect to body image.”
Stewart’s email to Zuckerberg
I was hoping we could maintain a moderately protective stance here given the risk to minors. … I just hope that years from now we will look back and feel good about the decision we made here.
Ms. Stewart, who subsequently left Meta, did not respond to an email seeking comment.
In the end, Meta said it barred filters “that directly promote cosmetic surgery, changes in skin color or extreme weight loss” and clearly indicated when one was being used.
Priorities and Youth Safety
In 2021, Meta began planning for a new social app. It was to be aimed specifically at children and called Instagram Kids. In response, 44 attorneys general wrote a letter that May urging Mr. Zuckerberg to “abandon these plans.”
“Facebook has historically failed to protect the welfare of children on its platforms,” the letter said.
Meta subsequently paused plans for an Instagram Kids app.
By August, company efforts to protect users’ well-being had become “increasingly urgent” for Meta, according to another email to Mr. Zuckerberg filed as an exhibit in the Tennessee case. Nick Clegg, now Meta’s head of global affairs, warned his boss of mounting concerns from regulators about the company’s impact on teenage mental health, including “potential legal action from state A.G.s.”
Describing Meta’s youth well-being efforts as “understaffed and fragmented,” Mr. Clegg requested funding for 45 employees, including 20 engineers.
The World Health Organization is no stranger to issuing reports. Often filled with bureaucratic language on niche topics, no one would bat an eye if a dictionary was needed to decode the confusing jargon found in a typical WHO release.
Most responsible are companies from the tobacco, alcohol, processed food, and fossil fuel industries, in addition to familiar actors in health care like pharmaceutical companies, and newer entrants like private equity investment firms.
How are these corporate players causing such harm?
Among the many mechanisms highlighted are: industry lobbying that weakens regulation, market concentration with monopoly-like effects, one-sided international trade and investment agreements, the subversion of science and manipulation of research, reputation-washing through corporate social responsibility initiatives, tax-avoidance coupled with extractive financial practices, and a motive to function with the lowest possible labour standards.. The WHO’s report also notes how industry uses health crises or “shocks” to opportunistically maximise profits at the expense of health.
Though the list is long, each topic is summarised in just a few pages, with front loaded key points and illustrative case studies in what amounts to a surprisingly readable text.
One case study addresses increasing private equity ownership stakes in the health sector. In Germany, nearly 20% of ambulatory (or ‘community’) healthcare centres are owned by private equity firms. In Sweden, a third of primary care clinics are. Higher costs and worse patient outcomes result from this ownership model. Why? These firms often cut staff and increase fees to patients, while using the same health centres to take out debt, write-off taxes, and extract profits to pay both investors and executives.
Other chapters and cases examine alcohol labelling, gig work, patent law and industry-funded advocacy groups, among many others.
The authors of the report unite these seemingly disparate areas under a ‘commercial determinants of health’ banner. Described as “the ways in which commercial sector actors and their products and practices impact on health” the report notes “the fact that diverse commercial actors are causing avoidable harm reflects their shared underlying motivation to maximize profits.”
Importantly, this WHO release does more than bring corporate harms to light. It offers examples of how such health-harming activities can be beaten back.
For example, how Estonia advanced a sugar tax on pop and juice, or how European drug prices were brought under control for conditions like asthma and COPD, and how a ban on marketing unhealthy food in the UK is on the cusp of being won.
Yet, the report on its own will do little to change the problems it identifies. Though important, the WHO is a multinational, member-driven organisation that typically does not engage in the type of gritty politics and persuasion required to put this genie back in the bottle.
Nonetheless, there are clear implications for Canada. For example, private equity firms are taking increasing interest in our healthcare system, reputation washingunder the guise of corporate social responsibility is common practice here, and precarious working conditions in Canada have long been known to contribute to death and disease.
[Note: This item comes from friend Desire Banse. DLH]
Why China is winning the EV war
By Vox
Jun 7 2024
The Biden administration set a climate goal that 50 percent of all new car sales in the US would be electric by 2030. Meanwhile, China reached that milestone this year, in 2024. This video explains how China was able to fast-track EV adoption and develop an EV battery that rivals what any other country has been able to do so far. It’s been a decade of government strategies that have created some of the biggest battery companies in the world, like CATL and BYD. The Biden administration wants to keep Chinese cars and batteries out of the country — but our video explains what kind of position that puts the US in in terms of meeting its own climate goals. Sources and further reading: https://www.vox.com/climate/2024/3/4/…https://www.technologyreview.com/2023…https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/27/bu…https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2…https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl…https://www.iea.org/reports/global-cr…
Louisiana became the first state in the nation to require the Ten Commandments be displayed in public school classrooms.
Gov. Jeff Landry (R) signed the Republican-led bill Wednesday that got some bipartisan support in the Louisiana Senate to display the Ten Commandments in all public elementary and high school classes.
The signs must be in “large, easily readable font” in classrooms by the beginning of 2025. The posters will also contain a three-paragraph statement that will say the Ten Commandments have been a prominent part of American education.
“The Pelican State has rightly recognized the history and tradition of the Ten Commandments in the state,” said Matt Krause, of counsel at First Liberty Institute.
“Putting this historic document on schoolhouse walls is a great way to remind students of the foundations of American and Louisiana law. First Liberty was grateful to play a part in helping this bill reach the Governor’s desk. We applaud Louisiana for being the first, but by no means the last, state to take this bold step for religious liberty,” he added.
The move has already sparked legal challenges, a major concern of Democrats who have opposed the bill.
“It’s a lawsuit waiting to happen,” Democratic state Sen. Royce Duplessis told CBS affiliate WWL-TV in April. “I think we are going to likely lose in court.”
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announced its intent to sue, arguing the law violates the First Amendment.
“We are preparing a lawsuit to challenge H.B. 71. The law violates the separation of church and state and is blatantly unconstitutional. The First Amendment promises that we all get to decide for ourselves what religious beliefs, if any, to hold and practice, without pressure from the government. Politicians have no business imposing their preferred religious doctrine on students and families in public schools,” the ACLU said Wednesday.
The upcoming battle will be a test for other states that have considered implementing similar laws, such as Tennessee and Texas.
Sleepless in Seattle as a Hellcat Roars Through the Streets
The modified Dodge Charger roaming Seattle’s downtown by night has infuriated residents. But it seems no one can stop it.
May 29 2024
City leaders and police officers have responded to complaints about the renegade driver with warnings, citations, criminal charges and a lawsuit.Brian Lau for The New York Times
As much of Seattle tries to sleep, the Hellcat supercar goes on the prowl, the howls of its engine and the explosive backfires from its tailpipes echoing off the high-rise towers downtown.
Windows rattle. Pets jump in a frenzy. Even people used to the ruckus of urban living jolt awake, fearful and then furious.
Complaints have flooded in for months to city leaders and the police, who have responded with warnings, citations, criminal charges and a lawsuit, urging the renegade driver to take his modified Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat from the city streets to a racetrack. Instead, the “Belltown Hellcat,” with its distinctive tiger-stripe wrap, has remained on the move.
For hundreds of thousands of people with Instagram accounts, the driver is a familiar character: @srt.miles, otherwise known as Miles Hudson, a 20-year-old resident of one of the Belltown neighborhood’s pricey apartments. For all the aggravated residents who view him with increasing disdain — “Entire neighborhoods are angry and sleep deprived,” one resident wrote their local council member — many more are tracking his escapades on social media, celebrating a life unencumbered by self-consciousness or regret.
When Mr. Hudson posted a video (350,441 likes) showing his speedometer topping 100 miles per hour during a downtown outing to get boba tea, a follower asked: “How does it feel living my dream?” When he posted a video (698,858 likes) showing the rowdy rattles of the Hellcat, another replied: “You really make the town so fun at night.”
In one self-reflective post, Mr. Hudson captured video (69,742 likes) of himself watching a television news segment that discussed the city’s concern about his driving, and proceeded to rush frantically around the apartment, pretending to be fearful that the police were on to him. “I like your content so when they arrest you I’m coming to get you,” one follower replied.
On one recent night when a police officer stopped Mr. Hudson, he pulled out his phone to show the officer his Instagram account and endeavored to explain that he was professionally unable to alter his late-night driving habits.
“No disrespect, but I feel like I’m doing my thing,” he told the officer, according to body-camera footage. “I’ve turned it into a career, and the car has paid for itself. 650,000 followers.”
To some residents, the city’s failure to stop Mr. Hudson’s exploits is but another example of its inability to bring an end to the homelessness, street crime and occasional mayhem that have plagued the downtown area since the pandemic. And it all raised a mystifying question about the incentives of modern life: What happens when fame and infamy can be equally lucrative?
The Belltown neighborhood has been transformed in recent decades from a grungy, semi-industrial arts district to a sort of ideal of moneyed urban living, with bike-friendly streets, hip cafés and condo towers so desirable that one penthouse there became the setting of the steamy “Fifty Shades of Grey” book series. This month, the rooftop of one such luxury tower featured a $1.7 million McLaren sports car to entice a prospective buyer. Other rooftops feature decks with lounge chairs and firepits, offering views of the Space Needle in one direction and waterfront sunsets in the other.
Mr. Hudson’s own Belltown apartment showcases panoramic views, decorated inside with neon lights and anime artwork. In his online postings, he can be seen playing video games and consuming iced pumpkin cream chai tea lattes.
He debuted the Hellcat seven months ago on Instagram, showing off the power of its engine and the interior ceiling lights that looked like a night sky. He casually took viewers along on an outing to Starbucks.
It did not take long, though, for a different social media story to emerge, one of unfolding chaos, narrated by Mr. Hudson in breathless expletives as he rolls around the city. If not out in his car, roaring through the streets, he is in the apartment, late at night, trying his hand at cooking.
In one video (669,757 likes), he got off the couch to ride a hoverboard over to his kitchen to cook some burgers, but the pan soon burst into flames, and Mr. Hudson raced around on his hoverboard trying to contain it. He had a fire extinguisher on hand in a later video when he tried to fry Twinkies. There was no fire this time, but the Twinkies were charred to a crisp. “I can’t cook,” he shouted.
His refrigerator, shown in another video (886,343 likes), looked to be barren save for some condiments and Lunchables.
Through the bleak Seattle winter, he posted about modifications to his car. In a video with nearly 700,000 likes, he could be seen out on the street at 2 a.m., starting it up. “It sounds like a shotgun,” he said, and asked his followers if it was too loud.
“Never too loud, I say not loud enough,” someone replied.
For the neighbors, the vehicle was plenty loud, and complaints were pouring in to city officials. One woman wrote that she lived with P.T.S.D. and woke up in fear because the backfiring vehicle sounded like gunshots outside her building. “This is the first time in 13 years that I’ve started seriously considering moving out of downtown,” she wrote. Another wrote in after 6 a.m. saying the tiger-striped Hellcat had been revving up and down streets for two hours. “What will it take for this to end?” the man wrote.
Chris Allen, who lives in the city center, said the backfires sound like explosions rattling the windows of his 17th-floor unit. While he regularly used a white-noise machine to drown out the blare of motorcycle and emergency vehicles, the machine was no match for the Hellcat, said Mr. Allen, adding that he has appealed to Meta, which owns Instagram, to take down Mr. Hudson’s account.
“He’s clearly committing crimes,” he said. “He’s documenting it on Instagram. It’s frustrating that Instagram hasn’t taken this down.”
Eventually, though, the wheels of bureaucracy began to turn. Police officers stopped Mr. Hudson once in January, giving him a warning, then again in February, giving another warning.
During the early morning hours one night at the beginning of March, the police stopped Mr. Hudson yet again. This time, he was cited for having a modified exhaust system that amplified noise. Mr. Hudson soon paid the $155 fine.
And the complaints kept coming. A couple weeks after the citation, Mr. Hudson posted a video (79,267 likes), recording himself starting the car remotely from his apartment balcony. Below, on the street, the vehicle roared to life, exhaust blasting out the tailpipes. Mr. Hudson then panned across the Seattle skyline.
“I am the Arkham Knight,” he said, referring to the Batman villain. “I am actually the Arkham Knight. My city actually hates me.”
For the police, the Instagram videos were a trail of criminal breadcrumbs around the city, complete with narration, time stamps and footage of his speedometer.
At the end of March, the city charged Mr. Hudson with two counts of reckless driving for “operating a motor vehicle with a willful or wanton disregard for the safety of persons and/or property.” At yet another traffic stop a few days later, an officer brought out a decibel meter, recording the Hellcat at 84 decibels even while idling, the equivalent of a diesel train.
Mr. Hudson declined to talk to The New York Times without payment, but he told a reporter at The Seattle Times in March that the city needed to focus its attention on other problems. “There are way bigger issues than a Black man with a nice car who makes noise occasionally,” he said.
At that point, a different city department stepped in. The Department of Construction and Inspections sent a notice, saying it had “investigated and found a violation or violations of the Seattle Noise Control Code.” Mr. Hudson was ordered to modify the vehicle and to not “operate any motor vehicle that causes sound in violation of the Seattle Municipal Code.” The notice came with a potential fine of $1,300 per day.
To the new city leadership recently elected in Seattle, many of whom had run on law-and-order campaigns, Mr. Hudson has become an example to be made. Bob Kettle, who represents Belltown on the City Council, said that something needed to be done about what he described as the city’s “permissive environment.”
“It’s shocking that somebody can make money by disturbing or impacting thousands of people on a nightly basis,” he said in an interview.
Mr. Hudson responded with a new tactic. In answer to the city’s orders not to drive his car, he posted a new video (528,359 likes) in which he could be seen getting in the passenger seat of the Hellcat, with a woman at the wheel. She drove them away, the car roaring once again.
Now the city is trying a new strategy: The city attorney this month filed a civil complaint, seeking a court order to force Mr. Hudson to modify his vehicle and penalties that could total tens of thousands of dollars.
A response came, from a different authority figure: Mr. Hudson’s mother, Rebecca Hudson. In an email to city officials, she said the Hellcat was off the streets and in the shop.
Meta allegedly tried to discredit university researchers in Brazil who had flagged fraudulent adverts on the social network’s ad platform.
Núcleo, a Brazil-based news organization, said it has obtained government documents showing that attorneys representing Meta questioned the credibility of researchers from NetLab, which is part of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).
NetLab’s research into Meta’s ads contributed to Brazil’s National Consumer Secretariat (Senacon) decision in 2023 to fine Meta $1.7 million (9.3 million BRL), which is still being appealed. Meta (then Facebook) was separately fined of $1.2 million (6.6 million BRL) related to Cambridge Analytica.
As noted by Núcleo, NetLab’s report showed that Facebook, despite being notified about the issues, had failed to remove more than 1,800 scam ads that fraudulently used the name of a government program that was supposed to assist those in debt.
In response to the fine, attorneys representing Meta from law firm TozziniFreire allegedly accused the NetLab team of bias and of failing to involve Meta in the research process.
Núcleo says that it obtained the administrative filing through freedom of information requests to Senacon. The documents are said to date from December 26 last year and to be part of the ongoing case against Meta.
A spokesperson for NetLab, who asked not to be identified by name due to online harassment directed at the organization’s members, told The Registerthat the research group was aware of the Núcleo report.
“We were kind of surprised to see the account of our work in this law firm document,” the spokesperson said. “We expected to be treated with more fairness for our work. Honestly, it comes at a very bad moment because NetLab particularly, but also Brazilian science in general, is being attacked by far-right groups.”
Similar push back against social media research is underway in the US. It was recently reported that the Stanford Internet Observatory, which has been exploring social media manipulation for the past five years, is being scaled back by the university following pressure from Republicans in the US House of Representatives.
On Thursday, more than 70 civil society groups including NetLab published an open letter decrying Meta’s legal tactics.
“This is an attack on scientific research work, and attempts at intimidation of researchers and researchers who are performing excellent work in the production of knowledge from empirical analysis that have been fundamental to qualify the public debate on the accountability of social media platforms operating in the country, especially with regard to paid content that causes harm to consumers of these platforms and that threaten the future of our democracy,” the letter says.
“This kind of attack and intimidation is made even more dangerous by aligning with arguments that, without any evidence, have been used by the far right to discredit the most diverse scientific productions, including NetLab itself.”
The claim, allegedly made by Meta’s attorneys, is that the ad biz was “not given the opportunity to appoint a technical assistant and present questions” in the preparation of the NetLabs report. This is particularly striking given Meta’s efforts to limit research into its ad platform.
In 2021, two years after shutting down ad transparency tools from ProPublica, Mozilla, and Who Targets Me, Meta disabled the accounts of researchers at NYU’s Ad Observatory Project claiming that their work violated its terms of service. Those involved denounced the social network’s account cutoff as an attempt to stifle legitimate research into disinformation.
Meta’s discomfort with scrutiny of its systems can be also seen in the subpoenas issued to third-party developers who created an unofficial API for Meta’s Threads app “for educational and research purposes.” Meta’s legal representatives claimed the API violated the company’s terms of service.
Meta is preparing to take another step in this direction come August when it expects to shut down CrowdTangle, a social media monitoring firm it acquired in 2016. Meta cites technology and regulatory changes for its decision.
The biz has been working on a replacement tool called Meta Content Library, which it says “was designed to help us meet new regulatory requirements for data-sharing and transparency while meeting Meta’s rigorous privacy and security standards.”
In a March blog post, Brandon Silverman, co-founder and former CEO of Crowdtangle, said, “Closing down CrowdTangle 12 weeks before the US Presidential election is hard to defend…” and cited concerns about expected election interference. He also said Meta Content Library is not close to CrowdTangle yet in terms of its capabilities.
NetLab’s spokesperson said the group’s researchers “rely a lot on CrowdTangle … and not only us. [The decision to close CrowdTangle] is being discussed by pretty much everyone who studies information on Meta.”
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