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☆ If I Embarrass My Baby on TikTok, Will He Stay My Baby Forever?
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-25 | by ( Amanda Hess | More About Amanda Hess | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

That is the eeriest part of these videos — the parents are barely interacting with their kids. The apps are always coursing with some new prompt beckoning parents to show off their big babies, their ugly babies, their ugly babies’ glow-ups. It feels so easy: You’ve got your phone, you’ve got your kid, and because of the kid, you’ve got nothing else to do except look at your phone. It’s seductive for new parents to think of our children as an extensions of ourselves, and social media makes that fantasy visceral. Babies are cute (even the ones their parents advertise as ugly), and their emotions are sweeping and operatic.

Persons: ”, vlogger, You’ve, you’ve Organizations: YouTube

☆ TikTok's strategy for US dominance is straight out of Amazon's playbook — but creators are the fuel for its flywheel
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-25 | by ( Jasmine Enberg | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

TikTok launched its e-commerce platform, TikTok Shop, on September 13, 2023. The social app's shopping business will be driven by FOMO and trends, fueled by its avid community of creators. After months of testing, TikTok this month launched TikTok Shop, an in-app commerce solution including shoppable short and live videos, checkout, TikTok Shop ads, fulfillment, and a marketplace accessible through a separate Shop tab. It has a roadmap and deep resources in parent company ByteDance, which can afford the $500 million loss TikTok Shop is expected to face this year. TikTok's commerce business will be driven by trends and FOMO, packaged up and delivered to users by creators.

Persons: TikTok, Jasmine Enberg Organizations: Intelligence, Google, Media, Meta, YouTube, Shop, Amazon Prime

☆ Rupert Murdoch is stepping down from running Fox and News Corp. and is handing the reins to his son Lachlan
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-21 | by ( Rebecca Cohen | Lucia Moses | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Rupert Murdoch is stepping down from his role at Fox and News Corp., according to a company statement. "For my entire professional life, I have been engaged daily with news and ideas, and that will not change," Murdoch wrote. AdvertisementAdvertisementIt's unclear how Murdoch's media empire will change post-Rupert. Lachlan Murdoch, 52, has been CEO since 2019 after the baton switched back and forth between him and his brother James as to who would succeed their father. And while he's privately criticized Trump, he's also said that the Fox audience supports the former president, suggesting he knows that supporting Trump is good for Fox's business, CNN has reported.

Persons: Rupert Murdoch, Murdoch, Lachlan, Lachlan Murdoch, Trump, Jeanine Pirro, Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Donald Trump, James, Rupert, He's, Tucker Carlson, he's Organizations: Fox, News Corp, Fox Corp ., Fox News, London, Voting, Dominion, Google, Meta, Street Journal, Hollywood, Fox Nation, CNN Locations: Rupert, FanDuel

☆ Craigslist founder Craig Newmark is pouring millions of dollars into combating AI's dark side
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-14 | by ( Jonathan Vanian | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +10 min

Since the 2015 debut of Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the entrepreneur has donated many millions of dollars to various causes involving media and technology. Newmark, 70, spoke to CNBC as he was recovering from a minor heart procedure he went through in late August. At the same time, he's worried that tech companies, particularly in social media, "aren't even trying anymore to get rid of stuff they know is dishonest," he said. "Protecting kids when it comes to AI is a big issue," Newmark said, regarding his donation to Common Sense Media. Within journalism, Newmark's most high-profile endeavor is the City University of New York's Craig Newmark Graduate School in Journalism.

Persons: Craig Newmark, Everard Craig Newmark, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Newmark, he's, aren't, I've, Rather, Jim Jordan, I'm, City University of New York's Craig, Julia Angwin, she'd, Sue Gardner, algorithmically, Thilina, doesn't, " Newmark, that's Organizations: Craigslist, LinkedIn, Facebook, Sense Media, CNBC, Tech, Meta, Twitter, Sense, Knight Foundation, Ford Foundation, City University of New, City University of New York's Craig Newmark Graduate School, Journalism, CUNY, Nurphoto Locations: San Francisco, New York, Ohio

Currently, TikTok spokesperson Laura Perez said more than 200,000 sellers have registered for TikTok Shop. ByteDance, the Beijing company that owns TikTok, already runs a thriving social media marketplace on Douyin, its twin video app for the Chinese market. “No social app has really been able to master e-commerce in the U.S.,” said Jasmine Enberg, a social media analyst at Insider Intelligence. Critics have levied accusations that the social media giant could be a tool for China’s government to surveil Americans. The company said TikTok shop will offer a secure checkout process and that all of its U.S. user data is stored and managed by servers maintained by the software giant Oracle.

Persons: —, TikTok, Laura Perez, TikTok’s, Perez, hasn't, “, ”, Jasmine Enberg, “ TikTok, Enberg, OtterBox Organizations: TikTok, Meta, Intelligence, Insider Intelligence, Amazon, U.S, Oracle Locations: U.S, Beijing, Asia, China

☆ Social Media Is Dead: Instagram, TikTok Replaced by Group Chats, Messaging
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-30 | by ( Sydney Bradley | Amanda Perelli | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +15 min

Frustrated with the state of the platform, Breuning launched the "Make Instagram Instagram Again'' crusade in 2022. Influencers, marketers, average users, and even social-media executives agree: Social media, as we once knew it, is dead. Social media to social mediaNo app better defines the changing nature of social media than Instagram. "I'm honestly just tired of social media," said 23-year-old Walid Malb, who works in the creator economy. Amanda Perelli is a senior creator economy reporter covering social media influencers, advertising and marketing trends for Insider.

Persons: Tati, everyone's, Bruening, Breuning, algorithmically, Kylie Jenner, Adam Mosseri, Instagram, Jeffrey Gerson, Sarah Frier, Influencers, Mosseri, Hannah Stowe, Andrea Casanova, Casanova, I'm, Walid Malb, —, Gerson, Nina Haines, Victoria Johnston, Johnston, Lia Haberman, Alpha, they're, Haberman, wouldn't, Amanda Perelli, Bradley Organizations: Bloomberg, Apple, Twitter, UCLA, American Influencer Council, Social, . Locations: Instagram, New York, Similarweb, Castro, Geneva

☆ The Fed is ‘flying blind’ on the economy. Will this week’s jobs data help?
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-28 | by ( Nicole Goodkind | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +9 min

The Bureau of Labor Statistics kicks things off on Tuesday with the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey report for July. But the pace of job creation and demand by employers for flexible labor, temporary, contract and full time jobs, while still strong, has definitely slowed. Tell me about the ASA Staffing Index, which tracks weekly changes in temporary and contract employment. The ASA Staffing Index is a real-time snapshot of employment. So I think we may have seen a trough in terms of temporary employment and we could be seeing now the beginning of the upturn.

Persons: Bell, Richard Wahlquist, Jackson, Jerome Powell, Powell’s Jackson, we’ve, We’ve, they’ve, upticks, Alicia Wallace, ”, Janelle Griffith, Marsh, Brian Fung Organizations: CNN Business, Bell, New York CNN, Labor Statistics, Labor, ADP, Reserve, American Staffing Association, Fed, ASA, Panama Canal Authority, Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Companies Locations: New York, Jackson Hole , Wyoming, Panama, North American

☆ Large US tech companies face new EU regulations
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-25 | by ( Brian Fung | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +10 min

Although the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) passed last year, companies have had until now to prepare for its enforcement. Friday marks the arrival of a key compliance deadline — after which tech platforms with more than 45 million EU users will have to meet the obligations laid out in the law. But the list finalized in April includes the most powerful tech companies in the world, and, for those firms, violations can be expensive. The DSA permits EU officials to issue fines worth up to 6% of a very large platform’s global annual revenue. In a statement, a Microsoft spokesperson told CNN the DSA deadline “is an important milestone in the fight against illegal content online.

Persons: “, TikTok, “ We’ve, ”, Nick Clegg, Meta, Snap, Apple, Pinterest, Robert Grosvenor, Alvarez, ” Grosvenor, Thierry Breton, Breton, X, Agustin Reyna, Court’s, ” TikTok Organizations: CNN, Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Union’s Digital Services, EU, DSA, Companies, Facebook, European Commission, X Locations: Europe, London, “, BEUC

☆ Meta's Threads just got an update that users have been begging for
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-25 | by ( Ashley Capoot | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +1 min

In this photo illustration, the Threads logo by META is displayed on a smartphone with Twitter logo in the background. Threads is the new social network from Meta Platforms which was launched on the 5th of July 2023. Many users have been asking Meta executives like CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram chief Adam Mosseri for the feature since Threads first launched earlier this month . Threads first launched on July 5 while a series of outages and controversial rate limit policies were impacting Twitter users. The platform quickly climbed to 100 million users, though engagement on the app has since tapered.

Persons: Mark Zuckerberg, Adam Mosseri, Meta, Elon Musk Organizations: Meta, Elon, Twitter

☆ Social Media Makes Teens Unhappy. It’s Time to Stop the Algorithm. - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-18 | by ( Chris Murphy | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

And all over social media are highly curated and filtered fake lives, breeding a sense of envy and inadequacy inside the developing brains of teenagers. Social media companies know that content that generates negative feelings holds our attention longer than that which makes us feel good. If you are a teenager feeling bad about yourself, your social media feed will typically keep delivering you videos and pictures that are likely to exacerbate negative feelings. It is not a coincidence that teenage rates of sadness and suicide increased just as algorithmically driven social media content took over children’s and adolescents’ lives. The psychological impact of the coming transition of thousands of everyday basic human tasks to machines will make the effect of social media look like child’s play.

Persons: ”, ’ Organizations: Social Locations: Connecticut

☆ I'm a small-business owner in the blockchain industry. I relied on 3 tactics to lead my company through a 'crypto winter' and other volatility.
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-07 | by ( Erin Greenawald | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

With a few strategic moves, the cofounder was able to grow the company during industry uncertainty. During times of "feast," we learned to become agile and adaptable, quickly capitalizing on opportunities for growth and expansion. While we originally sought to work with enterprises, "crypto winter" was taking a huge toll on the industry and we were no exception. For example, during the latest downturn, we spent time building up our accelerator program, Web3 Launchkit, which helps founders learn all the pieces to launch a successful crypto company. Some people were happy to forgo regular cash to receive compensation in a combo of crypto and equity, for example.

Persons: —, Altif Brown, Filecoin, Dor, Web3, we've, We've Organizations: Constellation, Service, Constellation Network, US Department of Defense, Enterprises

The sudden departure of Twitter executives tasked with content moderation and brand safety has left the company more vulnerable than ever to hate speech. Following Irwin's departure, the company's head of brand safety and ad quality, A.J. Musk has dramatically downsized the company's workforce and rolled back policies that restricted what kinds of content could circulate. Twitter, under Musk, is the fourth most-hated brand in the U.S. according to the 2023 Axios Harris reputation rankings. Musk, who is also the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has recently played down concerns about the prevalence of hate speech on Twitter.

Persons: Ella Irwin, Brown, Maie, It's, Elon Musk, Musk, Harris, it's, Linda Yaccarino Organizations: Twitter, Elon, NBC News, NBC Universal, SpaceX, CNBC Locations: U.S

☆ How 'the dress' broke the internet — and pushed Facebook to force everyone into their own filter bubble
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-25 | by ( Ben Smith | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +8 min

In 2015, a BuzzFeed staffer posted a picture of a dress with the caption, "What color is this dress?" The following is an excerpt from "Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral" by Ben Smith. Jonah saw it differently. From TRAFFIC: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith. Copyright © Ben Smith, 2023.

☆ Lawsuit alleges that social media companies promoted White supremacist propaganda that led to radicalization of Buffalo mass shooter
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-14 | by ( Zenebou Sylla Artemis Moshtaghian | Zenebou Sylla | Artemis Moshtaghian | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +11 min

New York CNN —A wrongful death lawsuit filed against several social media companies Friday alleges that social media lent to the radicalization of the gunman who shot and killed 10 people at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, last May. “However, the social media platforms that radicalized him, and the companies that armed him, must still be held accountable for their actions. Speaking to CNN Sunday, Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown commended some of the victims’ families and survivors for tackling extremism on social media platforms. We deliberately designed Snapchat differently than traditional social media platforms and don’t allow unvetted content to go viral or be algorithmically promoted. The lawsuit alleges that social media platforms “Meta, Alphabet, Reddit and 4chan earned advertising revenue from hosting and amplifying” Gendron’s video on their platforms.

☆ Check out the pitch deck that helped Freshsound, which helps brands license music for their ads, raise $2.2 million in seed funding
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-11 | by ( Lara O'Reilly | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

Freshsound, a self-service platform to license commercial music, raised a $2.2 million seed round. For more than a decade, Stevie Gyasi worked in marketing, helping link brands like Absolut, Nikon, and H&M with music artists for campaigns and events. The Freshsound platform offers its users an instant price for a track and handles the payments, removing the need to negotiate with songwriters and labels. This week, Freshsound said it had raised a 2 million euro, or $2.2 million, seed funding round, led by Zenith Venture Capital and Aligned. Check out the key slides from the pitch deck Freshsound used to raise its seed funding round.

But Nvidia has created variants of its chips for the Chinese market that are slowed down to meet U.S. rules. Even the slowed Nvidia chips represent an improvement for Chinese firms. The back-and-forth between government and industry exposes the U.S. challenge of slowing China's progress in high tech without hurting U.S. companies. Chip industry sources said that was an effective action. Some in the AI industry believe that is still plenty of speed.

☆ How Elon Musk transformed Twitter’s blue check from status symbol into a badge of shame
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-24 | by ( Brian Fung | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +9 min

Over the weekend, numerous high-profile people announced — with apparent despair — that they too had been “punished” with verification badges. Twitter Verified account seen in an iPhone screen in Vancouver, Canada, on Dec. 9 2022. Instead of conveying authenticity, Twitter verification is now fraught with multiple conflicting messages. For weeks, many legacy verified users had signaled they would not be paying for Twitter Blue. It doesn’t benefit Twitter for celebrity accounts to be buried along with the other non-paying accounts Musk has said the platform will demote.

☆ Trying to Find Your Place in the World? Try Birding From a Different Angle.
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-18 | by ( Ty Burr | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

A waxwing slain beneath a living-room window, its biannual journey stopped dead by the sky in a pane of glass. After 40 mostly satisfying years as a film critic, I began to feel all those imagined visions closing around my head. I yearned to shake them off, to return to reality; birding has come to seem one of the more graceful ways to do that. To me, the nightly BirdCast map is a corrective to our human-centric view of the planet. In April and May, the map’s a rainbow of arrival, a feathery procession as brilliant as a pride parade.

☆ Elon Musk's Twitter is now recommending Kremlin-linked accounts to users after restricting them last year, tests suggest
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-09 | by ( Ryan Hogg | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Twitter appears to be amplifying tweets of Russian state accounts after suppressing them last year. The Telegraph created a new account and was recommended the Kremlin-linked accounts, it reported. Elon Musk has been lifting most restrictions on accounts labelled harmful under previous management. Twitter had more broadly limited the reach of state-affiliated media since 2020, by not recommending them to users and labelling them as state-affiliated. The world's second-richest man reinstated Donald Trump's Twitter account in November to this end, although the former president has still not posted any new tweets.

☆ Peace, love, and Hitler: How Lex Fridman's podcast became a safe space for the anti-woke tech elite
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-03 | by ( Julia Black | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +26 min

Seemingly overnight, episodes of Fridman's podcast began racking up millions of views. YouTube/Lex FridmanIn his podcast, Fridman asks world-renowned scientists, historians, artists, and engineers a series of wide-eyed questions ("Who is God? But recently, "The Lex Fridman Podcast" has become a haven for a growing — and powerful — sector looking to dismantle years of "wokeness" and cancel culture. Twitter"The Lex Fridman Podcast" offered a rare opportunity to listen to four-hour conversations with luminaries of tech and science. Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder and publisher of the socialist magazine Jacobin who appeared on Fridman's podcast in December, praised Fridman's interviewing style.

☆ Premarket stocks: The return of the Reddit investor
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-09 | by ( Nicole Goodkind | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +6 min

What’s happening: Retail investors are pouring a record $1.5 billion per day into the stock market, according to data from Vanda Research. Brunswick has conducted its annual survey on the digital habits of institutional investors for over a decade. This year, it polled 257 institutional investors across North America, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. Retail investors amass funds, and power: Retail investors now account for half of all wealth globally, according to a recent report by Bain & Company. Fed officials have expressed concern that a tight labor market could keep upward pressure on wages and, in turn, inflation.

☆ Senators warn Big Tech on Section 230: ‘Reform is coming’
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-08 | by ( Brian Fung | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +2 min

Washington CNN —US senators said Wednesday that bipartisan support is growing for revising a federal immunity law for tech platforms and websites known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a warning aimed squarely at large social media platforms. “Here’s a message to Big Tech: Reform is coming,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who chaired a technology subcommittee hearing to consider changes to the law. “I can’t predict it’ll be in the next couple of weeks, or the next couple of months,” Blumenthal said. The case could have major repercussions for how social media sites rank, present and promote content online. Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, a vocal tech industry critic, acknowledged that the effort to revise Section 230 has been “very slow.”“As a Republican, I would love to blame that on my Democrat colleagues,” Hawley said.

☆ How the Supreme Court could re-shape the internet as you know it
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-24 | by ( Brian Fung | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +11 min

Nearly 30 years of protectionsA view of the U.S. Supreme Court on February 21, 2023 in Washington, DC. The Supreme Court isn't the only one reviewing Section 230; Congress and the White House have also proposed changes to the law, though legislation to update Section 230 has consistently stalled. For skeptics of the tech industry, and critics of social media platforms, more lawsuits would imply more opportunities to hold tech companies accountable. Allowing the courts to scrutinize the tech industry more would bring it in line with other industries, some have argued. Even a 'like' could trigger a lawsuitLiability could also extend to individual internet users.

☆ A growing group of lawmakers think TikTok is 'digital fentanyl' and want to ban it. Many others remain skeptical.
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-24 | by ( Bryan Metzger | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +10 min

Some members of Congress have begun pushing to ban TikTok in the US. "I'm a little less enthusiastic about an all-out ban of it," said Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota. "I'm an incrementalist on a lot of things, and I would be on this as well," said Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming. Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on social media and the internet's impact on children. Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, another committee member, said she's most concerned about how social media platforms are impacting kids.

☆ These 26 words ‘created the internet.’ Now the Supreme Court may be coming for them
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-18 | by ( Brian Fung | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +10 min

This week, the Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments on two pivotal cases dealing with online speech and content moderation. A set of rulings against the tech industry could significantly narrow Section 230 and its legal protections for websites and social media companies. If that happens, the Court’s decisions could expose online platforms to an array of new lawsuits over how they present content to users. Such a result would represent the most consequential limitations ever placed on a legal shield that predates today’s biggest social media platforms and has allowed them to nip many content-related lawsuits in the bud. “The massive social media industry has grown up largely shielded from the courts and the normal development of a body of law.

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