For subscribers to the Athletic, I ranked the top 50 free agents in this year’s class, and held a Q&A about it that afternoon. Based on my Twitter replies, a lot of people looked at the raw rankings without reading any of the content. Good times!
My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Caroline Criado Perez, author of the book Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Menand host of the podcast Visible Women. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Last week’s roundup went up late because of all the sportsball going on over the weekend, so I’m relinking it here for folks who missed it.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: Writing for the New Yorker, Jessica Winter looks at the rise in early puberty for American girls and what it might mean for them in the short- and long-term. She also explores the complex reasons why this trend increased during the pandemic.
- A ProPublica/Texas Tribune joint investigation shed more light on the botched police response in Uvalde.
- The Intercept ran a widely shared story about the Department of Homeland Security collaborating with tech companies to suppress (dis)information, but TechDirt writer Mike Masnick says the story is “absolute garbage.”
- Have you seen the “stop the insanity” or “anti-white bigotry” ads running during the MLB playoffs? Both are funded by dark-money groups founded and run by former Trump officials, including Stephen Miller. They’re bullshit, notably the first one’s claims about crime being out of control – crime is way down from the 1990s.
- John Leguizamo wrote an open letter to Hollywood about the continued lack of opportunities for Latinx actors on screen, in spite of growing evidence that movies and shows built around such actors and characters do well financially. The same argument applies to Black or Asian actors.
- Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, one of the worst and most vocal anti-vaxxers online for at least a decade, is now, finally under investigation by the Ohio medical board for her ridiculous testimony before that state’s legislature where she claimed COVID-19 vaccines made people magnetic, among other falsehoods.
- So much content on Elon Musk’s flailing takeover of Twitter, from how he’s backing down on promises and kowtowing to regulators to a massive drop in advertisers to a badly botched mass layoff to a class-action lawsuit because the layoff violated California law. And that’s without getting into this silly Twitter Blue program, that misunderstands the part where verifying users benefits Twitter, not the other way around.
- Musk also shot himself in the foot by retweeting a false right-wing conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi, which Musk later deleted, but not before amplifying it to his huge follower base.
- Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), who campaigned on the bogus pretense that critical race theory was being taught in the state’s elementary schools, set up a tip line for parents to rat out schools that were teaching stuff they didn’t like. Parents instead used it to report actual violations of their rights, such as the denial of special education requests, including services and evaluations.
- Countries in the Middle East are happily selling oil to the world while shifting to cleaner energy sources themselves. They know you don’t get high on your own supply.
- Dr. Oz had a paper rejected in 2003 over questions about the strength of the data he used to reach his conclusions, earning a two-year ban from publishing in that same journal – an unusually harsh punishment.
- The Slay the Spire board game Kickstarter has raised over $2 million already.
Re dark money – there is a ballot initiative in Arizona which will ban dark money. It likely will pass easily. Although I’m not sure it much matters. The same ads will be run but people will know who funds them a little clearer. Is it a mystery that billionaires fund this nonsense? We should eat them.
Speaking of Dr. Oz, think of some of the people we could have in the Senate after the election. Him, Herschel Walker, Blake Masters, JD Vance, Don Bolduc, Tommy Tuberville, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Josh Hawley, John Kennedy……it’s enough to make you realize we’re so screwed.
We’ll study the Musk run with Twitter for decades. It’s the classic case of a rich guy letting his ego get the best of him and not having a fundamental understanding of the allure and draw of the product. First he announces that everything is fair game to post and seems shocked that the lowest forms of humanity start saying awful things and using racial slurs (which gets advertisers nervous). Then he posts the link to an obvious fake news clip, deletes it, and then trolls the NY Times when called out. Then he attempts to charge 20 bucks per month for verified users which pisses them off. Then he tries to negotiate that down to 8 bucks which at that point you’ve already lost the argument. He then goes on the offensive against the advertisers who were already skittish and looking for an exit strategy. Then he lays off a bunch of the employees which makes potential advertisers even more nervous. Dude could’ve lit $44 billion in cash on fire and it would’ve had a similar effect.
It’s an interesting business model to charge people to give you more traffic/advertising dollars. But Musk is completely wrong on what the biggest problem of Twitter (and pretty much every social media site). It’s isn’t bots, it’s trolls. Musk may be more annoyed that bots try to grift his followers, but trolls impact everyone else. When all you need is an email address to get an account, it’s a problem. You can create hundreds or even thousands of accounts with a little bit of programming knowledge. And you can use those accounts to say racist, misogynistic, homophobic, etc. things to your hearts content. One account gets banned, start again with the next.
Exactly, addoeh. Companies and most people don’t want to see or be associated with all of the offensive things that a so-called (because I think it’s really bleeping clear that Musk isn’t one) free speech absolutist thinks are okay. Every social media site has run into this issue with trolls running wild. Almost everyone has a line on what needs to be moderated and Musk either didn’t know that or didn’t care. Now he’s learning the hard way as users and advertise leave because they don’t want to be associated with a platform where racial slurs, homophobia, misogyny, etc, are common.
The Intercept article is probably a little too sensationalized, but that rebuttal piece completely misses the article’s very valid point. Here is the thing the rebuttal paints as benign and above-board:
“The MDM team is also committed to collaboration with partners and stakeholders. In addition to civil society groups, researchers, and state and local government officials, the MDM team works in close collaboration with the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Defense, and other agencies across the federal government. Federal Agencies respective roles in recognizing, understanding, and helping manage the threat and dangers of MDM and foreign influence on the American people are mutually supportive, and it is essential that we remain coordinated and cohesive when we engage stakeholders.”
The idea that the FBI, State Department, and DOD are arbiters of any sort of truth and should be trusted to protect free speech and civil liberties is laughable. This is the whole problem with the DHS program and the rebuttal just hand-waves it away.