Meta Plays With Fire 📰🔕

👀 TLDR:

In this week’s What’s Appening, we cover Meta’s shameful blocking of the news during a crisis. We reported on Meta’s fallout with the Canadian government some weeks back, but now there is widespread criticism as wildfires rage and folks are blocked from viewing vital information. Oh, and Elon Musk is also blocking news (headlines) on X, for some unfathomable reason. This week, we also have news on dating app behemoth Match trying out AI tools on its products, some weird stats on Elon Musk’s followers on X, and What’s dAppening looks at the biggest craze in web3, Friend.tech.

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🚒🚫 Meta – News Blackout Criticized as Canada Battles Wildfires

The importance of social media during a natural disaster? Consider the evolution in how responses were coordinated during Hurricane Katrina (2005, only a nascent Facebook and no iPhones), and Hurricane Sandy (2012, smartphones and ubiquitous social media). Fast-forward to 2023 in Canada, and where are we? Business Insider’s headline – “Meta’s news ban is preventing Canadians from sharing vital information about the wildfires ripping through western Canada.” – says it all. We wrote about Meta’s fallout with the Canadian government a few weeks back, and this is the worst-case scenario we feared. Social media is indispensable during a climate emergency, allowing access to real-time updates, weather & police alerts on both the macro and peer-to-peer levels. Meta has failed that duty in pursuit of profit. It’s not the only one fiddling with the news this week. Elon Musk announced that X would be getting rid of headlines of articles shared on the platform. Why? “Esthetics”, Elon says. While not directly related, these two stories highlight how capitalist interests can clearly detract from the public good, despite the original idealistic intentions these platforms promised to deliver. Perhaps decentralized web3-style social media will provide the remedy one day. #MetaEmergency Read more here.

💘🤖 AI – Match Group Bets on Generative AI Tools for Dating

Match Group, which owns everything from Tinder to PlentyOfFish to BlackPeopleMeet, has had an interesting relationship with AI since the boom began. On the one hand, it was keen to try out the new tools on its apps. On the other hand, it didn’t want AI to tamper with the magic of two humans finding a connection. But it has finally relented, and Match will release a flurry of new AI tools on your favorite dating app. These include the ability to write your bio using AI and allowing AI to choose the best photos from an album. Most of the features will be tested first, and Match is likely to pull any that feel a bit weird for users. #AIDating Read more here.

Other News: A Brief Roundup of Interesting Stories this Week

🖼 A judge has ruled that AI art cannot be copyrighted. The ruling determined that only human-created artworks could be protected. Read about it here.

⚖️ Microsoft sniffs an opening in the Activision takeover case. Hurt by the UK’s antitrust ruling on the proposed $68.7 billion, Microsoft tries a new tactic. Get more on that story here.

🙏 An AI app lets users text with “Jesus”. A controversial new app allows users to chat with a bot posing as Jesus Christ. Critics have (unsurprisingly) called it blasphemous. The story is here.

🖥 Threads releases new web app. Threads. Remember it? Seems a lifetime ago we were talking about the Twitter Killer from Meta. Things have gone south in terms of user numbers. Will its new web app turn the tide? Get the details here.

🧐 Stat of the Week: 42% Fake?

❌😳 X – Mashable Report Lifts Lid on Musk’s 150 million+ Followers

Elon Musk is – famously – the most followed account on Twitter/X, a fact that probably suits someone with narcissistic tendencies. Mashable, however, took a deep dive into those followers, and it made for some interesting reading. 42% (65.3 million) of those accounts have zero followers, and 72% have less than 10 followers. Moreover, more than 62.5 million followers have never posted a single tweet. Almost 40 million were created after he purchased the platform, and 13.5 million accounts only followed one single account, Elon’s. So, what is it? Fakes? Bots? Lurkers? A bit from all three columns, Mashable claims. #MuskAccounts Read more here.

🕸️ What’s dAppening?

🤑👯 Friend.tech – Decentralized Platform Built on Base is All the Rage

The web3 world moves quickly, and there are few movements that have exploded into life as fast as “Friend Tech”. The platform, which is built on the Base blockchain (keep an eye on this one; it might be the next big thing) is kind of a hybrid social media and trading platform, where users buy and sell shares in themselves. The idea is that you buy shares (priced in Ethereum) in prominent users, allowing you to access exclusive content created by them. At the moment, this is all very much focused on crypto and crypto influencers, but some predict the idea will be popular with “normies”. Expect your fav celeb influencers to be on Friend Tech soon then. #FriendTech Read more here.

Meanwhile at 3Advance…

We have some bitter-sweet news regarding one of our most beloved platforms. This month was the end of an era for iFOIA, a free FOIA request service 3Advance developed and launched back in 2013. This incredible resource was devised by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and provided so much value to newsrooms and homes across America. The portal at iFOIA.org enabled an easy way to navigate the bureaucracy of government agencies, when, at the time their technology was limited to fax and email submissions that were hard to track and slow to process. Thankfully since then, there have been significant technology improvements (and much bigger budgets for the mammoth government consulting firms that were hired) on the government agency side. With the ever-growing need for legal services to defend the First Amendment’s freedom of the press, the RCFP made the announcement to shut down iFOIA earlier this year. 😥 We are so proud of our work here, developed when 3Advance was in its infancy. In fact, the project enabled our first full-time hire, Jorge Neyra, who stepped up to the plate and helped Paul and Darren make this happen. It has been an honor to work with the RCFP team, and we applaud them for their continued dedication to such an important cause.

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