Secret Facebook Genius

Willkommen bei THEFUTURE, dem Newsletter mit den interessanten Links zu Medien, Tech und Wild Wild Web.

Diese Woche mit viel Facebook. Sorry. Nächste Woche dann etwas verspulter zum Aerocene. Das wird gut. Hinter »Open Secret« unten bei den lustigen Links verbergen sich jede Menge digitale Kunstprojekte, richtig gut, da kann man sich Stunden verlieren. Allein NM WebDex Y2K20 (Si apre in una nuova finestra)...

Facebookistan

Das Wall Street Journal hat Zugang zu internen Studien von Facebook und veröffentlicht gerade eine investigative Artikel-Serie (Si apre in una nuova finestra), deren Enthüllungen 1–2 Tage später auch in Deutschland in den Medien auftauchen. Außerdem gibt es dazu 🎧 Podcast-Episoden (Si apre in una nuova finestra).

Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls (Si apre in una nuova finestra), Company Documents Show. Its own in-depth research shows a significant teen mental-health issue that Facebook plays down in public.
Facebook Says Its Rules Apply to All. (Si apre in una nuova finestra) Company Documents Reveal a Secret Elite That’s Exempt.
Facebook Tried to Make Its Platform a Healthier Place. (Si apre in una nuova finestra) It Got Angrier Instead.
Facebook Employees Flag Drug Cartels and Human Traffickers. (Si apre in una nuova finestra) The Company’s Response Is Weak, Documents Show.

Und sonst so?

Facebook sent flawed data to misinformation researchers. (Si apre in una nuova finestra) Vor drei Jahren wurden Daten weitergegeben, jetzt fällt auf: Da fehlt die Hälfte. Etliche Studien sind damit ... falsch.
WhatsApp Moderators Can Read Your Messages. (Si apre in una nuova finestra) WhatsApp isn't the impenetrable private messaging service Facebook likes to claim, ProPublica finds.

Social

TikTok, make it stop (Si apre in una nuova finestra): Gefälschten Nutzerkonten, ungenaue Kennzeichnung und nicht genug Engagement: Mozilla kritisiert vor der Bundestagswahl TikTok.
AfD, AfD, AfD (Si apre in una nuova finestra): »Inhalte der AfD landen im Instagram-Newsfeed weiter oben als die von anderen Parteien. Das zeigt eine Analyse der Süddeutschen Zeitung, die im Projekt #wahlfilter mit Hilfe eines Browser-Add-ons von AlgorithmWatch über 200.000 Datenspenden ausgewertet hat.« Hier ein Twitter-Thread mit Details.
Discord Is Worth $15 Billion (Si apre in una nuova finestra): Discord raised $500 million, led by Dragoneer Investment Group. Startup turned down $12 billion offer from Microsoft.

Journalismus

True Genius (Si apre in una nuova finestra): How to go from »the future of journalism« to a fire sale in a few short years.
Wie sich Macht und Geld (Si apre in una nuova finestra) in die österreichische Medienlandschaft eingeschlichen haben – und was das mit Profil zu tun hat, erklärt Anita Zielina.
The Devil Wears Allbirds (Si apre in una nuova finestra): Silicon Valley companies are sucking up all the fashion editors.

Silicon Valley

Paradise lost (Si apre in una nuova finestra): The rise and ruin of Couchsurfing.com. The once-utopian accommodations site, now headed by an alum of surveillance-analytics firm Palantir, has gone back on its always-free ethos.
Ebooks Are an Abomination (Si apre in una nuova finestra). If you hate them, it’s not your fault.
Turning Homes Into LLCs and Pissing Off the Neighbors (Si apre in una nuova finestra): Californians say the billion-dollar company is hawking illegal timeshares. »If this business model succeeds,« one Sonoma resident said, »our town starts to become more and more like an adult Disneyland.«
What Spotify and Apple can learn from Chinese podcasting apps. (Si apre in una nuova finestra) Western platforms are still way behind in giving creators (and fans) the tools to succeed.
What's New in Unicode 14.0 (Si apre in una nuova finestra): 37 brand new emoji code points.
Imagine a World Without Apps. (Si apre in una nuova finestra) Video games are inching away from apps. Maybe every other industry can, too.

Crypto

Insiders and experts are driving a massive spike in crypto (Si apre in una nuova finestra): DeFi, or decentralized finance, was meant to democratize crypto, but it is big speculators who are cashing in.
OpenSea confirms executive used insider knowledge when buying NFTs (Si apre in una nuova finestra): Ein Marktplatz, dessen Betreiber... ach, es ist alles dasselbe alte Spiel.

Longreads

The inside story of the most daring surveillance sting in history (Si apre in una nuova finestra): Billed as the most secure phone on the planet, An0m became a viral sensation in the underworld. There was just one problem for anyone using it for criminal means: it was run by the police.
What's going on with global supply chains? (Si apre in una nuova finestra) (aka "why are we running out of everthing," "why is shipping so slow," "why are things more expensive"). A link roundup thread.

Internet Explorer

Open Secret (Si apre in una nuova finestra) is a six-month long program that explores images of the technological hidden in our apparently »open« society.
Marginalia (Si apre in una nuova finestra): It is a search engine, designed to help you find what you didn't even know you were looking for.
Bespoke (Si apre in una nuova finestra) is a software modular synthesizer. It contains a bunch of modules, which you can connect together to create sounds.
How to Crawl the Web with Scrapy (Si apre in una nuova finestra)