These two posts, and how they were handled by Twitter and Facebook, will be studied for years.
You ask “Why North Carolina?” Well they’ve started voting in NC. He’s messing with the election in the very first state. Twitter is handling it appropriately by taking away amplification tools that provide the suppression velocity and reach. Facebook still not doing enough.
I can’t emphasize enough the elegance of Twitter’s policy here. In no way is Twitter suppressing the President’s speech (which they have right to do as a private platform). They are instead eliminating use of their social media tools to help spread it. This is good policy, @jack.
Facebook’s CEO and defenders argue that Facebook’s policy is best for speech. This is false. What they overlook is their algorithms spread the post microtargeting it to the vulnerable and reduce counter-speech which would otherwise correct the lie. Just see the first comments.
IOW, Facebook is enabling the harming of our democracy while Twitter is risking political pressures to do what is best to protect democracy. I wish advertisers and consumers could more clearly support this.
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Department of Justice has now posted its hundreds of great slides from closing arguments. I’ll share 13 slides that tell story imho captured by this list.
First, if search defaults don’t matter, why pay approx $30B, 40% of revenue to maintain them? 1/13
DOJ cleverly took this sentence from the DC circuit opinion in U.S. vs Microsoft and replaced it with Google’s search defaults story in red. “Fits like a glove” as they said to Court on Friday. Hard to argue. 2/13
The story on importance of Google’s data harvesting to monopoly maintenance was crystal clear so let’s move on to how DOJ alleges Google was able to use its market power to impact ad prices which drive much of their revenues. 3/13
There is a report going around Apple is going to facilitate blocking of ads in Safari - it deserves your attention. Meanwhile, I want to connect dots w/ a number of redactions lifted (yellow) late last night in the post-trial docs of US v Google - closing arguments are tmw. /1
It's critical to understand the importance of Safari to their Google deal under microscope. It's reasonable to say Safari delivers nearly 20% of Apple's Income from Ops almost entirely subsidized by Google. Without Safari, there is no Google deal. /2
As the expert witness in the trial pointed out, there isn't a rational explanation for a 40% revenue share on traffic that Google's proxies argue would happen without Apple. But hey, maybe that cash also pays for special influence into Safari's roadmap, too? /3
!!!!! just unsealed, and higher than prior news reports. /1
we learned last Fall in a different G lawsuit (NdCal) during widely reported testimony the number 36% as the share Google paid Apple to be locked in as default search across Apple's surfaces.
But now this was just unsealed from the two key contracts (here is 2014 which even then was 37.5%) /2
Whoa. Facebook had a secret "Project Ghostbusters" (get it?) which allegedly was to decrypt "man-in-the-middle" style Snapchat traffic to copy it. Yellow highlight indicates redactions just lifted in nine unsealed plaintiffs briefs in private antitrust lawsuit. Wild stuff. /1
A lot of new stuff. There was lots of reporting (including Apple threats to boot Facebook) at the time on Facebook's software and Onavo acquisition allowing it to "spy" on competitive apps but I recall the decryption was written as a hypothetical. CEO email kickstarting it. /2
You can read the press back in Jan 2019 spoon fed by Facebook PR to friendlies with no mentions of decrypting SSL then compare to this internal email below sent to Facebook's most senior executives - "currently includes SSL decryption"... /3
TikTok? Y’all are crazy. Yes, it’s a huge problem but hypocrisy. Last year after Facebook worked years to keep it sealed, a court unsealed its secret app audit. It showed 86,961 developers in China had access to all of our personal data…yet crickets. /1 storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…
This is the same app audit Zuckerberg promised Congress after concerns American’s personal data had been readily mined in Russia. Throw in Iran, North Korea, you name it. Press didn’t dig in. A good source told me DOJ and Congress hadn’t ever even seen this forensic audit. /2
Yet Facebook had spent four years trying very hard to keep even the names of the forensic auditing / clean-up firms confidential. Senate Intel Chairs did send a letter, no word on whether Facebook even responded to them. /3
ok, I've now read the NYT response this week to attempts by OpenAI to dismiss NYT's landmark lawsuit against the high-flying AI company.
Put simply, NYT makes it brutally clear on page one how you can tell the difference between the two companies.
Oomph. /1
A few other observations from me. Like NYT's original complaint, it's smart and future-focused on fair value. Where OpenAI made frankly bizarre claims NYT was hacking the platform as it detected OpenAI had its content, NYT is right. OpenAI isn't and can't dispute it copied it. /2
Um, 2022 > 2020 = TRUE. Where OpenAI tried to inject a statute-of-limitations argument that OpenAI's lifting of content was "common knowledge" in 2020, NYT points out that ChatGPT and OpenAI didn't go viral until Nov 2022. /3