Month: October 2021

Mark Zuckerberg would like you to call his troubled company something else now. From Wall Street to Main Street to Capitol Hill, everyone is mad at Facebook. The company has been under fire since a trove of leaked internal documents shed light on its struggles to prevent real-world harm, from political unrest to teen suicides.
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Researchers trained an algorithm to answer questions about human values. Some of the responses are troubling. Artificial intelligence has made it possible for machines to do all sorts of useful new things. But they still don’t know right from wrong. A new program called Delphi, developed by researchers at the University of Washington and the
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The president’s long-awaited nominees are strong proponents of narrowing the digital divide and restoring net neutrality rules. President Biden finally made his picks for the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday, ending a baffling delay that forced Democrats to operate in a 2–2 deadlock with Republicans instead of the 3–2 majority that the president’s party typically
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The “badge posts” of the company’s former researchers offer the parting thoughts of the disillusioned. “Hi, all,” reads a note on Facebook’s internal Workplace system that was posted on December 9, 2020. “Friday is going to be my last day at Facebook. It makes me sad to leave. I don’t think I’ll ever have a
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Human reviewers and AI filters struggle to police the flood of content—or understand the nuances in different Arabic dialects. Facebook launched support for Arabic in 2009 and scored a hit. Soon after, the service won plaudits for helping the mass protests known as the Arab Spring. By last year, Arabic was the third most common
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Internal research documents provide a blueprint for solving the company’s biggest problems. In December 2019, as Facebook was bracing for the looming chaos of the 2020 election, a post appeared on its internal discussion site. “We are responsible for viral content,” the title declared. The author walked through the ways in which Facebook’s algorithmic design
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A WIRED series dives into thousands of internal documents, showing a company rife with issues that it largely failed to address. On October 5, a former member of Facebook’s civic misinformation team named Frances Haugen testified before Congress. In her nearly two years at Facebook, Haugen said, she had consistently seen the company prioritize growth
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Plus: The infamous 2016 Macbook Pro, Gödel’s ontological proof, and a mascot’s moment of weakness. Hi, folks. So Facebook is changing its name? Sorry, Mark, Plaintext is taken. And apparently, so is “TRUTH Social.” The Plain View This week Apple introduced a set of new MacBook Pro laptops. During the prerecorded launch event, Apple’s engineers
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Making your News Feed chronological is an enlightening look at what’s really happening on the platform. Facebook is broken, says whistleblower Frances Haugen, who worked on the company’s civic integrity team. In testimony before Congress and in the media, Haugen has argued that the social giant’s algorithms contribute to maladies that range from teen mental
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Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel, digital artist Beeple, scholar Timnit Gebru, actor John Cho, and more will discuss some of the biggest challenges facing humanity. Our world is facing some of the most critical challenges of all time. While the past decade ushered in dramatic technological acceleration, the last 18 months have kicked off a tectonic
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Many people eligible for Covid-era rent assistance have trouble navigating a “tangled web” of agencies because they don’t have reliable internet access. A national moratorium on evictions expired in late August, after the US Supreme Court blocked a Biden administration bid to extend it. Many feared a drastic upswing in evictions, but instead filings rose
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Can rebranding the company herald a fresh start? Experts, as you might guess, are skeptical. When Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook, in 2004, it was a mere directory of students at Harvard: The Face Book. Two decades, 90 acquisitions, and billions of dollars later, Facebook has become a household name. Now it wants a new one.
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The new M1 Pro and M1 Max better integrate the computers’ hardware with their software—much like the iPhone. The combination of the Windows operating system and Intel chips was once so successful that the duo was referred to as “Wintel.” Apple’s new MacBook Pro laptops, revealed Monday, show just how much things have changed. At
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The Microsoft subsidiary had agreed in 2014 to censor content in China, but that apparently wasn’t enough for tougher government regulators. For Chinese regulators, even a censored US-based social network was too much. Microsoft ​said Thursday it would cease operating its work-oriented social network LinkedIn within China by the end of the year. In a
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It’s not a fantasy: VC valuations and spending on startups in 2021 are off the charts, and the year isn’t over yet. When the venture capitalist Aileen Lee coined the term unicorn, in 2013, there were 39 of them—roughly four minted every year. So far in 2021, 264 companies in the United States have reached
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As language models get more complex, they also get more expensive to create and run. Some companies are locked out.  Calvin Qi, who works at a search startup called Glean, would love to use the latest artificial intelligence algorithms to improve his company’s products. Glean provides tools for searching through applications like Gmail, Slack, and
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GM thinks consumers might pay $135 a month for emergency assistance, enhanced maps, and software-enabled upgrades that boost acceleration. In 2021, credit card statements are loaded with routine monthly charges: Netflix for video, Spotify for music, XBox Game Pass for gaming, Peloton for fitness—and so on, with meal kits, wine boxes, and high-protein, low-carb cereals.
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“Reading these headlines about record rounds, you have to ask, who is having this experience?” one founder says. “Certainly not the women I know.” Venture capitalists have broken records every quarter this year, pushing more money into the startup ecosystem with bigger and bigger deals. Amid this funding frenzy, some female-founded companies are raising “mega
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The social media behemoth outlines plans to bring speedy internet access to hard-to-reach places.  Facing heightened scrutiny for its social media policies and relentless quest for growth, Facebook is now turning its attention to getting more people high-speed internet access in hard-to-reach places. The move comes with some irony, as it comes on the heels
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Students—many from lower-income households—were likely to use school-issued devices for remote learning. But the devices often contained monitoring software. When tens of millions of students suddenly had to learn remotely, schools lent laptops and tablets to those without them. But those devices typically came with monitoring software, marketed as a way to protect students and
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A photographer set out to capture the misinformation producers in a small town in Macedonia. He wound up revealing uncomfortable truths about his own profession. The photographic elite gathered in Perpignan, France, on September 1 at the annual Visa Pour L’Image photojournalism festival. That night, the outdoor screen shimmered with images of people using laptops
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Congress has been grilling the company’s executives for years. This time, the whistleblower behind an unprecedented leak of documents will take the floor. The only safe prediction to make about the Senate’s Facebook hearing today is that, for the first time in a long time, it will be different. Over the past three and a
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Last year, Netflix made a pledge that represents the tech industry’s best shot at redressing the nation’s racial inequality. How seriously should we take it? In the spring of 2020, folks in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward started flocking to the Sankofa food pantry on Dauphine Street however they could—by car, on bicycles, rolling pushcarts
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In an interview with WIRED, CEO Hoan Ton-That said the company has scraped 10 billion photos from the web—and developed new ways to aid police surveillance. Clearview AI has stoked controversy by scraping the web for photos and applying facial recognition to give police and others an unprecedented ability to peer into our lives. Now
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