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Musk Draws Backlash for Picking World Economic Forum Leader, Supporter of ‘Content Moderation’ to Run Twitter
Elon Musk selected advertising executive Linda Yaccarino to replace him as chief executive officer of Twitter, drawing concern as users on the platform notice her connections to the World Economic Forum (WEF) and her endorsements of content moderation.
Twitter users started to uncover the connections that Yaccarino holds to entities such as the WEF, for which she chairs the Taskforce on Future of Work and sits on the Media, Entertainment and Culture Industry Governors Steering Committee.
The WEF is a leading proponent of stakeholder capitalism, an approach to investing that encourages executives to consider the needs of employees, communities and other parties in addition to shareholders, and the use of corporate power to advance political agendas.
Musk himself criticized the WEF earlier this year for “trying to be the boss” of the entire planet as business leaders and government officials gathered at the organization’s annual summit in Switzerland.
Yaccarino also served as board chair for the Ad Council, an entity which creates public service announcements for nonprofits and governments. She partnered with the Biden administration to launch a campaign featuring Pope Francis in order to promote COVID-19 vaccines.
IN-DEPTH: Is Your Money Spying on You?
Slowly but steadily, our money is taking on a new role; in addition to its traditional function as a medium of exchange and store of value, money is increasingly becoming a means of surveillance and control.
Financial privacy has become one of the biggest casualties in the world’s relentless march to a digital payments system.
Not only do corporations like your bank, credit card issuer, PayPal and Amazon know your buying habits intimately, this data is routinely passed on to government to be mined in a warrantless search for criminal activity.
Behind this phenomenon is what some call the “war on cash,” with the goal of a cashless society. This transition includes partnerships of banking and tech companies, and the rise of the “fintech” industry.
Google’s New AI Plan to Demolish Journalism Industry
Remember back in 2018, when Google removed “don’t be evil” from its code of conduct?
It’s been living up to that removal lately. At its annual I/O in San Francisco this week, the search giant finally lifted the lid on its vision for AI-integrated search — and that vision, apparently, involves cutting digital publishers off at the knees.
At first glance, the change might seem relatively benign. Often, all folks surfing the web want is a quick-hit summary or snippet of something anyway.
But it’s not unfair to say that Google, which in April, according to data from SimilarWeb, hosted roughly 91% of all search traffic, is somewhat synonymous with, well, the internet. And the internet isn’t just some ethereal, predetermined thing, as natural water or air. The internet is a marketplace, and Google is its kingmaker.
As such, the demo raises an extremely important question for the future of the already-ravaged journalism industry: if Google’s AI is going to mulch up original work and provide a distilled version of it to users at scale, without ever connecting them to the original work, how will publishers continue to monetize their work?
As COVID Emergency Ends, Surveillance Shifts to the Sewers
As the COVID-19 public health emergency expires in the U.S., the coronavirus will not disappear. But many of the data streams that have helped Americans monitor the virus will go dark.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will stop tabulating community levels of COVID-19 and will no longer require certain case information from hospitals or testing data from laboratories.
And as free testing is curtailed, official case counts, which became less reliable as Americans shifted to at-home testing, may drift even further from reality.
But experts who want to keep tabs on the virus will still have one valuable option: sewage.
People who are infected with the coronavirus shed the pathogen in their stool, whether or not they take a COVID-19 test or seek medical care, enabling officials to track levels of the virus in communities over time and to watch for the emergence of new variants.
Lawmakers ‘Cowered’ to Take on Tech Giants Again, Senator Says
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) spoke candidly on Thursday about the impact of failed efforts to pass major antitrust legislation last Congress. The defeat is hurting lawmakers’ attempts to rein in the tech giants, he argued, because some of his colleagues “cowered” in the face of industry “intimidation.”
A massive industry-led lobbying campaign to tank those proposals is still giving lawmakers the jitters, he said during a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting.
Grassley’s blunt remarks illustrate fallout from lawmakers’ antitrust defeat and how it may shape efforts to regulate the tech sector moving ahead, beyond concerns about competition.
