Rest of World / Russell Brandom
The war in Gaza is reshaping moderation rules →“In a recent talk with the Atlantic Council, a member of Meta’s independent Oversight Board gave new details about the weeks immediately following the October 7 attacks. As part of its arrangement with Meta, the Board receives appeals from the company or its users when a moderation decision is believed to be false, or simply raises issues the company can’t resolve. But in the three weeks after the attacks, the board received 20 times more appeals than usual, according to board member Julie Owono.”
The Wall Street Journal / Salvador Rodriguez, Sam Schechner, and Meghan Bobrowsky
Threads to launch in Europe in December →“The launch represents Threads’ largest market expansion since its debut in July and signals the social-media company’s commitment to the microblogging service, which rivals that of Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter.”
Poynter / Deborah Caldwell
The Washington Post / Taylor Lorenz
Substack is rolling out a suite of new video creation and editing tools →“The focus on video signifies a shift in Substack’s business model — and a sign that the platform may now be forced to compete for talent with video-focused social media behemoths like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. It also puts Substack in direct competition with platforms like Patreon that allow users to charge subscriptions for a wide variety of content formats.”
The Verge / Jacob Kastrenakes and Mila Sato
Elon Musk tells advertisers: “Go fuck yourself” →“I hope they stop. Don’t advertise,” Musk told interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin. “If somebody is going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself. Go fuck yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is.”
Grist / Rachel Glickhouse
The New York Times / David Sanger
Henry Kissinger always tended to his image, even when it came to his obituary →“He wrote voluminous memoirs for the same reason Churchill did: He wanted be the first to cast his role in the best possible light, omitting almost all of its ugliest moments. His mistake was living so long that reams of his old memos and diplomatic cables were declassified, including those that revealed his most vicious acts. Yet one could not help but admire how he thought constantly about the new challenges that did not fit the world he once knew.”
Substack / Richard J. Tofel
Pew Research Center / Michael Lipka and Elisa Shearer
Audiences are declining for traditional news media in the U.S. – with some exceptions →“Overall, digital traffic to newspapers’ websites is declining. The average monthly number of unique visitors to the websites of the country’s top 50 newspapers (based on circulation, and including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post) declined 20% to under 9 million in the fourth quarter of 2022, down from over 11 million in the same period in 2021, according to Comscore data. The length of the average visit to these sites is also falling – to just under a minute and a half in the last quarter of 2022.”
The Guardian / Rob LeDonne
“Almost like election night”: behind the scenes of Spotify Wrapped →“Wrapped, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2024, has come a long way in the intervening years. ‘It started as a marketing campaign without any type of digital component,’ says [Spotify head of global marketing experience Louisa] Ferguson of what was originally called Year In Music. ‘Then it expanded with an external microsite, and the following year we took it in-app.’ Since then it’s experienced ‘exponential growth.'”
Press Gazette / Dominic Ponsford
Discourse Blog / Jack Crosbie
The ghosts of websites past →“If you browse around the sea of media properties long enough you will find many floating hulks of publications gone by, drifting listlessly as ghost ships or manned by a skeleton-crew of raiders who have repurposed them to trawl for the diminishing returns of SEO traffic or ecommerce kickbacks.”