Mozilla News Beat, Sept 4
| | | | | | | | | Welcome to the Mozilla News Beat, a glance at the best and worst internet news of the week. We hope you enjoy it! |
| I'm Not Crying, You're Crying. Beirut is still reeling from the tragic explosion last month. This video will give you all the feels of people being reunited with their lost pets weeks later. I'm totally crying. | via Twitter | | | What's Old is New Again. Feeling nostalgic for the internet of old when you could hack together your own site all about the random things you were into? Back before Facebook algorithms sparked anger all the time? That internet is trying to make a comeback and we're here for it! | via MIT Technology Review | | | Checkmate 2020. The global pandemic forced this year's Chess Olympiad online. In one of the most 2020 things ever, India and Russia were declared joint winners when two players from India lost their internet connection and couldn't finish their matches. | via BBC | | Yard Signs Don't Vote. Players of Animal Crossing, the video game of the pandemic, can now add political yard signs to their island. Islanders have their choice of 4 different sign designs to voice their support. Just don't expect Isabelle to call the election results November 3. | via The Guardian | | Out Of Control. Lines of code — called algorithms — written by humans control our lives in all sorts of consequential ways. Mashable put together a list of decisions made about your life via code you might find surprising — everything from if you can eat out to if you are a crime risk. | via Mashable | | Back In Control. Fortunately, Mashable also put together a useful guide on how to reduce the influence of the decision-making algorithms in your life, at least in a few places like Facebook and YouTube. | via Mashable | | Deepfake Detector. Microsoft has partnered with the AI Foundation to make a new deepfake detection tool available to news outlets and political campaigns. It identifies manipulated videos to help fight misinformation during the US election. | via TechCrunch | | Too Little Too Late? Facebook announced this week it won't allow any new political ads seven days before the US election. It will still let existing ads run and be microtargeted, making this move feel rather shallow. | via BBC | | A Bad Trend. Twitter's Trending Topics has come under fire for its spread of harmful misinformation. Mozilla and many others would like to see Twitter remove Trending Topics through the US election. Instead, Twitter plans to add context to the topics, a half-measure. | via NY Times & Mozilla | | Flood of Falsehoods. This week saw a wave of false and deceptively edited videos, shared on Twitter and Facebook, by high profile US politicians and political campaigns. Those social media platforms aren't doing a very good job keeping this harmful content from spreading. | via CNN | | No Laptops For Learning. Thanks to the pandemic there's a global laptop shortage. This shortage has hit particularly hard for the low-cost laptops many students, especially low-income students, need for remote learning, widening the already growing inequality gap. | via Vox | | Lack Of Consent. A rapidly growing number of deepfake porn videos are created and shared on porn sites without the consent of the people inserted into the videos, often female celebrities. Porn sites frequently won't remove these videos because laws aren't keeping up with the technology. | via Wired |
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