|
Friday again, incredible. We made it another week. On the podcast this week: More on what is happening inside Meta with the company's recent speech policy change, and how thousands of apps have been hijacked to steal your location data. In the subscribers-only section, we talk about various stories intersecting with the LA fires. Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or watch it on YouTube. An update on orders of our new merch: They’re shipping this week! They were a little delayed due to, like, various acts of god, but you should be getting them soon. And people already are! If you snagged some swag and want to show it off, post it on the social platform of your choice and tag us. We’re on most of ‘em. And don’t forget to mark your calendars for our next FOIA Forum on January 23, where we'll talk live about how to request documents from local, state, and federal agencies; tricks for getting the records you want; requesting things you might not have thought of; and how to apply when the government tries to withhold those records. Details here. Sign up as a supporter to get access. Ok, here’s what you may have missed this week: OK MIKEYMikey Shulman, the CEO and founder of the AI music generator company Suno AI, thinks people don’t enjoy making music. “We didn’t just want to build a company that makes the current crop of creators 10 percent faster or makes it 10 percent easier to make music. If you want to impact the way a billion people experience music you have to build something for a billion people,” Shulman recently said on the 20VC podcast. “And so that is first and foremost giving everybody the joys of creating music and this is a huge departure from how it is now. It’s not really enjoyable to make music now […] It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.” Cool take, Mikey. The Oscars of porn and the industry’s largest trade show will begin in one week, on January 22 at Virgin Hotels in Las Vegas. Inside, adult performers, producers, directors and crew will find out whether they’ve won the prestigious AVN Award in categories including “Best All-Girl Group Sex Scene” and “Best Big Butt Movie or Collected Release,” but outside, hospitality workers are picketing for a better union contract. It’s a massive week for the adult industry, but porn workers are conflicted about crossing the picket line, with many choosing to sit this one out entirely. The U.S. government is trying to give Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg the greatest gift he could possibly imagine: A TikTok ban. This would be U.S. intervention against the most credible competitor Meta has seen in years, and U.S. intervention to kill a superior product to the benefit of an American company. On Joe Rogan last week, Zuckerberg said that the U.S. government “should be defending its companies, not be the tip of the spear attacking its companies.” And yet, in this case, the U.S. government—the Biden administration that he has been railing against as he pivots to MAGA—has squarely aimed its spear at Meta’s biggest, most credible competitor in a move that would greatly benefit Zuckerberg and his company. Yes, Donald Trump has Mark Zuckerberg by the balls.  Image: Immigration and Customs Enforcement SPEECHLESSWith Meta’s recent speech policy changes regarding immigration, in which the company will allow people to call immigrants pieces of trash, Mark Zuckerberg is laying the narrative groundwork for President-elect Trump’s planned mass deportations of people from the United States. Multiple speech and content moderation experts 404 Media spoke to drew some parallels between these recent changes and when Facebook contributed to a genocide in Myanmar in 2017, in which Facebook was used to spread anti-Rohingya hate and the country’s military ultimately led a campaign of murder, torture, and rape against the Muslim minority population. Although there are some key differences, Meta’s changes in the U.S. will also likely lead to the spread of more hate speech across Meta’s sites, with the real world consequences that can bring. KEEP READINGReplying to Why This OnlyFans Model Posts Machine Learning Explainers to Pornhub, Neal Sorensen writes: “This story feels like a neighbor to stories in 2018ish about clips of Hamilton and full movies being hosted on Pornhub. And now there's educational content! It's sad that PH is one of the only sites where content creators get paid more fairly.”
Close: 2015, actually! And in response to Meta Is Laying the Narrative Groundwork for Trump’s Mass Deportations, Chris Wagner writes: “‘Meta was getting back 'to its roots’’ Rating the hotness of Harvard's women?”
It’s just that return to masculine energy, baby. BEHIND THE BLOGThis is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss enjoying things in the AI industry and the TikTok ban. JOSEPH: I’m going to talk about Emanuel’s great piece "CEO of AI Music Company Says People Don’t Like Making Music." Please go read Emanuel’s whole piece. It’s short and gets straight to the good points of, among other things, that the pursuit of the challenge is one thing that draws people to learn an instrument. Shulman says with his AI tool, they could make the music industry as big as the video game industry, ignoring the fact that some of the most popular video games are specifically about a hard challenge, as Emanuel says. I’ve been thinking a lot about AI music generators recently. I listened to this fascinating On The Media episode where a highly accomplished composer who writes music for adverts and other things is absolutely terrified at AI taking his job and thinks it will in large part. Read the rest of Joseph's Behind the Blog, as well as Jason, Emanuel, and Sam's, by becoming a paid subscriber.
|
