- Filled with loopholes: Salvador Rodriguez, writing for CNBC, argues that the bylaws for the new board leave too much control in the hands of Facebook. The 46-page document is “filled with loopholes and binds Facebook to very little concrete action,” he writes. “These bylaws make clear that Facebook is still firmly in control.” In addition to the restrictions on the types of content it can adjudicate, the bylaws suggest that any decisions will only apply to specific pieces of content brought before the board, and won’t necessarily create any precedent for the company to take action on similar types of content, Rodriguez says.
- Uncharacteristically incremental: Evelyn Douek, who is working on a doctorate in law from Harvard and writes for the legal blog Lawfare, sees a positive side to some of the restrictions. Instead of rushing into making big decisions, the way the company often does, Douek argues that the bylaws “betray an uncharacteristically incremental approach from Facebook” in the sense that the board’s original scope will be fairly limited, with promises to ramp up the group’s decision-making power at some point in the future. But she said the limitation of only being able to challenge take-downs “is a blunder that will skew the work of the board,” and she hopes the company rectifies that situation soon.
- Hurry up and wait: Bloomberg notes that the way the board is structured won’t make it easy for the group to act quickly to stop the viral spread of misinformation or abuse on the network, because the decisions are expected to take as long as three months to work their way through the process and get to the point where Facebook can act on them. In what the company calls “exceptional circumstances,” a case could be expedited, and then the decision-making process might be sped up to the point where it would only take a month.
- Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor who was once seen as a potential savior for print newspapers, is cashing in his chips and walking away from the table: Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett’s holding company, has sold its entire stable of newspapers—a group that includes the Buffalo News—to Lee Enterprises. The fact that Berkshire Hathaway is also lending Lee $576 million to pay for the acquisition suggests that Buffett would much rather earn a steady rate of interest from a loan than rely on revenue from the newspapers themselves. To complicate matters, hedge fund Alden Global Capital, which has been making wide cuts at its Digital First Media newspaper chain, has just acquired a stake in Lee Enterprises.
- ABC News has suspended the correspondent who speculated on-air that all four of Kobe Bryant’s daughters were on board the helicopter that crashed and killed the NBA icon and eight others on Sunday. Before it was confirmed that only one of Bryant’s daughters was on board with him for the flight, chief national correspondent Matt Gutman said during his live report from the scene that Bryant’s other daughters were on the helicopter as well. He corrected the error in a later report and apologized for conveying the misinformation, but the network said his behavior “failed to meet our editorial standards.”
- News Corp. launched its competitor to Google News, which is known as Knewz, with a website design that many described as garish, offensive, and even nausea-inducing. The company said that the site draws news from more than 400 publishers and sites, and uses a combination of algorithms and human editors to select to most interesting or relevant. “We live in a world of vexatious verticals, of crass clickbait, of polarized perspectives and fallacious, fact-free feeds,” News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson said in a statement. “Knewz is knowing and needed. Knewz nous is in the house.”
- The BBC announced that it is cutting about 450 jobs from its news division in order to meet a cost-saving target. Programs that will be hit by the cuts include BBC Two’s Newsnight, BBC Radio 5 Live and the World Update programme on the World Service. BBC News boss Fran Unsworth said there had to be a move away from traditional broadcasting and towards digital. But broadcasting union BECTU said the changes mean staff will be “under even more pressure to deliver”. BBC News currently employs around 6,000 people, including 1,700 outside the UK. It is hoping to save about $100 million with the cuts.
- Nicholas Pelham, the Middle Eastern correspondent for The Economist, writes about how he was detained in Iran for almost two months last year while on a reporting trip. “I was paying my bill at the hotel when they came,” he writes. “There were seven of them, stiff and formal in plain-clothes. “Mr Pelham?” asked the shortest one and presented me with a hand-written document in Farsi. “It’s been signed by a judge,” he said. “It entitles us to detain you for 48 hours.” He paused to allow the information to register on my face. “It might be less,” he added. “We just need you to answer a few questions.”
- Bob Norman writes for CJR about how Matt Drudge, whose site is one of the biggest conservative traffic sources on the internet, has turned on Donald Trump since the 2016 election. He even manages to get the reclusive media mogul on the phone to talk about it, but all Drudge wants to discuss is how Norman drove out to his $2.2-million estate near Miami and knocked on the door trying to find him. “That’s not fair that you would come onto my property, knowing the climate we’re in,” Drudge said. “What happens if it was a stalker?”
- After a year of beta testing, ad-free-news startup Scroll opened up to the general public on Tuesday. Founded by former Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile, the company offers users an ad-free reading experience on more than 300 news sites (plus a few other added features, including audio versions of all articles) for $5 a month. Most of that money goes to Scroll, but part of it is shared with the publishers whose sites users frequent the most, which Haile hopes will keep media outlets on board. He says Scroll was born out of his own frustration as an online news reader who resented slow-loading junk ads and dodgy trackers.
- Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has released a proposal to deal with disinformation online, but while the announcement caused some concern about a sweeping ban on “fake news,” the plan focuses on one specific variety of disinformation: namely, the kind that tries to mislead voters about when or where to vote. Warren said she would “push for new laws that impose tough civil and criminal penalties for knowingly disseminating this kind of information, which has the explicit purpose of undermining the basic right to vote.” Separately, Twitter announced a new tool that will allow users to report tweets that they suspect are being used to try to deceive people about voting-related information.
- The Guardian newspaper says it will no longer accept advertising from oil and gas companies. “Our decision is based on the decades-long efforts by many in that industry to prevent meaningful climate action by governments around the world,” the company’s acting chief executive, Anna Bateson, and chief revenue officer, Hamish Nicklin, said in a joint statement. They said the response to global heating was the “most important challenge of our times” and highlighted the Guardian’s own reporting on how lobbying by energy companies has explicitly harmed the environmental cause.
- New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo says he’s more worried about the panic and other behavior surrounding the coronavirus than he is about the virus itself. “What worries me more than the new disease is that fear of a vague and terrifying new illness might spiral into panic, and that it might be used to justify unnecessarily severe limits on movement and on civil liberties, especially of racial and religious minorities around the world,” he writes. “I also worry that in the event of an actual pandemic a large number of people may delay treatment or refuse vaccines because they don’t believe the science or are suspicious of the government.”
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