NEW RESOURCES

DigitalNC: DigitalNC’s newest newspaper title, The AC Phoenix, is available now!. “The AC Phoenix serves the African American communities in and around North Carolina’s Triad region. Based in Winston-Salem, this paper has decades of experience sharing local and national news with its readers. There’s more to come, but this first batch includes issues from 1987 to 1989, and from 2007 to 2015.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Guardian: Parliamentary report set to savage ‘duplicitous’ Facebook. “Facebook cannot be trusted to regulate itself and must be subject to sweeping new legislation, a parliamentary report will announce on Monday. It will also call on the government to launch an independent investigation into foreign interference in British elections since 2014. The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee will publish what is expected to be a landmark report into fake news and disinformation at midnight on Sunday night.”

The Verge: Peach isn’t dead yet. “Peach went down last week. It took a few days before the developers addressed the situation online, and in that time its users were distraught because it wasn’t clear if the app was ever coming back. (As of this writing, it’s still not back up.) It is a special place: Warm, inviting, and private, a port hidden from the chaotic storm of posts that make up the contemporary internet. I got in touch with some of those people to see what Peach meant to them, and what it felt like to face down the possibility that this safe, beautiful place might disappear.”

USEFUL STUFF

How-To Geek: How to Upload the Best Looking Instagram Images. “Instagram is probably our favorite social network here at How-To Geek. We always want our photos to look their best, so I did the research. Here’s how to make your images look as good as possible on Instagram.”

Social Media Explorer: 20 of the best social media monitoring tools (the ultimate list). “There’s enough social media monitoring tools on the market to get you absolutely confused. This list is here to help. Every tool on the list does what it claims to do (which is not universal among software and products in general) – it either focuses on social media monitoring exclusively or does social media monitoring as a part of a broader toolkit. When in the right hands, it will definitely help improve customer service, raise brand awareness, and prevent a social media crisis. And some of the tools do even more than that.” Extensive, decently-annotated list though I’m not sure I agree with all of it (I love TweetDeck but I don’t consider it a monitoring tool.)

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

CNBC: Facebook lists and tracks users it considers security threats. “One of the tools Facebook uses to monitor threats is a ‘be on lookout’ or ‘BOLO’ list, which is updated approximately once a week. The list was created in 2008, an early employee in Facebook’s physical security group told CNBC. It now contains hundreds of people, according to four former Facebook security employees who have left the company since 2016.”

Motherboard: The Internet Was Built on the Free Labor of Open Source Developers. Is That Sustainable?. “On the surface, the open source software community has never been better. Companies and governments are adopting open source software at rates that would’ve been unfathomable 20 years ago, and a whole new generation of programmers are cutting their teeth on developing software in plain sight and making it freely available for anyone to use. Go a little deeper, however, and the cracks start to show. The ascendancy of open source has placed a mounting burden on the maintainers of popular software, who now handle more bug reports, feature requests, code reviews, and code commits than ever before. At the same time, open source developers must also deal with an influx of corporate users who are unfamiliar with community norms when it comes to producing and consuming open source software. This leads to developer burnout and a growing feeling of resentment toward the companies that rely on free labor to produce software that is folded into products and sold back to consumers for huge profits.”

BBC: Made In Chelsea’s Andy Jordan: Being an influencer made me ‘a puppet’. “He was making money, but the constant selling took its toll on Andy. At the same time, he was starring in Made In Chelsea, a scripted show made to look like reality TV. ‘You just become a puppet… you’re literally like the packaging,’ he says. ‘I’d lost who I was because everything was directed by someone else.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Forbes: New Legislation Seeks To Protect Lost African-American Burial Grounds. “In just the past year, construction projects and archaeological surveys have encountered numerous examples of undocumented African American burial grounds across the country. Archaeological testing encountered the remains of a 19th century African American burial ground in Philadelphia; construction crews in Fort Bend County, Texas, discovered nearly 100 unmarked graves of African American prison inmates believed to have been forced to work in sugar fields long after emancipation was declared; and, archaeologists working for the Maryland Department of Transportation uncovered a previously unknown slave cemetery in Crownsville, Maryland.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Wired: 1 in 3 Americans Suffered Severe Online Harassment in 2018 . “Despite concerted efforts by tech giants to cut back on abhorrent behavior on their platforms, a new survey finds that severe forms of online hate and harassment, including stalking and physical threats, may be on the rise. According to the survey, released Wednesday by the Anti-Defamation League, more than one third of Americans reported experiencing some type of severe online hate or harassment in 2018.” Good evening, Internet…

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