TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Washington Post: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey called Rep. Ilhan Omar after Trump’s tweet sparked a flood of death threats. “Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey phoned Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar on Tuesday and stood by the company’s decision to permit a tweet from President Trump that later resulted in a flood of death threats targeting the congresswoman.”

Financial Express: ‘Systemic Retaliation’: Google workers share stories, discuss with activists. “Hundreds of Google staffers met on Friday and discussed what activists allege is a frequent consequence of criticizing the company: Retaliation. Two leaders of recent company protests said they’ve been mistreated by managers and collected similar stories from other workers at the world’s largest internet company.”

WordPress 5.2 Release Candidate 1 is now available. “This is an important milestone as we progress toward the WordPress 5.2 release date. ‘Release Candidate’ means that the new version is ready for release, but with millions of users and thousands of plugins and themes, it’s possible something was missed. WordPress 5.2 is scheduled to be released on Tuesday, May 7, but we need your help to get there—if you haven’t tried 5.2 yet, now is the time!”

USEFUL STUFF

Internet Archive: The Mueller Report, Searchable and Accessible on the Archive. “We have the tools that empower people to share and discover public domain documents like government reports. Thanks to our community members who moved quickly to upload copies, the world can now search, share, download or read a mobile-friendly version of the Mueller report for free.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Harvard Business Review: The Instagram Army: Activism in the 21st Century. “Eglantina Zingg has leveraged her success as a model, actress, and television personality to become a leader in the fight to create better opportunities for women and girls around the world, such as the soccer program Goleadoras. It’s hardly a new phenomenon for successful, famous people to wield their influence for social change. But in our modern social media, FOMO-driven world, it’s become more essential than ever for people with large followings to harness this unprecedented personal influence to create the positive change we desperately need.” This is a podcast episode which, sadly, does not seem to have a transcript. In my experience HBR is normally really good about that, but this particular podcast (FOMO Sapiens) doesn’t appear to have transcripts for any of its episodes. I have reached out to the podcast host and will update this if I hear back.

Washington Post: YouTube recommended a Russian media site thousands of times for analysis of Mueller’s report, a watchdog group says. “When the report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III came out last week, offering the most authoritative account yet of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, YouTube recommended one video source hundreds of thousands of times to viewers seeking information, a watchdog says: RT, the global media operation funded by the Russian government.”

The Star: Archives says someone started fire outside DC building. ” Someone tried to light on fire the Washington, D.C. building that keeps the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the National Archives said Friday.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Mashable: Facebook bans political ads from other countries to fight EU election interference . “Facebook announced a major change to combat foreign election interference ahead of the European Union (EU) elections in May. At a press briefing on Friday, Facebook officials said that in order to protect ‘the integrity of elections,’ they would be cracking down on online advertising from being used for foreign interference. All political advertisers in the EU now need to gain authorisation in the country where ads are being delivered.”

Krebs on Security: P2P Weakness Exposes Millions of IoT Devices. “A peer-to-peer (P2P) communications technology built into millions of security cameras and other consumer electronics includes several critical security flaws that expose the devices to eavesdropping, credential theft and remote compromise, new research has found.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

EurekAlert: The dead may outnumber the living on Facebook within 50 years. “New analysis by academics from the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), part of the University of Oxford, predicts the dead may outnumber the living on Facebook within fifty years, a trend that will have grave implications for how we treat our digital heritage in the future. The analysis predicts that, based on 2018 user levels, at least 1.4 billion members will die before 2100. In this scenario, the dead could outnumber the living by 2070. If the world’s largest social network continues to expand at current rates, however, the number of deceased users could reach as high as 4.9 billion before the end of the century.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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