NEW RESOURCES

Variety: Ava DuVernay Launches ARRAY Crew, Promoting Below-the-Line Diversity. “Producer and director Ava DuVernay has launched ARRAY Crew, a database for Hollywood’s below-the-line crew members. ARRAY Crew’s main focus is to elevate women, people of color and other underrepresented film and television professionals.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

9to5 Google: Google winding down standalone Crisis Map website given Search, Maps integration. “Google is deprecating this standalone website, which has not been visually updated for quite some time, as much of the data is available directly on Google Search and Maps as SOS Alerts.”

New York Times: A New Delay for Census Numbers Could Scramble Congressional Elections. “The delivery date for the 2020 census data used in redistricting, delayed first by the coronavirus pandemic and then by the Trump administration’s interference, now is so late that it threatens to scramble the 2022 elections, including races for Congress.”

USEFUL STUFF

Fast Company: Facebook has banned Australian news, but there’s a workaround. “It’s unlikely that the news ban will last forever, at least in its current form….But in the meantime, Facebook users are stuck without a way to share reliable information on the world’s largest social media platform. That’s not ideal, given how easily misinformation can flourish on Facebook instead. Fortunately, there is a workaround.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Fast Company: These are the world’s most sustainable fonts. “You probably haven’t thought about whether some websites can be more sustainable than others, but in fact, web design choices can affect how much energy the site uses. In this case, the Formafantasma team made visual choices that had a direct effect on the site’s sustainability. They didn’t just choose Times New Roman and Arial because they liked them, but because they’re standard default typefaces—and therefore, the most sustainable typefaces on the web.”

ABC News (Australia): Sex abuse survivors lose archive as Facebook removes news from ‘life saving’ site. “A survivor of clergy abuse who started a Facebook group to help other survivors says he is ‘devastated’ by the social media giant’s decision to block Australian news….[Richie Scutt] estimated more than 2,000 news articles had been shared to the Facebook group since 2016, and said he was devastated to find they had all disappeared when he logged onto Facebook this morning.”

Bangkok Post: Cambodia’s new internet gateway decried as repression tool. “Human rights groups decried Cambodia’s establishment this week of a China-style internet gateway that would allow all online traffic to be controlled and monitored, saying it would be a new tool for longtime leader Hun Sen to repress any opposition.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Marketplace: New antitrust legislation would check the power of tech giants. “I spoke with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., who leads the subcommittee on antitrust and has introduced a bill intended to check the power of tech giants. It focuses mostly on acquisitions, aimed at preventing huge companies from buying potential competitors and forcing companies that control more than 50% of a market to prove that an acquisition wouldn’t reduce competition. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation.”

CNET: Millions of Americans can’t get broadband because of a faulty FCC map. There’s a fix. “Millions of Americans around the country lack access to fast internet at home, a need that’s become especially critical over the past year as the COVID-19 pandemic forced everything from family gatherings to classes and business meetings to go online. But even as President Joe Biden pushes an ambitious $20 billion plan on top of billions of dollars in funding already earmarked for unserved communities, a fundamental flaw remains in not knowing where the problems lie.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Cheddar: Exclusive: Misinformation Increased After Capitol Riots Despite Social Media Bans. “Advertising analytics company DoubleVerify found in a report looking at trends from 2020 and the beginning of this year that there was a 21 percent increase in ‘inflammatory news and political content’ on websites, a term the company used to classify fake news and misinformation, in the week following the January 6 riots. It also found hate speech increased three times in the 10 days after the events compared to the same period before.”

Toronto Star: Coming soon: A public database of global fossil fuel reserves. “Energy experts are working to produce the world’s first public and complete database of fossil fuel reserves in the lead-up to this year’s UN climate summit. The ‘Global Registry of Fossil Fuels’ would fill a major gap in public knowledge, where only expensive or proprietary databases on fossil fuel reserves have existed before, or ones that are not detailed enough or are designed for industry use.”

Lab Manager: Google Scholar Shows Bias Against Non-English Papers. “If you’ve written a scientific article or conference paper in a language other than English, it may as well not exist on Google Scholar, according to recent research published in Future Internet. Knowing that academic search engines such as Google Scholar have been optimized to ensure that research papers get optimal ranking in search results, researchers from Universitat Pompeu Fabra’s (UPF’s) Department of Communication (Barcelona, Spain) wanted to explore if the language documents were published in affected their ranking by search algorithms.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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