NEW RESOURCES

DataHorde: YouTube Community Contributions Archive Now Available: A Look at the Stats. “The YouTube Community Contributions Archive is now available on the Internet Archive! You can download the entire collection, or simply search for and download files for a particular video. The collection is composed of 4096 ZIP archives which contain 406,394 folders and 1,361,998 files. Compressed, the collection is 3.83GB, and once decompressed, the collection is 9.46GB.”

EVENTS

Emory University: U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo to give free Emory University reading online. “Current U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, the first Native American to hold the position, will read her poems at an event hosted by the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library on Saturday, March 20, at 4 p.m. Although this is normally a large, annual, in-person event — part of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series — Harjo’s program will be online due to ongoing COVID-19 restrictions.” The event is free but registration is required.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

BuzzFeed News: NYT Columnist David Brooks Resigns From Nonprofit After More Evidence Of Conflicts Emerges. “BuzzFeed News first revealed Brooks never disclosed to Times readers that he takes a full-time salary for his work on Weave, or that its funders include Facebook, the father of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and other wealthy individuals and corporations. Brooks recently wrote a blog post for Facebook’s corporate website in praise of Facebook Groups, a product that has often been a fount of misinformation and hate speech.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

YouTube: Why popular YouTubers are building their own sites. “Whether he’s showing off astronomically expensive computer gaming hardware or dumpster-diving for the cheapest PC builds possible, Linus Sebastian’s videos always strike a chord, and have made him one of the most popular tech personalities on YouTube. But Google-owned YouTube gets most episodes of Linus Tech Tips a week late. Now, they debut on his own site called Floatplane, which attracts a much smaller crowd.”

The New York Times: How Do Influencers Get Jobs? It’s Changing. “The business of influence is professionalizing. Content creators are signing to major talent agencies. In February, SAG-AFTRA, the largest union in the entertainment industry, expanded coverage to people who make sponsored content. And now, a new service wants to make it easier for creators to apply to work with brands, and for companies to hire them.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Gizmodo: Hackers Just Looted Passenger Data From Some of the World’s Biggest Airlines. “SITA, a data firm that works with some of the world’s largest airlines, announced Thursday that it had been the victim of a ‘highly sophisticated cyberattack,’ the likes of which compromised information on hundreds of thousands of airline passengers all over the world.”

Reuters: Exclusive: U.S. agency probes Facebook for ‘systemic’ racial bias in hiring, promotions. “A U.S. agency investigating Facebook Inc for racial bias in hiring and promotions has designated the probe as ‘systemic,’ attorneys for three job applicants and a manager who claim the company discriminated against them told Reuters on Friday.”

StateTech Magazine: New Forms of Ransomware and 5G Smart City Attacks Could Cause Real Harm, Expert Warns. “The threat of ransomware attacks for state and local governments has been an ever-present peril over the past several years, one that has gotten worse, experts say. What’s more, the threat is likely going to evolve to attack cloud service providers that host government services. That’s according to cybersecurity expert Theresa Payton, who detailed her IT security predictions for 2021 and 2022 during a recent webinar sponsored by CDW and Intel.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Phys .org: Blind trust in social media cements conspiracy beliefs. “Researchers found that people with a strong trust in information found on social media sites were more likely to believe conspiracies, which falsely explain significant events as part of a secret evil plot, even if they could identify other types of misinformation. The study, published in the journal Public Understanding of Science on March 5, showed this held true for beliefs in older conspiracy theories as well as newer ones around COVID-19.

The Guardian: A few rightwing ‘super-spreaders’ fueled bulk of election falsehoods, study says. “A handful of rightwing ‘super-spreaders’ on social media were responsible for the bulk of election misinformation in the run-up to the Capitol attack, according to a new study that also sheds light on the staggering reach of falsehoods pushed by Donald Trump.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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