NEW RESOURCES

New-to-me, from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Black Male Therapists connects Atlanta’s Black men with mental health specialists. “Last year, the pandemic leveled communities, especially those of color, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reporting that Black people are two times more likely to die from COVID-19 than their white counterparts. The Economic Policy Institute reports similar findings in that Black workers face racism and economic equality, making those communities more susceptible to the effects of COVID-19.” This article actually points to mental health resources for both men AND women of color.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Axios: Google, YouTube to prohibit ads and monetization on climate denial content. “Google and YouTube on Thursday announced a new policy that prohibits climate deniers from being able to monetize their content on its platforms via ads or creator payments. Why it matters: It’s one of the most aggressive measures any major tech platform has taken to combat climate change misinformation.”

CNET: Twitter tests tool to give users a heads-up about heated conversations. “The social media giant tweeted Wednesday about the test, which is happening on both Android and iOS devices. The heads-up tool reminds users to communicate respectfully and to understand that there will be different perspectives. Fact-checking is also encouraged.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

MIT Sloan School of Management: Ex-Google researcher: AI workers need whistleblower protection . “Artificial intelligence expert Timnit Gebru on the challenges researchers can face at Big Tech companies, and how to protect workers and their research.”

University of Kansas: Grant Will Give Public Better Access To History Of Black Literature. “It’s the latest extension of [Professor Maryemma] Graham’s [History of Black Writing] project, which she brought with her from the University of Mississippi to Northeastern University and then to KU in 1999. The first stage was to identify and save physical copies of books by Black writers from destruction. The next was to digitize them. And now the organizers are creating tools that will allow both academic researchers and the general public to look at the entire corpus of Black fiction, which HBW has been collecting for nearly 40 years, by using keywords, themes, data visualizations and in other ways that [Drew] Davidson termed ‘metadata.’.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Task & Purpose: Someone hijacked a Navy warship’s Facebook account so they could livestream ‘Age of Empires’. “For the last several days, someone has been having a lot of fun playing the classic 1997 strategy game ‘Age of Empires.’ Normally, that wouldn’t be news (the game is freaking fantastic) but in this case someone has been livestreaming their game sessions on the official Facebook account for the USS Kidd, and the U.S. Navy still hasn’t regained control of their account.”

Reuters: ‘A coward’s palace’: Australian PM slams social media amid defamation law controversy. “Australia’s prime minister lambasted social media on Thursday as ‘a coward’s palace’, saying platforms should be treated as publishers when defamatory comments by unidentified people are posted, pouring fuel on a raging debate over the country’s libel laws.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Kansas: Study: Social Media Can Learn How To Regulate Speech From Online Gaming. “The authors point out that social media evolved from games as places where people could communicate, and though there is not explicit gameplay involved, such sites are in fact a game of their own, with people seeking likes, retweets or other engagement. The gaming world eventually developed a community-based approach in which users set the standards and controlled what is acceptable, but social media is still struggling with top-down approaches in which executives decide what is allowable.”

News@Northeastern: Can We Better Understand Online Behavior? These Researchers Will Dig Deep To Find Out. . “Researchers at Northeastern University were awarded a $15.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation to build a research infrastructure that will provide scientists around the world and across disciplines with open, ethical, analytic information about how people behave online.”

OTHER STUFF I THINK IS COOL

New York Times: How Word Lists Help — or Hurt — Crossword Puzzles. “If we were to go by the New York Times Crossword, Lake ERIE would be the most dazzling body of water on Earth. Mining ORE would be the most lucrative business venture. According to xwordinfo.com, ERIE is the third most popular word in the New York Times Crossword. It has appeared over 1,350 times. ORE is seventh, with over 1,200 appearances. ORE and ERIE are examples of crosswordese, words that appear often in crossword puzzles but rarely in day-to-day conversation.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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