NEW RESOURCES

Baltimore Sun: Baltimore launches new public safety accountability dashboard with crime, arrest, conviction metrics. “The Public Safety Accountability Dashboard… will offer the public a view of police and court data broken down by neighborhood, police district and crime types. It also will offer metrics around neighborhood demographics and the city’s community violence intervention sites, including Safe Streets locations and hospital-based sites.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: Jack Dorsey-backed Twitter alternative Bluesky hits the App Store as an invite-only app. “Bluesky, the Twitter alternative backed by Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, has hit the App Store and more testers are gaining access. Though the app is still only available as an invite-only beta, its App Store arrival signals that a public launch could be nearing.”

New York Times: ‘Sometimes Things Break’: Twitter Outages Are on the Rise
. “In February alone, Twitter experienced at least four widespread outages, compared with nine in all of 2022, according to NetBlocks, an organization that tracks internet outages. That suggests the frequency of service failures is on the rise, NetBlocks said. And bugs that have made Twitter less usable — by preventing people from posting tweets, for instance — have been more noticeable, researchers and users said.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

From the National Library of Spain, and Google-translated from Spanish: New boost to digitization, access and digital reuse in the BNE. “The project that is being launched now, starting in March and for the next two years, will develop a program to support and promote processes related to digitization, electronic legal deposit, digital preservation, access possibilities, and promotion of its reuse.”

Rolling Stone: People Are Getting Pregnant on TikTok’s Trendy ‘On-Demand’ Birth Control. “But EvoFem Biosciences has mounted an aggressive marketing campaign, presenting Phexxi as a standalone birth control — the Annie Murphy commercial racked up more than 2 billion impressions. And with its popularity on TikTok, where videos tagged #phexxi have a combined 2.3 million views, there is high demand for the product. According to the company, a little more than 100,000 women hold Phexxi prescriptions today in the United States. Yet in crowd-sourced databases and online forums, alongside some rave reviews of Phexxi, are dozens of women reporting pregnancies while using the drug.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Russian court fines Wikipedia over military ‘misinformation’. “The Wikimedia Foundation was fined 2 million roubles ($27,000) by a Russian court on Tuesday after the authorities accused it of failing to delete “misinformation” about the Russian military from Wikipedia, the courts service said.”

Bianet: Türkiye sentences a journalist under ‘disinformation law’ for first time. “Sinan Aygül had tweeted about allegations of child abuse against security, but deleted the tweets a few hours later, apologizing for sharing unconfirmed information.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Harvard Gazette: Consulting Dr. YouTube. “The researchers found content platforms like YouTube offer a vast catalog of videos on sleep health, many containing an alarming amount of misinformation.”

The Conversation: How fitness influencers game the algorithms to pump up their engagement. “In our recent article for the Academy of Management Journal, we explain how just establishing a social media presence doesn’t mean a would-be influencer can easily reach clients, as the social media platform’s algorithm determines who sees what posts, and when. And even if influencers do attract large followings, social media users shouldn’t necessarily buy what the influencers are selling.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

The Guardian: Rediscovered Terry Pratchett stories to be published. “Twenty stories written under a pseudonym and never before attributed to Pratchett, who died in 2015, will be released this year by Transworld.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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