Notices by Drew Harwell (drewharwell@mastodon.social)

New: I talked to Trump Media investors about their shares' value getting cut in half. A tree remover in Oklahoma who bet basically his whole nest egg told me, “This isn’t just another stock … I feel like it was God Almighty that put it in my lap" https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/14/truth-social-investors-faith-trump/

New: Trump Media, launched after the insurrection, faces a rebellion of its own. Four lawsuits in three states involving its co-founders and former money man could imperil its long-delayed merger - and a potential Trump lifeline, given his $500M in legal fines. These court filings, I tell you, are truly something else: raw, personal and very, very angry

Gift link here: https://drewharwell.com/truth-socials-civil-war/

With Threads' entry into the fediverse, I'll be posting and playing around with two accounts now.

This one, on Mastodon.social: @drewharwell

And this one, on Threads: @drewharwell@threads.net

How are y'all planning to do it?

The Biden executive order we reported on Monday is being issued today: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/02/26/biden-sensitive-data-china-ban/

Will block bulk sale of biometric, financial, genomic, geolocation and health data to China and other "countries of concern." White House called it "the most significant executive action any President has ever taken to protect Americans’ data security"

Kremlin troll farms and spin doctors churned out thousands of social media posts and articles to divide and destabilize Ukrainian society, according to a big cache on Moscow's “information psychological operations." Incredible reporting by Catherine Belton https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/02/16/russian-disinformation-zelensky-zaluzhny/

@metacurity Yeah, it went down right when I promoted it (and not because of popularity). Fixing! Thanks.

I'm using the open source platform Ghost now, which can integrate with ActivityPub. Very cool. Will look into that soon.

I've moved from Substack for obvious reasons to a new newsletter at https://drewharwell.com.

Still free, and I'll be sharing gift links to all my new stories there from now on.

Would love for you to subscribe!

New: Cops are going into pharmacies and walking out with people's most sensitive health information. No warrant or judge review. Comes at a time when women's health care is being criminalized.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/12/12/pharmacy-records-police-privacy-abortion/

Trump's spokesman says that anyone who makes the "ridiculous" claim that he is talking like a dictator will have their "entire existence ... crushed"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/12/trump-rally-vermin-political-opponents/

New: X/Twitter just removed the gold 'verified' badge from
@nytimes's 55-million-follower account with no explanation. Musk constantly complains about NYT, and other news orgs' badges are untouched. Raises risk of impostors amid a flood of false information on X related to the Israel-Gaza war, some of which Musk has personally endorsed

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/10/19/x-twitter-nyt-dispute-musk/

First president in history to have his mugshot on the Wii News Channel

New: Elon Musk’s X is throttling traffic to news websites and competitors he dislikes. Five-second delays on links to New York Times, Reuters, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Bluesky and Substack. Most other sites we tested have zero delay https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/08/15/twitter-x-links-delayed/ @jeremybmerrill

Iowa school district asked ChatGPT which books had sex in them, then banned them, including "Beloved," "Friday Night Lights" and "Handmaid's Tale." We must protect high schoolers from independent thought at all costs https://www.popsci.com/technology/iowa-chatgpt-book-ban/

New records from inside Twitter one day before the Capitol riots: "Does somebody need to be murdered ... for us to take this seriously?"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/23/new-twitter-video-jan6/

Twitter did the same thing with Mastodon in December, then suspended journalists like me who pointed that out https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/15/23512113/twitter-blocking-mastodon-links-elon-musk-elonjet

How scared is Elon Musk of actual competition? https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/04/07/twitter-substack-taibbi-musk-split/

Wild story: A group of conservative Catholics has spent millions of dollars to buy mobile app tracking data to identify priests who used gay dating and hookup apps

"A new surveillance frontier in which private individuals can track other Americans’ locations and activities using commercially available information"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/03/09/catholics-gay-priests-grindr-data-bishops/

"Fox News is a right-wing talk channel that profits off Republican propaganda. This isn't an opinion. It is a fact laid bare via the hundreds of pages of legal documents in the Dominion lawsuit. And yet, credible newsrooms continue to describe the outlet as a "news" network. This does a disservice to readers ... Fox News' business model is not predicated on informing viewers. It's dependent on feeding them lies that validate their views"

Preach, @oliverdarcy: https://view.newsletters.cnn.com/messages/1677641642131a48fca269f90/raw

"In chatbots, in some autonomous-driving systems, in the unaccountable AIs that decide what we see on social media, and now, in the latest applications of AI, again and again we are the guinea pigs on which tech companies are testing new technology.

It may be the case that there is no other way to roll out this latest iteration of AI—which is already showing promise in some areas—at scale. But we should always be asking, at times like these: At what price?"

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chat-gpt-open-ai-we-are-tech-guinea-pigs-647d827b @mimsical