www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
10.03.2026 23:56
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AOC came out swinging against age verification legislation and somehow the entire tech press seems to not have noticed?
eBay's story shows how the cyberlibertarian dream died: founder Pierre Omidyar’s (left) vision of a self-governing community was supplanted by ex-Bain Meg Whitman’s (right) idea of a well-lit marketplace. an emerging discipline called “Trust and Safety” would come to synthesize both.
Article abstract: Early enthusiasts imagined a cyberspace free from centralized control. Today, Internet platforms surveil and regulate user activity through systematic governance mechanisms, including content moderation. This article examines how centralized control became the taken-for-granted solution to platform challenges, a shift that abandoned the dream of self-governance. By analyzing the rise of “Trust and Safety” at eBay between 1995 and 2007, I show that platform governance emerged to align eBay with corporate pressures as it transitioned from a startup to a public, multinational corporation. Trust and Safety at eBay came to designate a department, a discipline, and a philosophical approach to questions concerning the governance of users, synthesizing two competing visions: Pierre Omidyar's cyberlibertarian ideal of community self-governance through mutual surveillance, and Meg Whitman's corporate vision of a centrally regulated “well-lit marketplace.” Drawing on internal and external company documents, I demonstrate how Trust and Safety provided a moral justification for centralized governance by framing corporate vigilance as user protection, making control of users compatible with the “community” ethos of early Internet culture. As an early commercial platform, eBay acted as a laboratory for platform governance, where the visions and practices of Trust and Safety were developed and then exported to other major platforms.
Screenshot of eBay's homepage in 2009.
my (first!) article, “From the virtual community to ‘Trust and Safety’: eBay (1995–2007) and the rise of platform governance” is out on Big Data & Society! it is a history of content moderation at eBay, where they coined the term Trust and Safety 🌐 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Everyone should read @tomasgna.bsky.social's brilliant article about eBay and its creation of centralized "trust and safety" efforts!!!
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
“Tehran is burning. And smoke has filled the streets. It’s impossible to drive out of the city right now and even with the windows closed, heavy smoke is making its way inside."
Read every word.
Brian Niccol of Starbucks took home the award for the most nonsensical disparity between CEO and employee income: He earns $95,801,676, while the median salary for a Starbucks employee was a mere $14,674. trib.al/EOv81eF
if you are a writer, you don't HAVE to write about the looksmaxxing movement. in fact, it's actually possible to not write about it
New from 404 Media: Proton Mail, the privacy-focused email service, gave authorities data that let the FBI unmask an anonymous 'Stop Cop City' protester. It was payment data linked to the anonymous email account. From that, FBI ID'd them, then tracked their movements www.404media.co/proton-mail-...
This blog post by @davekarpf.bsky.social is really worth reading and reflecting upon.
This is horrifying because it implies the Iranian school mistargeting was down to Claude layer in Palantir systems. What’s more horrifying is that if the rest of the article is accurate AI was a massive force multiplier for US/Israel strikes.
As I've been saying for days: this feud with Hegseth -- in which Anthropic looks principled, and Claude looks so valuable that the Pentagon can't live without it -- has been terrific marketing for Anthropic www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
The concerning background:
-CEO of the Thiel Foundation
-Managing Director at Thiel Capital
-Managing Director of Clarium Capital (hedge fund led by Peter Thiel)
-Managing Director of Mithril Capital Management (VC fund founded by Peter Thiel that funds Palantir)
-Co-founder of the Thiel Fellowship
Wonder what it’s like to live in a society where there are regulations on capitalist excesses
x.com/SecWar/statu... Anthropic has just been designated as a "Supply Chain Risk to National Security." This is so fucking insane it is hard to describe how insane it is.
Sam Altman tweet: Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network. In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome. AI safety and wide distribution of benefits are the core of our mission. Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement. We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DoW also wanted. We will deploy FDEs to help with our models and to ensure their safety, we will deploy on cloud networks only. We are asking the DoW to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept. We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements. We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can. The world is a complicated, messy, and sometimes dangerous place.
My goodness.
The new Ellison-controlled media combine will check the boxes for all three types of capture: capitalistic, oligarchic, and authoritarian.
lpeproject.org/blog/the-ame...
The left is not "missing out" on AI. It's winning the argument. Americans worry about AI and dislike tech CEOs. They're mobilizing against data centers. They support regulation, even refusal.
Calls for the left to embrace AI are an effort to change the terms of the debate in Silicon Valley's favor.
While the Trump admin works with right-wing creators, a White House staffer moonlighting as an anonymous MAGA influencer makes it nearly impossible to distinguish official government messaging from 'organic' online support.
More here:
www.wired.com/story/a-whit...
historical detail I can't help but bring up: by some accounts, the event that instigated the British soldiers to open fire on Crispus Attacks and the rest of the crowd in the Boston Massacre was a soldier being hit by a snowball
sargon of akkad ass politics
2017 anti-SJW youtuber politics
Yeah I don’t mean to be overly glib in my original post, but I do think someone who positions himself as a leader on these issues should be more concrete around his claims
I would agree with that if he didn’t also have the strange quote I screenshotted here, which seems to be making a broader claim that purchasing choices cannot be a meaningful form of protest. At least that’s what it seems like? This is why I say I would genuinely like to hear his thoughts
lol such a good point
Genuinely curious what cory doctorow would say about the consumer boycott of apartheid south africa...was that neoliberal purity politics?
