“X said the law known as the Stop Hiding Hate Act violated the First Amendment and state constitution by subjecting it to lawsuits and heavy fines unless it disclosed ‘highly sensitive and controversial speech’ that New York may find objectionable…New York’s law requires social media companies to disclose steps they take to eliminate hate on their platforms, and to report their progress. Civil fines could reach $15,000 per violation per day.”

Casey Newton: “I think that already the value of text feels lower than it did two years ago. My job is basically to analyze and synthesize the news for readers, and that is a skill that chatbots are getting pretty good at. So it does have me thinking about what the next iteration of my job looks like. And I don’t love most of my options.”

“Starting today, if you’ve turned on fediverse sharing in Threads, there will be a new section at the top of your Following feed that takes you to a list of posts from folks you follow on Mastodon, Flipboard, or wherever else you’ve connected your Threads account.”

“We have a historic belief in media that the brand name of our organization is enough to convey trust, confidence, integrity, but people right now are really looking for relationships with the reporter,” NPR CEO Katherine Maher said. “They want to understand why someone is saying what they’re saying. That is as meaningful now as the brand of the organization itself.”

“‘We explicitly prohibit the scraping of user data for unauthorized purposes, e.g. archival or large language model (LLM) training. We want to make it clear that training LLMs on the data of Mastodon users on our instances is not permitted,’ Mastodon said in an email sent to users.”

“Multiple respondents compared the behavior of the swarming bots to more traditional online behavior such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks designed to maliciously drive unsustainable levels of traffic to a server, effectively taking it offline…Like a DDoS incident, the swarms quickly overwhelm the collections, knocking servers offline and forcing administrators to scramble to implement countermeasures. As one respondent noted, ‘If they wanted us dead, we’d be dead.’”

“Some theorists have even proposed that we’re returning to a kind of oral culture — what the historian Walter Ong described as a ‘secondary orality,’ in which gab and give-and-take are enhanced by the presence of text. The ascendance of podcasts, newsletters, and memes has lent credence to this view. The Joe Rogan Experience could be understood as a couple of guys around a campfire, passing on knowledge through conversation, like the ancient Greeks.”

“Concerns have been raised about press freedom in some Pacific countries in recent years, including in Solomon Islands, where the former prime minister Manasseh Sogavare reportedly threatened to ban foreign journalists in 2022 if they were not ‘respectful’ in stories about the country’s ties with China, and in Papua New Guinea where reporters have been suspended over their coverage of certain political stories. Papua New Guinea is the lowest-ranked Pacific country — 91st in the world — when it comes to press freedom, according to the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index 2024.”

“While struggling to be published, Mr. Langewiesche supported himself as a corporate pilot.

‘Other people trying to break into writing have to work as waiters,’ he told Aviation News in 2001, ‘and I considered myself as having a technical skill — like a welder — that I could use to support myself.'”