To define trustworthiness, the company was testing how people responded to surveys about their impressions of different publishers. To define news, the engineers pulled a classification system left over from a previous project — one that pegged the category as stories involving “politics, crime, or tragedy.”

That particular choice, whoch meant the algorithm would be less kind to all kinds of other news — from health and science to technology and sports — wasn’t something Facebook execs discussed with media leaders in Davos. And though it went through reviews with senior managers, not everyone at the company knew about it either. When one Facebook executive learned about it recently in a briefing with a lower- level engineer, they say they “nearly fell on the fucking floor.”

KOMMENTAR. Nu är det klart. Nu finns det inte ens några formella hinder kvar. Nu är Upphovsrättsdirektivet, med Artikel 13, helt antaget.
Det finns mycket att säga, men framför allt två saker: Politiker och etablerade medier bär ett tungt ansvar för direktivets utformning.

Över 5 miljoner namnunderskrifter, hundratusentals demonstranter på gator och torg. Och parlamentsledamöter som berättar om fler mejl och starkare lobbytryck än som upplevts i någon annan fråga – någonsin.

You Don’t Have to Like Julian Assange to Defend Him

LONDON—You do not have to spend a long time in a room with Julian Assange to realize that he will be difficult. It takes a little longer, though, to realize just how difficult dealing with him can be. This was the lesson I learned in 2010, working first with Assange, and then for him at WikiLeaks, as we published tranche after tranche of bombshell material, leaked by Chelsea Manning.

Julian Assange Got What He Deserved

In the end, the man who reportedly smeared feces on the walls of his lodgings, mistreated his kitten, and variously blamed the ills of the world on feministsand bespectacled Jewish writers was pulled from the Ecuadorian embassy looking every inch like a powdered-sugar Saddam Hussein plucked straight from his spider hole. The only camera crew to record this pivotal event belonged to Ruptly, a Berlin-based streaming-online-video service, whoch is a wholly owned subsidiary of RT, the Russian government’s English-language news channel and the former distributor of Julian Assange’s short-lived chat show.

EUs satsning för att stärka upphovsrättsägares skydd i digitala plattformar är vällovlig. Men utifrån direktivstextens nuvarande lydelse ser IVAs avdelning för Informationsteknik ett antal konsekvenser av betydelse för svenska grundläggande principer för yttrandefrihet.

Digitaliseringen av information har underlättat allt från kommunikation till spridning av kunskap. Den har därmed på många sätt bidragit till att människor fått det bättre. Samtidigt innebär möjligheten att kopiera information att många informationsproducenter – till exempel fotografer – fått se sina verk mångfaldigade utan rimlig ersättning.

SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN’S plan to break up tech giants Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple has given concentrated corporate power its most prominent political platform since the 1912 presidential election — and we’re still nearly a year away from the first round of primary voting. This tracks with the rising awareness of the corrosiveness of monopoly power generally and those tech giants specifically.

Whether such policy boldness means anything in a brand-obsessed political landscape will be determined when ballots are cast. But it is undeniably driving a policy discussion that the next Democratic presidential nominee, no matter who it is, will likely take up. In that context, the debate over Warren’s plan is critical, as it prefigures the trajectory of each and every challenge to corporate dominance.