Ben Werdmuller helps leaders at newsrooms, non-profits, and mission-driven organizations to navigate their biggest technology challenges.
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A sober breakdown of what it may mean for Meta's new social network to finally join the open social web (aka the fediverse). For many people, this has been a hard pill to swallow: while it's clear that Meta has been a human rights disaster, its
Newsletter subscribers might be surprised to see a slightly new design. I’ve moved away from Substack and back to Buttondown, an indie mailing list service. Every email will be free from now on; paid subscribers will be refunded in full. Why? Here’s the New York Times with the
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I have so much respect for what everyone at The 19th does. It has one of the best work cultures I've ever encountered, and Amanda is a huge part of that. I'm deeply glad to have worked their and to have worked with her. The things
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"An investigation by ProPublica and Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism shows how false claims based on out-of-context, outdated or manipulated media have proliferated on X during the first month of the Israel-Hamas conflict." "[...] We also found that the Community Notes system, which has been
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I think this is right: AI companies, and particularly OpenAI, have a crisis of trust with the public. We simply don't believe a word they say when it comes to privacy and respecting our rights. It's well-earned. The way LLMs work is through training on vast
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Interesting study. Although I think there are enormous incentives for people to report this way, I'm sure there's a lot of truth to it. It sounds like the big issue is the kind of informal ideation and conversation that happens really easily when you're
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Flipboard is making its entire platform fediverse-compatible, allowing anyone on any fediverse platform (eg Mastodon, Pixelfed, and eventually Threads) to follow content shared there. "By March Flipboard says it plans to allow anyone on the platform to open their account to the fediverse and allow any Flipboard user to
The EU has opened up an investigation into Elon Musk’s X: X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, may have broken the European Union’s tough new Digital Services Act rules, regulators said as they announced the opening of a formal investigation today. A key concern of the investigation
When I was eleven years old, my family relocated to the outskirts of Durham, North Carolina for a little while while my dad taught at Duke. We home-swapped with an abortion doctor, and our temporary home was sometimes pelted with eggs. My parents asked us not to play in the
I’d been doing pretty well on my manuscript until I realized I needed to make a major plot revision. That’s been a tough thing to go back and re-edit for. For a few months I was paralyzed between just rewriting the whole thing or diving into extensive re-edits.
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"Immigrants are poisoning the blood of the country" is something a real Presidential candidate said in 2023. You know which one. Here's a clue: he's by far the frontrunner for Republican candidate, and has a fair chance of being elected for a second term
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This story seems a little suspect, but still worrying: "A marketing team within media giant Cox Media Group (CMG) claims it has the capability to listen to ambient conversations of consumers through embedded microphones in smartphones, smart TVs, and other devices to gather data and use it to target