Author: nick

To what extent do social media algorithms, and YouTube’s specifically, contribute to user’s views becoming more extreme and even radicalizing? That’s a complicated question, but researchers tried to tackle it and have come up with some interesting results. First let’s define some terms (as the researchers did). An echochamber is a social media information ecosystem (such as a specific forum, blog, or content provider) that shares a common view, ideology, or narrative. The researcher use this precise definition: “a bounded, enclosed media space that has the potential to both magnify the messages delivered within it and insulate them from rebuttal.”…

Will Iran 'Behave' in Wake of the Latest Deal? Source link

From yesterday’s Complaint in Spatz v. Stewart & TheaterMania (S.D.N.Y.): This is an action for libel per se, and false statements causing special damages. Defendant Zachary Stewart, a theater critic writing for Defendant TheaterMania, authored and published a review of a theatrical production written and presented by Plaintiff. The production was a serious, historically grounded drama confronting the Holocaust, the founding of the State of Israel, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the tragedy of a miscarriage, and the racially motivated execution of a Black man for loving a white woman. Yet it was deliberately, falsely, and maliciously described that production as…

Jonathan Cook Substack Mike Tapp, a minister in the Home Office, recently posted on X a “gotcha” response to Green Party leader Zack Polanski’s criticism of the Labour government’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action. In the wake of the Court of Appeal ruling this week to uphold proscription, Polanski noted the government’s authoritarian assault on civil liberties. Thousands of grandparents –retired lawyers, doctors, vicars, army veterans – he pointed out, had been arrested on terrorism charges simply for holding a placard saying: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.” In response, Tapp asked Polanski: “Do you support the Palestine Action group?” This was…

Windmill, Columbia River Gorge. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair. As the petroleum-run global economy continues to implode from war, pollution, and oligarchic meddling, a localized new-energy infrastructure is being built with clean, cheap, and safe renewable energy – 85% of all installations last year – led by China’s world-leading manufacturing of photovoltaic (PV) solar panels, wind turbines (WTs), and electric vehicles (EVs). The global electric grid capacity is almost 10 terawatts, more than 40% of which is now renewable (3 TW solar, 1.3 TW wind), a fourfold increase in two years. Control of oil and gas reserves dictated the economic and…

How To Manage the AI Revolution Source link

The new Global Justice Report by the World Inequality Lab in France—which calls for caps on economic growth in rich countries, top income-tax rates of 90 percent, and a World Sovereign Fund to redistribute wealth to the Global South—has reignited one of the oldest debates in economics: How do we actually lift people out of poverty? The data have never left much question. The answer is economic growth. Nonetheless, many development economists have spent decades arguing that growth isn’t enough or as important as development aid. The French report is simply a radical expression of a popular view. So, it’s worth…

Sara Flounders. Workers World. The stated role of FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), as the World Cup tournament organizer, is to ensure that football (soccer) is accessible to everyone and that global tournaments will be “safe, welcoming and inclusive.” That is not the reality of the 2026 World Cup. The anger at FIFA’s multimillionaire directors is wholly justified and righteous. The call to “Boycott FIFA” and a demand for accountability for abusive behavior need immediate support.  Every FIFA-sponsored game reinforces U.S. repression and racist exclusion. Resistance from below by those refusing to let the world’s most popular sport…

Empires don’t end with a bang. They end when the people running the institutions stop believing in them and start carrying the furniture out the back door. Last week, the FBI arrested a senior CIA official, David Rush, with 303 one-kilogram gold bars, $2 million in cash, and three dozen Rolexes stacked inside his Virginia home, none of it held in the currency his agency exists to defend. The only charge so far is fudging his time sheets, not the $40 million in metal the agency handed him and then couldn’t find. This is a working definition of a Fourth…

We Have To Manage the AI Revolution Source link