onfocus

"Here is what I am not allowed to do: write things that are known to be false, with or without the intention to mislead. There’s an ethical reason for this, and a practical one. The ethical reason is that it’s not okay to intentionally deceive people — especially when the consequences of the deception are potentially deadly, as they are with vaccine misinformation. The practical reason is that it introduces liabilities for the publisher."

"A Substack spokesperson referred the Guardian to an essay published on Wednesday by the platform’s co-founders, Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie and Jairaj Sethi, in which they said silencing vaccine sceptics would not work. “As we face growing pressure to censor content published on Substack that to some seems dubious or objectionable, our answer remains the same: we make decisions based on principles not PR, we will defend free expression, and we will stick to our hands-off approach to content moderation,” they said."

“With an estimated 11 million listeners per episode, JRE, which is hosted exclusively on Spotify, is the world’s largest podcast and has tremendous influence,” the letter reads. “Spotify has a responsibility to mitigate the spread of misinformation on its platform, though the company presently has no misinformation policy.”

I like getting shipping confirmations and updates, but all I need is a glance at the subject line and forget about it. The solution: tell Gmail to archive or delete certain emails after a specified number of days. Surprisingly enough, Gmail does not have this as a native feature. Users can set filters to automatically delete emails from certain senders or with keyword pattern matches, sure, but that’s an instant filter and those emails never see the light of day.

Nevertheless, I am left today primarily thinking of all who have died, as well as those suffering from long covid, and those who may suffer in the years ahead in ways we cannot predict. This could have been a moment when we decided to step outside of our divided camps and come together. That the blame for this not happening is so asymmetric along the political divide does make me very angry, but it doesn’t make me any less sad.

“By allowing the propagation of false and societally harmful assertions, Spotify is enabling its hosted media to damage public trust in scientific research and sow doubt in the credibility of data-driven guidance offered by medical professionals,” the letter said.

"'This year, what's happening is off the scale,' he said. 'There's been a new billionaire created almost every day during this pandemic, meanwhile 99% of the world's population are worse off because of lockdowns, lower international trade, less international tourism, and as a result of that, 160 million more people have been pushed into poverty.'"

"The obvious people to blame for this gross behavior are Republicans themselves. But what's the fun in that? So, instead, far too many in the media are letting Republicans off the hook and instead fixing the blame on Democrats for somehow not doing more to make Republicans less evil."

"Simple, dependable architectures such as the one covidtests.gov seems to employ are proven at scale. This affords agencies the space to focus on improved user experience and service delivery, rather than consuming large resources keeping sites up and running. This takes operational experience and know-how, though; even with the use of managed services, composing a full, end-to-end digital service experience takes skill."