alanlammiman

True, but lots of harm can be done in 20 years and lots of harm was done by concentrated media in the past (eg all the cases in Manufacturing Consent)

Indeed. I can see the logic for the US - accept that these guys milk your own citizens a bit in exchange for bringing in loads of cash from abroad plus massive spying and influence capabilities wrt the rest of the world. But why GB, EU etc go along with it is beyond me. Seems like a strategic blunder.

Yes. In both directions: 'Low-profile' advertisers (millions of dollars per year is still low-profile) meanwhile get the nonsensical AI rejections and shadowbans

Indeed, and therefore it reveals that enforcing guidelines is not the priority.

Unfortunately it's not just that. A few years ago a friend reached out to a few investigative journalists with documents about wrongdoing at a big co. No response. This was at the time of the Mossack Fonseca hack when many of those same publications were calling out individuals who owned offshore companies, even when it was perfectly legal for them to do so. Maybe she was unlucky, but my anecdotal takeaway was that perhaps it simply required less work, and got more clicks than real investigative journalism.

In society not everybody is equal, however in societies with rule of law, the idea is that everybody is at least deemed equal under the law. That this unfortunately often fails in practice is very different from explicitly and intentionally having separate rules

depends on your definition of 'automate'. If you mean by computer software, perhaps not, but it begs the question of why one would presume that automation to be necessary. If you just mean 'software' (not necessarily computer software), then yes, rule of law is software that has scaled to manage society scale interactions and run for hundreds of years. Whether it is 'fair' is still debatable, but it is at least more legitimate than FB's system.

it cuts both ways. for every high profile person posting real porn (eg Neymar's revenge porn in the article) there are thousands of instances of regular users with ML flagged 'napalm girls'

If the moderation is extremely prejudiced, then it doesn't work.

Though I don't disagree that lots of well-intentioned humans could be a path to moderation that works.

yep, agree. So simply preventing all the re-work (on the vendor side) of everyone having to implement account management, payments, etc + the resulting confusion (on the user side) would be a start

Interesting, do you mean no link rot in that the URC at least gives you the metadata for what was there originally instead of showing a 404 error, even though the content itself is no longer there? Or do you also imagine archiving the page and/or a centralised index?

I believe one of the arguments used in the suit was along the lines of "Apple, by making the minimum price (other than 'free') for apps and IAPs 99c, prevents us from charging, say, 37c and this harms consumers and is anticompetitive". I believe it was just to provide a clear, verifiable argument that customers were being charged more than they would be in a free market (whereas other things Apple does are infinitely more serious, but also harder to prove and quantify). I'd guess the agreement addresses that to be consistent, even though I don't think anybody truly cares about the granularity of the price tiers.

I was looking into this recently, but only superficially, so apologies (and please correct me) if I'm mistaken here:

1. Your intro appears a bit misleading in that because 'Certified B-Corp' is just a certification issued by a private entity, companies are 'legally required' to do those things only to the extent that they are 'legally required' to abide by any contractual agreements with the certification entity and any language they put in their bylaws (e.g. to obtain the certification). That's it. Doing the specific things you say is not 'legally required' in the same sense as you are 'legally required' to pay your taxes. Now - some jurisdictions around the world do have laws creating the figures of 'Benefit Corporations' and specifying what they are legally required to do (in the same sense as paying their taxes).

2. In a global context, the US is an outlier in its cult of shareholder primacy and fiduciary duty. So much so that I read that in US jurisdictions, the reasoning for Benefit Corp legislation is to protect management in case any of these 'good deeds' are viewed as deliberately failing to maximize shareholder value. Frankly that seems a bit far-fetched unless there is something demonstrably egregious or shareholders are being misled (you don't see shareholders suing over companies going carbon-neutral, offering employees snacks or refraining from price-gouging). But, in any case, in other countries it is acceptable and even expected (in a few it might even be required) for companies in general to benefit various classes of stakeholder - customers, employees, etc.

3. B-Corp Certification doesn't really have many hard & clear requirements - it's that fluffy language + audits. Frankly, sounds like a recipe for bureaucracy.

4. I had come to the exact same conclusion as another commenter here - that if your objective is to be part-for-profit-part-do-gooder, you'd be much better-off having an objective target. E.g. 10% of net profit will be given to charity. That would just plug into your regular financial audit (and above that, you could have someone just checking to make sure the charities aren't related parties or fronts for cost-centres). If it helps, you could have NGO's promoting and certifying this type of company too like for B-Corps. My suggestion would be T-Corp as in T for Tithe, though I wonder whether the Christian connotations might put people off.

My company runs one of the top iPhone apps for creating & exporting stickers to WhatsApp (and iMessage, Telegram & others). When WhatsApp started accepting animated stickers, we implemented the Giphy API to allow users to get GIFs and export them as animated stickers to WhatsApp (yes, from one Facebook product to another). Giphy rejected our application and blocked our API access claiming that their API Terms of Service prohibited what we were doing, which they did not in fact appear to do (we had read the terms before going to the trouble of implementing). No point arguing as the terms do say that they reserve the right to deny or revoke access at any time (in line with the CMA's concerns). So we just switched to Google's Tenor and ironically that has worked fine. Perhaps I should be writing a letter to the CMA!

I personally know vik, knew of the project, and so was so excited to see this article here by coincidence. He's personally investing great effort to rescue music that otherwise wouldnt be heard. Super recommend his other albums (one is like a Haitian Buena Vista).