Important read here if you’re looking for big tech product safety insights …

Trust in US institutions is close to its lowest level since Gallup began measuring this in 1979

On Platformocracy, Rob writes about his new transparency non-profit, collectivemetrics.org. 2/3

Latest note: While I personally love the idea of a web-based agent going around and cleaning up my digital PII data footprint, there are still a lot of problems with agent-based data deletion. The best known companies in this category are DeleteMe, Incogni and Optery but there are several others.

It's a home and away series today! @robleathern.bsky.social and I have traded newsletters to continue our reaction to @jeffhorwitz.bsky.social article about Meta's shockingly high fraud rates. 1/3

Anyone here?

Fun, I submitted a very small Facebook mobile web bug which Meta fixed but it fell below their threshold for a bug bounty (I would have donated it to charity of course)

Clownocracy day 79

2025 is not like other recent years in so many ways

A friend (very happily switched from another electric car brand and) just got a @Rivian and asked me, a longtime owner: “Got my Rivian! Another Rivian driver waved as he passed by. Is that a thing like with Jeeps? Do I have to wave at everyone now?”

More relevant than ever

The TV show Silicon Valley still holds up. Hilarious. “I’m not going to be the one to tell him we’re 15 weeks behind, but feel free”

“Thank you for registering your phone number with the National Do Not Call Registry. You successfully registered your phone number ending in XXXX on June 29, 2003.”

The OAI o1 and DeepSeek r1 models are obviously not designed to play chess optimally (vs say Stockfish which is better than all human players) but this was LOL hilarious to watch with the kid youtu.be/JHq4EKMg7fI?...

Extrapolating our behavior from search to AI, we underestimate how many more details (health, private, intimate) we will tell a machine than another person

Have some sympathy for the comms teams scrambling to write DeepSeek into earnings call scripts

I bet you you’ve never checked out the Apple Ad Repository!

On your iPhone if you want more than one free “20 minute” wi-fi session on the plane eg American Airlines, just touch the (i) next to Wi-Fi network name and toggle the “Private Wi-Fi Address setting between off/fixed/rotating

"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." - George Bernard Shaw

I’d like to write more here about online privacy and trust - and I would love some help getting more followers. If you’ve seen my content elsewhere on X or Threads pls re-share this

A friend to me last night: “So many people, on both sides, are trying to find ways to let this go. Bc no one knows what to do if it’s real. We just aren’t ready to resist.”

9pm eastern - it begins

Most people do not realize how opaque and privacy-problematic the advertising SDK world is. Multiply shitty ad networks, thousands of apps running ads & data brokers by exact location permissions (along with coarser geoIP in many cases too)

Another key skill is adding+ subtracting stakeholders. Sometimes you need to convince a knowledgeable exec to get more involved/interested in your project (sometimes it’s the opposite!) - but make sure they have enough bandwidth to engage or else they may slow things down.

Read Dave, who helped build Facebook’s first content policies, on why this week represents such a big step backwards: “The specific examples I called out above have been prohibited on the site since I wrote the first set of hate speech standards in 2009.”

Folks are mostly missing the forest for the trees re: the recent Meta announcement. Specifically, the focus on the move from fact checking to community notes. There two different changes that are a much bigger deal that have received less focus. 🧵 1/11

Here's my "fact check" on Meta's announcement that it is terminating its fact checking program. The TL;DR: Pay more attention to product changes than to political pandering. THREAD...

@willoremus.com hi Will - I just joined bluesky recently. Good to see you here - in case you wanted to share something.. Here’s my latest blog post -> robleathern.substack.com/p/robs-notes...

There is a chance actions like Meta's makes regulators even more eager to force platforms to act on less serious, potentially-harmful content. Which is why I think we might see platforms start to put the power of filtering directly into users’ hands -> robleathern.substack.com/p/robs-notes...

The fact that the EU’s website had this option is mindblowing given history. “the "Sign in with Facebook" option on the EU login webpage”

This is likely far more impactful that removing 3rd party fact-checking - cutting back enforcement only to the WORST violations (outright illegal) will mean a lot more bad stuff gets through. As journalists cover this I hope they don't only write about the misinfo angle.

For those wondering about “biased” content moderation in “Texas” but unfamiliar with Austin (where many tech companies have long had outsourced or in-house content moderation operations). Travis County in 2024: Harris: 69% Trump: 29% Compare to San Mateo county (Meta HQ): Harris: 72% Trump: 25%

I’m not entirely sure what the statement about TX vs. CA T&S means, but I’m guessing it does NOT mean the engineers & product managers who build the Meta safety systems are moving out of CA. it is, however, disappointing for MZ to throw teams under the bus, implying they’re biased/unprofessional 🙁

This weekend we hiked to the highest point in Texas, Guadalupe Peak at 8,751 feet (2,667 m), a 8.5 mile +3000ft hike. Weather was perfect for it.

One of my favorite weekends of summer 2024: a group of friends joined me to run/hike 50k up and down Boulder’s peaks. Grateful!!!

First post. Hello all.