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👋 Hi friends,
Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes, a weekly newsletter containing my recent Wall Street Journal stories, must-read links on tech and life, and funny dog videos.
Image of the week, above:
🏃♂️ Members of our WSJ Hong Kong bureau participated in #IRunForEvan on Thursday – a jog to mark our colleague Evan Gershkovich’s 32nd birthday. It’s now been more than 30 weeks since he was wrongly detained in Russia for doing his job.
My WSJ latest:
🗞 My latest, an Oct. 21 scoop with my colleagues Sam Schechner and Jeff Horwitz.
The headline: Inside Meta, Debate Over What’s Fair in Suppressing Comments in the Palestinian Territories. <– 🎁 Gift link
It began:
After Hamas stormed Israel and murdered civilians on Oct. 7, hateful comments from the region surged through Instagram. Meta Platforms managers cranked up automatic filters meant to slow the flood of violent and harassing content.
But still the comments kept appearing—especially from the Palestinian territories, according to a Meta manager. So Meta turned up its filters again, but only there.
In an internal forum for Muslim employees, objections poured in.
“What we’re saying and what we’re doing seem completely opposed at the moment,” one employee posted internally, according to documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. Meta has publicly pledged to apply its policies equally around the world.
The social media giant has been wrestling with how best to enforce its content rules in the midst of the brutal and chaotic war. Meta relies heavily on automation to police Instagram and Facebook, but those tools can stumble: They have struggled to parse the Palestinian Arabic dialect and in some cases they don’t have enough Hebrew-language data to work effectively.
Here are 10 items worth your time this week:
1) 🇨🇳 Longread of the week: The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos on “China’s age of malaise.”
2) 📹 A new component of war and terrorist attacks in 2023: ubiquitous videos of violence.
3) 🔥 Charlottesville, Virginia’s divisive statue of Robert E. Lee has been melted down and will be made into a new piece of public art.
4) 🐦 One year after Elon Musk took over Twitter, daily active users, downloads, and ad revenues are all down – though engagement with his account is at all time high. <– 🎁 WSJ gift link
5) 🔨 Shot: While slick influencers dominate Instagram, some of TikTok’s biggest global stars are blue collar workers…
6) 🏍 Chaser: …And gig workers in Latin America are creating viral pop hits.
7) 🧠 The 12 problems that influence author Ted Gioia’s work and thinking.
8) 🎧 Vinyl fans are revolting after the popular Discogs website raised fees.
9) ⚽ Lionel Messi’s pink Inter Miami jersey cannot be made fast enough to keep up with demand (Thanks, Anasuya!).
10) 🐕 Canine-related music story of the week: the Danish Chamber Orchestra brought in three dogs to participate in a recent symphony. (Thanks, Beth D-B!)
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🦴 Dog-related video of the week:
“I work from home so they’re with me all day. This is still the reaction I get when I finish for the day.”
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💡 Quote of the week:
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
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🤗 What’s new with you? Hit reply to send me tips, queries, random comments, and videos of pups that are so stoked their owners have clocked off.
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👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,
Newley