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On Friday night, Substack writer Matt Taibbi posted a thread showing former Twitter employees debating the decision to restrict sharing of a NY Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election. Twitter CEO Elon Musk hyped the release of the so-called “Twitter Files,” saying they would expose how the company, under its previous leadership, engaged in “free speech suppression.”

The screenshots of internal communications reveal that Twitter employees were worried that the Post article could be the result of a Russian hacking operation. Their ultimate decision to suppress the story drew outcry from conservatives, and former CEO Jack Dorsey has said it was a mistake, noting that the company changed its policy on hacked materials as a result.

But Taibbi’s thread did not provide any direct support for Musk’s suggestions that Democrats conspired with Twitter to block the article. Taibbi wrote, “There’s no evidence — that I’ve seen — of any government involvement in the laptop story.” Furthermore, the thread exposed the names of ex-Twitter employees and the apparent email addresses of Dorsey and Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna (who criticized Twitter’s decision on the Hunter Biden story). On Saturday, Musk acknowledged that posting some emails was a mistake.

Elsewhere in the Twitter-verse…

• While Musk banned Ye’s account for tweeting a swastika on a Star of David, he allowed neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin, who created the white supremacist website The Daily Stormer, back on the platform.
• Musk seems to have dropped his feud with Tim Cook over App Store rules, and said that Apple has “fully resumed” advertising on Twitter.
• Twitter is still hurting financially, though. Its US ad revenue was reportedly 80% below expectations during the first week of the World Cup.

The post The ‘Twitter Files,’ and other news from the bird app appeared first on Buzz Badger.

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If you can remember back to January, Microsoft shook up the gaming world when it agreed to buy Call of Duty-maker Activision Blizzard for $69 billion. If it goes through, it’d be Microsoft’s biggest acquisition and one of the 30 largest deals ever.

Key word: if. The FTC has been fretting over the antitrust implications of this deal and, in a meeting today, regulators could vote on whether to sue to block it from going through. The primary worry: Microsoft produces its own console, the Xbox, and if it were to also own Activision’s games, it could withhold those titles from competitors, such as Sony’s PlayStation.

Given the enormous popularity of Call of Duty, it would be a nightmare scenario for Sony to get frozen out of the franchise. The franchise has generated $30 billion in revenue on its own, and the most-recent release, Modern Warfare II, racked up more than $1 billion in sales in its first 10 days.

Microsoft wants to show it can play nice

Like an alien descending the stairs of a UFO, Microsoft says “We come in peace .” As part of its campaign to soothe regulators ahead of a potential vote, on Tuesday it announced an agreement with Nintendo to bring CoD to the Switch for 10 years. Microsoft said it made a similar offer to Sony that would make new CoD releases available on PlayStation, but it seems that Sony hasn’t checked voicemail yet..

With its charm offensive, Microsoft is attempting to placate regulators not just in the US, but also around the world. 16 governments have to greenlight its deal for Activision, and only a small minority has approved it so far.

Still, the biggest fight may be on Microsoft’s home turf. Under the Biden administration, regulators have gone full beast mode in trying to block mergers over antitrust concerns. So far during Biden’s term, the DOJ has sued to block eight mergers and the FTC has also sued to block eight. Over the same period of the Trump administration, the DOJ challenged one merger and the FTC five, per the NYT.—NF

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From Chance the Rapper to the random dude you drunkenly talked to at a concert, seemingly everyone has taken to Instagram to flash their AI-created portraits. The souped-up selfies come from photo-editing app Lensa AI through its “Magic Avatars” feature that generates original images of users’ likeness rendered in various artistic styles.

Lensa acts as an intermediate between Stable Diffusion, the open-source AI tool that powers it, and the portrait subject. After paying $3.99 to use the feature, you upload 10–20 selfies and Lensa spits out 50 stylized portraits that look like they’re the work of an eclectic digital artist collective.

You’re not alone in seeing it everywhere: The appeal of visualizing one’s anime, sci-fi, or fairy princess alter-ego landed Lensa at the top of the charts among free apps in the Apple and Google app stores soon after the Magic Avatars feature launched late last month.

But while Lensa might be a great source of eye-catching material for an artsy dating profile, many observers are unsettled by the implications of its rise. So let’s ruin the fun and take a peek into the Pandora’s box of ethical murkiness that comes with new technology.

Who’s not impressed by your new profile pic?

Artists: Many digital artists and copyright holders say they’re not being credited or reimbursed for their artwork, which is being used to train the AI model that the company behind Lensa, Prisma Labs, is monetizing. Artist Lauryn Ipsum pointed to what she says are frequent instances where fragments of artists’ signatures are visible in the digital avatars. She tweeted her frustration at the fact that “people are still trying to argue it isn’t theft.”

Others worry about how automated art generators might devalue their skills as visual creators (similar to how certain newsletter writers are made uneasy by the writing talent of OpenAI’s new chatbot).

Privacy advocates: Some users expressed privacy concerns about how Lensa uses their photos and personal data. Prisma says it deletes your selfies after they’re turned into avatars, but it uses them to train its neural networks and reserves the right to use personal data to improve the product.

Ethicists: All it takes to use Lensa for sexually predatory purposes is a few photos of the victim. Unlike human artists, the app can’t tell right from wrong and can be easily tricked into churning out erotic stylizations of whatever images it gets fed. Technology researcher Olivia Snow went as far as using her own childhood photos to demonstrate that Lensa has no qualms about sexualizing images of children.

What’s next? Some creators have called for a boycott of Lensa, urging people to hire an old-school, flesh-and-blood artist for their next round of stylized selfies. But now that AI art tools exist, they aren’t going away and we’ll have to learn how to navigate the presence of paintbrush-wielding machines in our lives.—SK

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In an early Christmas gift to Youtube Shorts and Instagram Reels, this week the US Senate unanimously passed a bill that would ban TikTok on the government-owned devices of federal employees. Though the legislation faces an uncertain future in the House, several states have already enacted similar bans. And a bipartisan group of legislators wants to go further, proposing a full-on nationwide TikTok prohibition.

Lawmakers have nothing against lip-syncing challenges and 20-second plant care tutorials, but they see the short-form video app as a national security threat and point to a parade of red flags (no Communist Party pun intended) concerning privacy and security that arise from TikTok being owned by a Chinese company: Beijing-based ByteDance.

But TikTok is hoping to salvage the American Dream of virality for its 135 million US-based users. The company has been negotiating with the Biden administration for months, hoping to reach a deal to keep the company running in the US with changes to its data governance policies.

So how exactly could your twelve-year-old cousin’s favorite thing to do before bed be a threat to anything other than her emotional development?

The case against TikTok

FBI Director Chris Wray warned that the Chinese government could weaponize the powerful recommendation algorithm for “influence operations.” Wray also claims China can collect user data for espionage.

This isn’t just TikTok-phobia:

• Leaked audio from the company’s internal meetings obtained by BuzzFeed suggests that engineers in China have accessed US users’ data.
• Forbes learned of a Beijing-based ByteDance team’s plan to surveil the location of at least two Americans using TikTok data.
• Chinese law mandates that businesses share intelligence with the government upon request.

All this has lawmakers like Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) saying that Americans aren’t safe on TikTok unless ByteDance sells it to a company not based in China. US users themselves, too, appear worried. A recent YouGov poll found that 41% of Americans think TikTok is a national security threat (35% said they’re not sure).

But some experts think these concerns are overblown

If you’re worried that a CCP cadre might cringe at unpublished footage of you munching corn off a rotating drill, or steal your personal info, remember that TikTok isn’t the first app to hoover up user data.

Information researcher Clifford Lampe told Forbes he thinks TikTok “collects as much data as any social media platform.” And researchers from the University of Toronto concluded last year that the app doesn’t appear to collect “contact lists, user files, or geolocation coordinates” without user permission.

China also doesn’t need TikTok to get a hold of personal data: Hacking or buying it off a shady data broker (as it has done on multiple occasions) are options, too. Besides, much of it can already be found in public sources.

As for TikTok itself, it claims US user data can’t be accessed from China without the oversight of a US team and assures it would never share data with authorities in Beijing.—SK

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What’s the opposite of quiet quitting? Because that’s what Elon Musk seems to be doing as CEO of Twitter.

After another head-spinning day on the bird app, Musk posted a poll asking users whether he should step down as the company’s chief executive (“I will abide by the results of this poll,” he said.) As of 5am ET, more than 57% voted “yes”—he should step down. 

As bizarre as it sounds that a CEO would leave their professional fate to random people (and an untold number of bots), there’s reason to think that Musk will actually abide by the results: He restored former President Trump’s account after that choice won in a poll, and also reinstated banned journalists’ accounts this weekend when users voted in favor of that option.

But in even posting the survey in the first place, Musk seems to be issuing a cry for help. In the roughly seven weeks since he (reluctantly) bought Twitter for $44 billion, the only constant has been chaos—from the debacle of a rollout of Twitter’s subscription service to haphazard and inconsistent application of content moderation policies.

That chaos reached a climax yesterday

A new rule instituted (briefly) by Twitter caused even Musk’s most loyal supporters to lose faith in him. The company said Sunday that it will no longer allow the “free promotion” of certain rival social media sites on its platform: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, and three others.

• In response, former CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted that the policy “doesn’t make any sense.” (Dorsey previously said that Musk was “the singular solution I trust” to lead Twitter.)
• Venture capitalist Paul Graham, who just last month bashed Musk critics, tweeted “This is the last straw. I give up” after Twitter announced the rule change. Graham’s account was subsequently suspended, then reinstated.

After receiving pushback, Twitter once again reversed itself and deleted its posts about the new rule.

Big picture: While criticism from his backers may have been the immediate cause of Musk publicly questioning his role as CEO, the fundamental issue is that Twitter is simply a failing business under Musk’s ownership. As advertisers have paused spending on the platform and Musk faces $1 billion in annual interest payments, Twitter has reportedly been seeking new equity investors to help fund the company.

As for the question of whether Musk has a replacement in mind if he does step down, he said yesterday “There is no successor.”

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