The Moon is shrinking. Should you be worried? If you’re an astronaut looking to land there, then perhaps yes. CC-licensed photo by Sara Hathaway on Flickr.

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There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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A selection of 10 links for you. It’s up there. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

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TikTok is full of made-up slang and trendbait • Vox

Rebecca Jennings:

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Right now, language is exploding on TikTok. It is kind of beautiful until you understand why. With every scroll, new terms compete for space in your brain: “orange peel theory,” “microcheating,” “girl hobby,” “loud budgeting,” “75 cozy.” They are funneled into the collective consciousness not because they are relevant or necessary but because random people have made videos inventing these terms in the hope that the wording will go viral. The other day, I saw one where a guy was like, “Does anyone else just love a ‘dinner and couch’ friend? Like, you just have dinner and then you sit on the couch?” The video currently has more than 100,000 likes and 600 comments. He then repeats the term as if to drill into the audience that this is a phenomenon that deserves its own designation: “dinner and couch friend.” Fascinating!

There is a case to be made that the constant stream of phrases vying to become widely used slang exemplifies a deep appreciation for language among the extremely online, or a desire to connect over the intricacies of the human experience. Perhaps you, too, can relate to the concept of “polywork” (that is, working multiple jobs) or having been raised by a diet-obsessive “almond mom.” Maybe this guy’s video coining the term “weekend effect” to describe the feeling of wasting your Saturdays and Sundays really speaks to you; maybe “first time cool syndrome” is something you’ve personally overcome.

But chances are, either you have never heard of any of these terms or you have heard of so many that you are starting to become a little bit fatigued by them. It is not novel to note that TikTok has sped up the trend cycle, creating incentives for users to remix or react to the latest viral video and forget about it once it’s no longer a reliable source of views. What this has wrought is a graveyard of microtrends and niche aesthetics for people to try on, care about only to the extent that they generate attention, and then discard for the next thing (who even talks about “e-girls” or “goblin mode” anymore?). And over the past few years, TikTokers have clamoured to coin the next new trend.

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The internet accelerating language? Predictable enough, I suppose.

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Platformer’s Casey Newton on leaving Substack and surviving the great media collapse • The Verge

Nilay Patel interviews Newton, who has a three-person team (including himself):

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As somebody who’s very nervous about the state of media, I would like to get a lot more money in the bank. I don’t think most media businesses work by wanting to have someone’s entire salary in the bank before they hire them, but that’s basically how I think about it. I do think that we could get there with Platformer this year, but I’m trying to spend a lot of time thinking about, “Okay, well, what does it mean when that person shows up? What do I actually want them to contribute to the business?” One of the amazing things about hiring Zoe was that she joined right when Elon [Musk] was buying Twitter. She broke and helped me to break a bunch of stories about that takeover, and that generated hundreds and hundreds of new subscriptions for us at Platformer. And for a very tiny media company, that is important that the people that you are hiring are creating the conditions for you to be able to continue paying them.

I understand why a lot of reporters don’t want to be in that position. I think you and I both wanted to live in a world where reporters could just roam free, write whatever they wanted, and it would all just work out in the end. And I think for a long time, it did. I think we’re now in this worse world, where, in order for the media businesses to work, whatever you’re reporting and writing, somebody has to want to pay you $10 a month or $100 a year to read it. So I’m happy with the state of things for us, but I also acknowledge this is not the ideal state of tech media.

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Why scientists are starting to worry about the moon shrinking • The Washington Post

Kasha Patel:

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“A concept that I think that many people have is that the moon is this geologically dead body, that something on the moon never changes,” said lunar geologist Tom Watters. But “the moon is a seismically active body.”

Studies of moonquakes date back to the Apollo era. More than 50 years ago, astronauts placed seismometers around the near side of the moon’s surface to record trembles. The most powerful shallow quake was located near the south pole, which is near landing spots for NASA’s Artemis III mission to send people back to the moon, potentially in 2027. The lunar south pole region is enticing because it contains permanently shadowed regions that some speculate could have water-based ice.

In a new study, Watters and his colleagues state that this powerful quake is tied to a group of currently seismically active faults, which were created as the moon has shrunk. Quakes in the area could trigger landslides from loose rocks and dust from surrounding craters, according to models.

Other researchers say we still don’t have enough information to determine hazardous places to land on the moon.

The moon’s shrinking has been measurable, but small. It has contracted about 150 feet in diameter over the last few hundred million years. Much of the shrinking is driven by natural cooling of our moon’s molten core. As the core cools, the moon’s surface contracts and adjusts to the change in volume. As it shrank, portions of the crust pushed together to form ridges known as thrust faults.

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OK, I thought I ought to be worried about the shrinking moon, but now I’m not.
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Scientist discovers fake peer reviewing of scientific articles • Observant Online

Maurice Timmermans:

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For journals, who set up the peer reviews, it is not easy to find reviewers. It takes time and many scientists would prefer to work on their own research than assessing other people’s articles. That is why journals often ask the author to come up with suitable candidates.

Bouter: “That may sound strange, but researchers know their own field of specialisation best. They also know who is knowledgeable in their subject field. At the same time, a lot can go wrong.”

It is true that some authors give the names of colleagues – sometimes heavyweights – but they don’t always add their real e-mail addresses, but made-up ones. The review request from the journal never reaches the colleague, but appears in the author’s inbox. Who subsequently writes a glowing assessment of his own work.

It also happens that researchers write fake reviews in which they emphatically advise the author to include in the manuscript references to articles written by the reviewer. That appears to be the case in the abuse exposed by the Spanish professor Angeles Oviedo-Garcia. She discovered a total of 85 articles in which a group of ten scientists (from five universities) reviewed manuscripts in order to inflate the number of references to their own works. The more references to your publications, the greater your prestige as a scientist.

The reviews themselves carried little weight and were filled with standard texts, in which reviewers (and possibly also ChatGPT) make empty suggestions about paragraphs being too long or too detailed. Bouter: “It reminds me of something we have known for quite some time: citation cartels. Here too, scientists agreed to refer to each other’s articles. Except that this was not always accompanied by fake reviews.” 

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Make something – such as getting scientific research published – a KPI (key performance indicator) and people will game it.
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Fake research papers flagged by analysing authorship trends • Nature

Dalmeet Singh Chawla:

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Paper mills are a growing problem for publishers — according to one estimate, around 2% of all published papers in 2022 resembled studies produced by paper mills — and in recent years publishers have stepped up efforts to tackle them.

As well as being of poor quality, often containing made-up data and nonsensical text, the articles that paper mills churn out are frequently padded with researchers who buy authorship on manuscripts already accepted for publication. Some paper mills claim to have brokered tens of thousands of authorships — including in journals that are indexed in respected databases, such as Web of Science and Scopus.

This can create unusual patterns of co-authorship and networks of researchers that are different from those in legitimate research, says Simon Porter, vice-president for research futures at Digital Science.

Under normal circumstances, “you would expect to find behaviour where a young researcher is publishing with their supervisor, and starts to branch out a little later and publish with other people”, Porter says. “You can see an evolution; it’s not a random network.”

This is not the case with paper-mill works. The technology that Porter and his colleagues developed searches for trends that indicate paper-mill activity. These include co-author networks composed of early-career researchers who suddenly have a spike in publications, and papers featuring several authors who have no publication history or a collection of collaborators who are unlikely to have worked together, such as authors from several locations or unrelated disciplines.

When they compared the new technique’s results with those of the Problematic Paper Screener, a tool that searches for tortured phrases and other red flags, Porter and colleagues identified a significant overlap. Around 10% of authors were directly flagged by both tools, their study found, and 72% of authors in the ‘author networks’ data set can be linked through co-authorship to those in the ‘tortured phrases’ data set.

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Another version of “make something a KPI, and people will distort their behaviour to game it.”
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Judge rules against users suing Google and Apple over “annoying” search results • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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Users had argued that Google struck a deal making its search engine the default on Apple’s Safari web browser specifically to keep Apple from competing in the general search market. These payments to Apple, users alleged, have “stunted innovation” and “deprived” users of “quality, service, and privacy that they otherwise would have enjoyed but for Google’s anticompetitive conduct.” They also allege that it created a world where users have fewer choices, enabling Google to prefer its own advertisers, which users said caused an “annoying and damaging distortion” of search results.

In an order granting the tech companies’ motion to dismiss, US District Judge Rita Lin said that users did not present enough evidence to support claims for relief. Lin dismissed some claims with prejudice but gave leave to amend others, allowing users another chance to keep their case—now twice-dismissed—at least partially alive.

Under Lin’s order, users will not be able to amend claims that Google and Apple executives allegedly sealed the default search deal on the condition that Apple would not create its own general search engine through “private, secret, and clandestine personal meetings.” Because plaintiffs showed no evidence pinpointing exactly when Apple allegedly agreed to stay out of the general search market, these meetings, Lin reasoned, could just as easily indicate “rational, legal business behavior,” rather than an “illegal conspiracy.”

Users attempted to argue that Google and Apple intentionally hid these facts from the public, but Lin wrote that their “conclusory and vague allegations that defendants ‘secretly conducted meetings’ and ‘engaged in conduct to obfuscate internal communications’ are plainly insufficient.”

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The complaint is pretty weak sauce. It claims that “Apple was a major potential threat to Google” in search and that Google paid and pays its billions for default search placement to keep Apple out of that space. This seems unlikely; Apple thought that making its own maps was worthwhile, but that consumes vast (but, to Apple, tolerable) amounts of money. Search would cost far more, and gain what?
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Microsoft’s recent layoffs contradict what the company promised of its merger, says FTC • The Verge

Lauren Feiner:

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Microsoft’s recent layoffs contradict what the company promised of its merger, the FTC says.The Federal Trade Commission complained to a federal appeals court on Wednesday that Microsoft’s layoff of 1,900 employees in its video games division went against its representations in court as it fought to acquire Activision Blizzard.

The move undermines Microsoft’s claims that the companies would continue to operate independently, the FTC said, and will make it harder to get “effective relief” if the agency succeeds in its administrative proceeding.

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Well exactly. “We’re not going to lay people off! They’ll operate independently!” *Takes over company, fires loads of people* “What’s wrong??”
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Kara Swisher: how Silicon Valley tech bros ruined media • NY Mag

Kara Swisher:

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In 1995, a quirky programmer in San Francisco named Craig Newmark started emailing friends a list of local events, job opportunities, and things for sale. The next year, he turned Craigslist into a web-based service and eventually started expanding it all over the country and the world.

It was clear this list was a giant killer, and I told everyone who would listen to me at the Post that we needed to put all the money, all the people, and all the incentives into digital. I insisted that the bosses had to make readers feel like digital was the most important thing. But the bosses never did because the business they knew was the physical paper. I relayed my worries about the turtle pace of digital change many times to the Washington Post Company’s affable CEO, Don Graham, the son of legendary publisher and surprisingly entertaining badass Katharine Graham. Don Graham was inexplicably humble and even sheepish about his power. The very worst thing that Graham — always apologetic for having interrupted me, as I strafed big retail advertisers in my stories about the sector’s decline locally — would say to me was “Ouch.” Then he would saunter away from my desk with a jaunty wave. And while Graham was interested when I talked about what Newmark was doing, he laughed when I told him that Craigslist would wipe out his classifieds business.

“You charge too much, the customer service sucks, it’s static, and most of all, it doesn’t work,” I lectured him about this business, which was crucial to his bottom line. “It will disappear as an analog product, since it is a perfect target for digital destruction. You’re going to die by the cell and not even know it until it’s over and you’re dead on the ground.”

Don smiled at me with a kindness I certainly did not deserve at that moment. “Ouch,” he said.

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As Swisher points out, other journalists not in tech were dismissive of this new space: “I guess you’ll be covering CB radio,” one media reporter says to her. (From Swisher’s forthcoming book “Burn Book”.)
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The Messenger shut down: behind Jimmy Finkelstein’s site’s implosion • The Hollywood Reporter

Lachlan Cartwright:

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Less than a year after making wild predictions of generating $100m in revenue by attracting 100 million readers with a newsroom of 550 journalists, The Messenger has crashed and burned in spectacular fashion, leaving in its wake 300 staffers tossed to the media scrapheap without severance or health insurance in a failure that marks the end of the splashy media startup era. The money owed to freelancers and vendors is expected to balloon out to seven figures, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

…On the business side, [Finkelstein] linked back up with former Condé Nast Media Group president Richard Beckman, who had been president of The Hill before Finkelstein sold it to Nexstar for $130m in 2021, and who was given the nickname “Mad Dog” by former Condé Nast CEO Steve Florio, due to his hard-charging — and at times out of control — nature.

…Condé Nast was forced to pay a reported multimillion-dollar settlement after Beckman, as a joke, tried to force two female employees to kiss, slamming one woman’s head into the other’s forehead and leaving one executive with a broken nose.

…Former staffers tell THR that Beckman displayed a complete lack of understanding about digital media and showed little interest in learning or taking input from the team of talented staff he hired. Worse still, those that worked with him say he was stuck in a bygone era, circa Condé Nast in the 1990s, believing he could secure million-dollar deals from advertisers. “If you were trying to comment on something or tell him something, he would cut you off and say, ‘Do not open your mouth, I don’t wanna hear it’ and then go on long tirades about his brilliance,” another former staffer says.

Ultimately, Beckman and Finkelstein, who were both paying themselves seven-figure salaries and spent big on multiple offices in three cities, failed to generate revenue streams or communicate a coherent business strategy to staff. Just how do you monetise commodity news that at times appeared to be a poor man’s Daily Mail online, without the sexy photos and sidebar of shame?

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Toxic people. And yet, despite all their hubris, one suspects they will somehow appear again, with other people’s money in their pockets, on a stage proclaiming a new venture.
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Holes appear in internet-connected toothbrush botnet warning • Data Breach Today

Mathew Schwartz:

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The viral story originated in Swiss German-language daily newspaper Luzerner Zeitung. On Jan. 30, the paper set this scene: A woman blissfully brushes away, oblivious to the fact that her internet-connected toothbrush has been infected with malware, making it moonlight as one of millions of other toothbrushes controlled by a botnet, which the toothbrushes collectively harness to bring the website of an unsuspecting Swiss firm to its digital knees.

The story – as machine-translated by Google – claims “this actually happened” and quotes Switzerland-based Stefan Züger, Fortinet’s director of systems engineering, as saying: “Every device that is connected to the internet is a potential target – or can be misused for an attack.”

The report arrives on the heels of high-profile nuisance attacks against Switzerland’s federal government, based in Bern. The attacks last month were apparently timed to coincide with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s attendance at the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos.

The self-proclaimed Russian hacktivist group NoName057(16), aka NoName, claimed credit for the DDoS attacks, which the Luzerner Zeitung report referenced.

Whether or not a single smart toothbrush has ever been remotely compromised – never mind three million of them – remains to be seen, especially since no such devices appear to be designed to directly connect to the internet.

But NoName, which closely aligns itself with Moscow and may be run by Russia’s intelligence apparatus – is not letting the dust settle on this dental drama. British cybersecurity expert Kevin Beaumont spotted the group asking its followers via Telegram: “Who infected thousands of ‘smart’ toothbrushes with our software?”

The smart money answer remains: No one. “It takes 2 seconds to peel back the story to see if there’s anything reasonable there. There isn’t,” tweeted offensive security engineer Robert Graham.

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I did look at the original story to try to check its veracity, but didn’t spot anything telling. Say ahhhhh. (H/t Mathew S. Yup, him.)
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• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified