Life for gigging musicians hasn’t got particularly easier of late. They’re real members of the “precariat”, a new book suggests. (But the Arctic Monkeys aren’t.) CC-licensed photo by Bleeding Mole on Flickr.
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A selection of 8 links for you. Power chord. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Meta suspends accounts tracking Trump, Bezos jets, echoing Musk’s X • The Washington Post
Drew Harwell:
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The tech giant Meta this week suspended Instagram and Threads accounts tracking the flights of private jets owned by Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, former president Donald Trump and other public figures, echoing a move by Elon Musk’s X to crack down on such accounts that drew criticism over social networks’ suppression of public data.
The accounts drew from publicly broadcast flight data to post the takeoff and landing airports of planes used by Zuckerberg, Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Kim Kardashian, Kylie Jenner and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) alongside estimates of the carbon dioxide emissions from each trip.
The posts do not specify who was on the plane, the purposes of the flight or where the passengers traveled next. (Bezos, Amazon’s founder, owns The Washington Post.)
Meta’s suspensions appear to mimic X’s move in late 2022 to delete X accounts tracking Musk and other private-jet owners. The platform implemented the policy even after Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” had pledged to keep the accounts online.
Andy Stone, a spokesman for Meta, which also owns Facebook, said that the accounts were disabled for “violating our privacy policy,” that they posed a “risk of physical harm of individuals,” and that the decision followed the recommendation of Meta’s independent Oversight Board.
But the board’s decision, from 2022, offered nonbinding advice only on the sharing of “private residential information,” such as home addresses, and makes no mention of flight or travel data.
It remains unclear under what guidelines an account could post information about a public figure’s travel. Journalists and researchers have frequently used flight data to cover influential newsmakers, investigate government misconduct and report on current events.
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Very strange move. Temporary, only around the election, perhaps, out of an abundance of care? If they’re violating the privacy policy now, they’ve been doing that for a very long time without anyone taking action.
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Tech critics want a Google exec punished for deleted chats • The Verge
Lauren Feiner:
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Three advocacy groups are trying to amp up the pressure on Google for allegedly destroying company records. The American Economic Liberties Project, Check My Ads, and the Tech Oversight Project are urging the State Bar of California to investigate Kent Walker, Google’s President of Global Affairs and a member of the Bar. They claim Walker “coached” the company “to engage in widespread and illegal destruction of records relevant to multiple ongoing federal trials.”
In a letter shared exclusively with The Verge, the groups point to a 2008 memo Walker sent to employees while he served as general counsel. The so-called Walker Memo was highlighted in the Department of Justice’s recent antitrust trial, one of multiple cases where Google has been accused of obscuring potentially incriminating documents. The memo referenced “several significant legal and regulatory matters” Google faced at the time as the rationale for a new policy limiting employee chat message retention. The DOJ claimed it marked a turning point for company secrecy — as Google changed the default setting on chats from “history on” to “history off.”
In a legal filing in the ad tech case, Google dismissed the memo as an old document irrelevant to its evidence retention policies for that case. “[T]he memo was not only written 11 years before DOJ opened its investigation or any duty to preserve existed, but also instructs employees to take steps to preserve relevant Chat messages if they are subject to a litigation hold. That is the opposite of an intent to destroy evidence.”
But Google employees “understood the goal was to remove information that might be discoverable at trial,” the advocacy groups write in their letter to the Bar. Walker also allegedly advised the company implement a “communicate with care” policy, which instructed employees to do things like gratuitously invoke attorney-client privilege on sensitive emails.
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It’s quite the allegation, but there are plentiful examples from the latest two Google antitrust cases in the US where chats have been erased and the privilege was unnecessarily invoked.
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How to make Google’s [ad] network business a force for good • AdExchanger
Richard Kramer of Arete Research:
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Throughout history, technology has made industries more efficient. But not ad tech. Why, for example, can we trade stocks for fractions of a% while digital ads cost 50% of spend? Ad tech’s murky supply chain is causing publishers around the world to struggle at best and fail at worst.
Meanwhile, every new revelation from the category of truth tellers we call “forensic ad tech,” including Adalytics, Human and Sincera, sparks indignation and generates fiery headlines only to fade away shortly after.
Yet a US government-mandated breakup of the “ad tech stack” would likely have unintended consequences. Most publishers principally rely on revenue from Google-placed ads. Lawyers may imagine ways to pick apart tech features, but most publishers lack the technical expertise to implement them. There’s a reason so many publishers integrate Google’s products as a default.
I’d argue the best way to unpick this Gordian Knot is to change the incentives and for Google to spin out its entire network unit as a public benefit “B Corp” with capped margins.
Why would Google and its shareholders, which have fiercely resisted any curtailment, consider this plan? There are five very good reasons.
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He suggests: PR; not getting caught up with antitrust (unlike Microsoft), useful to the wider web, not a great business for Google and could end up sending extra money to publishers.
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Streaming subscription fees have been rising while content quality is dropping • Ars Technica
Scharon Harding:
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Subscription fees for video streaming services have been on a steady incline. But despite subscribers paying more, surveys suggest that viewers are becoming less satisfied with what’s available to watch.
At the start of 2024, the industry began declaring the end of Peak TV, a term coined by FX Networks chairman John Landgraf, refers to an era of rampant content spending that gave us shows like The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones. For streaming services, the Peak TV era meant trying to lure subscribers with original content that was often buoyed by critical acclaim and/or top-tier actors, writers, and/or directors. However, as streaming services struggle to reach or maintain profitability, 2024 saw a drop in the number of new scripted shows for the first time in at least 10 years, FX Research found.
Meanwhile, overall satisfaction with the quality of content available on streaming services seems to have declined for the past couple of years. Most surveys suggest a generally small decline in perceived quality, but that’s still perturbing considering how frequently streaming services increase subscription fees. There was a time when a streaming subscription represented an exclusive ticket to viewing some of the best new TV shows and movies. But we’ve reached a point where the most streamed TV show last year was Suits—an original from the USA Network cable channel that ended in 2019.
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The study is by TiVo. What are we at after Peak TV, then? Doldrums TV?
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Meta tests facial recognition for spotting ‘celeb-bait’ ads scams and easier account recovery • TechCrunch
Natasha Lomas:
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Meta is expanding tests of facial recognition as an anti-scam measure to combat celebrity scam ads and more broadly, the Facebook owner announced Monday.
Monika Bickert, Meta’s VP of content policy, wrote in a blog post that some of the tests aim to bolster its existing anti-scam measures, such as the automated scans (using machine learning classifiers) run as part of its ad review system, to make it harder for fraudsters to fly under its radar and dupe Facebook and Instagram users to click on bogus ads.
“Scammers often try to use images of public figures, such as content creators or celebrities, to bait people into engaging with ads that lead to scam websites where they are asked to share personal information or send money. This scheme, commonly called ‘celeb-bait,’ violates our policies and is bad for people that use our products,” she wrote.
“Of course, celebrities are featured in many legitimate ads. But because celeb-bait ads are often designed to look real, they’re not always easy to detect.”
The tests appear to be using facial recognition as a backstop for checking ads flags as suspect by existing Meta systems when they contain the image of a public figure at risk of so-called “celeb-bait.”
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There are plenty of examples of this stuff on X, if they need to do some training.
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Why is Apple so bad at marketing its TV shows? • Fast Company
Joe Berkowitz:
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Ever since its launch in 2019, Apple TV+ has been carving out an identity as the new home for prestige shows from some of Hollywood’s biggest names—the kind of shows that sound natural coming out of Jimmy Kimmel’s mouth in monologue jokes at the Emmys. While the company never provides spending details, Apple is estimated to have spent at least $20bn recruiting the likes of Reese Witherspoon, M. Night Shayamalan, and Harrison Ford to help cultivate its award-worthy sheen. For all the effort Apple has expended, and for all the cultural excitement around Ted Lasso during its three-season run, the streaming service has won nearly 500 Emmys . . . while attracting just 0.2% of total TV viewing in the U.S.
No wonder the company reportedly began reining in its spending spree recently. (Apple did not reply to a request for comment.)
“It seems like Apple TV wants to be seen as a platform that’s numbers-agnostic,” says Ashley Ray, comedian, TV writer, and host of the erstwhile podcast TV I Say. “They wanna be known for being about the creativity and the love of making TV shows, even if nobody’s watching them.”
The experience of enjoying a new Apple TV+ series can often be a lonely one. Adventurous subscribers might see an in-network ad about something like last summer’s Sunny, the timely, genre-bending Rashida Jones series about murderous AI, and give it a shot—only to find that nobody else is talking about it in their social media feeds or around the company Keurig machine. Sure, the same could be said for hundreds of other streaming series in the post-monoculture era, but most streaming companies aren’t consistently landing as much marquee talent for such a limited library. (Apple currently has 259 TV shows and films compared to Netflix’s nearly 16,000.)
How is it possible for a streaming service to have as much high-pedigree programming as Apple TV+ does and so relatively few viewers, despite an estimated 25 million paid subscribers? How can shows starring Natalie Portman, Idris Elba, and Colin Farrell launch and even get renewed without ever quite grazing the zeitgeist? How does a show set in the same Monsterverse as Godzilla vs. Kong, and starring Kurt Russell and his roguishly charming son, not become a monster-size hit?
For many perplexed observers, the blame falls squarely on Apple’s marketing efforts, or seeming lack thereof.
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And, as the article points out, how is a company that people think of as being great at marketing so bad at.. marketing?
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The decline of the working musician • The New Yorker
Hua Hsu reviews Franz Nicolay’s new book called “Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music”:
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Nicolay makes these gangs sound like a lot of fun, while also demystifying them. Some band people prefer hierarchy and assertive decision-makers; others aspire to a more chaotic kind of democracy. Some envy the star; others feel sorry for him. Jon Rauhouse, a musician who tours with the singer Neko Case, is glad not to be the one that interviewers want to speak with—he’s free to “go to the zoo and pet kangaroos.” Band people are often asked to interpret cryptic directives in the studio. The multi-instrumentalist Joey Burns recalls one singer who, in lieu of instructions, would tell him stories about the music—he might be told to imagine a song they were working on as “a cloud in the shape of an elephant, and it’s trying to squeeze through a keyhole to get into this room.”
Many musicians prefer the “emotional life” of the band to be familial, rather than seeing their bandmates as “a handful of co-workers.” And despite the collective dream that brings artists together, the critic and theorist Simon Frith argues, “the rock profession is based on a highly individualistic, competitive approach to music, an approach rooted in ambition and free enterprise,” which feeds perfectly into a quintessentially American zero-to-hero dream. This, Nicolay suggests, is what makes the prospect of, say, “a hypothetical union,” which might negotiate fees with a club on behalf of musicians, unimaginable.
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Be right back, just getting the music in the form of an elephant-shaped cloud into the room via the keyhole. But musicians now are also part of the “precariat” – people on the edge of making a living.
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The vibes are off: did Elon Musk push academics off Twitter? • Cambridge Core
James Bisbee and Kevin Munger:
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This article addresses a narrower empirical question: What did Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform mean for this academic ecosystem? Using a snowball sample of more than 15,700 academic accounts from the fields of economics, political science, sociology, and psychology, we show that academics in these fields reduced their “engagement” with the platform, measured by either the number of active accounts (i.e., those registering any behavior on a given day) or the number of tweets written (including original tweets, replies, retweets, and quote tweets).
We further tested whether this decrease in engagement differed by account type; we found that verified users were significantly more likely to reduce their production of content (i.e., writing new tweets and quoting others’ tweets) but not their engagement with the platform writ large (i.e., retweeting and replying to others’ content).
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There’s plenty of data to back them up, but it also strengths a vague feeling you may have had that there’s less academic discourse on Twitter nowadays.
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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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