“So many folks in D.C. don’t actually know what it is,” he remarked.
When Graham put out a call for startup applications, a dozen startups got into YC’s debut class.
Lowe didn’t confirm where that was a strategy on Tan’s part, but he praised Tan for his warmness and his dedication.
After educating the D.C. market, YC aims to leverage its influence, particularly in areas like competition policy.
And if we don’t do that, then it’s pretty easy to see how this plays out,” Lowe said.
Bluesky now allows heads of states to sign up for the social networkSocial networking platform Bluesky lifted its ban on sign-ups for heads of state over the weekend.
This applies to recent/prominent heads of state as well,” the company had said at that time.
Bluesky faced moderation challenges early in its lifespan and battled issues like allowing racial slurs in handles.
With the social network now allowing political heads to join the platform, there could be new types of moderation issues that it hasn’t faced yet.
However, Bluesky users don’t have to rely on a central algorithm to look at different kinds of political content, as they can subscribe to different feeds.
If you haven’t been seeing much political content on Instagram lately, there’s a reason for that.
Since March, Instagram and Threads have instituted a new default setting that limits political content you see from people you’re not following.
Hundreds of creators, convened by GLAAD and Accountable Tech, have signed an open letter demanding that Instagram make the political content limit an opt-in feature, rather than on by default.
Instagram’s definition of political content leaves a lot of room for interpretation, which stokes further concern among these creators.
“Removing political recommendations as a default setting, and consequently stopping people from seeing suggested political content poses a serious threat to political engagement, education, and activism,” the letter says.
As the election cycle heats up, Instagram and Threads will be cooling down the amount of political content entering many users’ feeds.
These changes, which limit the reach of political content from accounts users don’t already follow, are enacted by default.
If you’re already wondering how to get that kind of content back into your feed, you can follow our guide on changing Instagram’s political settings here.
Threads will host, but not “amplify” news, per remarks from its head Adam Mosseri’s last year.
And what posts and topics will Instagram actually deem to be political?
It’s election season in the U.S., and Instagram has changed the way that it recommends political content.
But the platforms won’t proactively recommend content about politics, which could limit users’ ability to learn about political issues from people outside of their existing circles.
Plus, Instagram’s definition of political content is a bit broad — it describes political content as anything “potentially related to things like laws, elections, or social topics.”If these changes bother you, you can adjust your settings to override Instagram’s political content filters.
Changing Instagram’s political content settingsIf you don’t want Instagram to filter out political content from your feed, here are steps to opt out of these changes.
Limiting political content is going to have a ripple effect.
Threads, the Twitter-like app from Instagram, is rolling out its “trending now” feature widely to all users in the U.S.
Trending topics are available on the search page and in the app’s For You Feed.
The feature is somewhat limited, as Threads only display five trending topics at a time, while X shows you multiple.
It’s possible that Threads may be limiting the number of trending topics to prevent issues around safety and spam.
During President Biden’s State of the Union address earlier this month, Threads’ trending topics were dominated by political chatter.
Sarah Kreps is a political scientist, U.S. Air Force veteran and analyst who focuses on U.S. foreign and defense policy.
She’s a professor of government at Cornell University, adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School and an adjunct scholar at West Point’s Modern War Institute.
Kreps’ recent research explores both the potential and risks of AI tech such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, specifically in the political sphere.
In an opinion column for The Guardian last year, she wrote that, as more money pours into AI, the AI arms race not just across companies but countries will intensify — while the AI policy challenge will become harder.
Developing AI in these publicly interested way seemed like a valuable contribution and interesting interdisciplinary work for political scientists and computer scientists.
Meta’s newest app Threads, a would-be Twitter/X rival, may not want politics on its platform, but it’s coming to the app anyway — or so Threads’ search trends indicate.
And with the expansion, it seems the topics that Threads users are talking the most are, in fact, political in nature.
In 2016, the company made a change to Facebook’s Feed, to prioritize posts from family and friends over news.
Creators who post about laws and legislation, elections or other political and social issues, were not happy about this change.
But there’s one area where Threads isn’t (yet) suppressing politics, and that’s in its Trends feature.
Reports are coming in that a number of Meta’s top social apps, including Facebook and Instagram, as well as its new app Threads, are all experiencing an outage on Tuesday morning.
We’ve reached out to Meta to confirm the timing and the reports and will update if we hear more information.
In the meantime, Meta communications director Andy Stone has confirmed the outage in a post on X, noting, “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services.
To quell its potential role in influencing the elections’ outcome, Meta disables political ads in the timeframe leading up to key elections, like the U.S. midterms.
To address newer concerns, Meta also announced it would label political ads with AI-generated imagery for the 2024 election cycle.
Apple does not enjoy this, which should surprise exactly no one.
Somehow, despite that, society remains intact and people are mostly ok with using those platforms with reasonable success.
What isn’t so understandable is just how petulant the company is being about prying open fingers on its tightly closed fist when it comes to compliance here.
At best, it seems short-sighted: Yes, doing so will mean Apple’s revenue picture doesn’t materially change in the near-term.
And developers are increasingly irate at Apple’s antics.
