Local news is crucial to democracy, and it's disappearing — according to a new book by Steven Brill, excerpted in @Semafor, approximately twenty-two hundred papers and their websites went out of business between 2005 and 2021. That's created a vacuum into which "pink-slime" sites have poured. Brill writes about these sites that present themselves as legitimate publishers but are created to boost specific candidates and secretly financed by partisan funders, Democrats and Republicans alike.
Federated news publishers include @AxiosNews, @Semafor, @BloombergGreen, @19thnews, @ConversationUS and more. You'll also find many fantastic lifestyle publishers there, such as @Smithsonianmag, @cntraveler, @outside, @Kotaku and @TheRoot. We're working on a better way to separate publisher and curator profile details so you can easily find what you're looking for; stay tuned. If you're a publisher who'd like to onboard to Flipboard or have your account federated, fill in this survey:
JUST IN: The US has reportedly allowed Ukraine to strike Russia with US-supplied weapons specifically in the area around Kharkiv, according to Politico.
Israeli War Cabinet member Benny Gantz announced Wednesday his centrist National Unity party has introduced a bill to dissolve the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, which would trigger an early election....
JOHANNESBURG — South Africa’s ruling African National Congress looks set to lose its parliamentary majority for the first time since coming to power after the end of apartheid 30 years ago, according to projections based on early election results....
"Despite the Biden campaign ramping up its focus on Heritage’s “Project 2025” this year, fewer than one in four Americans say they’ve heard about it, according to new polling shared with Semafor this morning."
-S Talcott
MSM & SM aren't informing viewers & readers about the existential dangers of GOP presidency, esp. #Project2025 *Erosion of democratic norms, use of govt institutions to target pol opponents..., whether it's #TFG or someone else:
Young voters overwhelmingly believe that almost all politicians are corrupt and that the country will end up worse off than when they were born, according to new polling from Democratic firm Blueprint obtained exclusively by Semafor....
Venezuela revoked an invitation for European Union election observers to attend its presidential election in July, triggering new concerns over the likelihood of a free and fair vote.
I agree with the title, but Semafor is not a real news source.
The easiest way to understand Signals is to go look at one yourself — it’s fundamentally a collection of links to stories from around the web about a topic, curated and summarized by a Semafor reporter. The twist is that Semafor built an AI-powered search tool called MISO (for “multilingual insight search optimizer”) to help those reporters find a broad range of stories in various languages to make that curation process more efficient. The company describes the tool as “a custom bot built on OpenAI’s platform and using Microsoft’s Bing search engine.”
Their “reporters” are just checking what an AI spews out.
And there’s a lot more shady stuff this could be heading.
They’ve said they want to eventually tailor articles presented, headlines, and even article content to users.
The potential propaganda impact of something like this can not be ignored. People bitch about social media algorithms changing people’s opinions, but this is disguised as a real new organization and wants to change the information shown on its site on a user by user basis to more effectively get people to the result the owners of the website works.
Uber used to provide a cheap effective service, so did Walmart. Once they get market share, the shit show begins.
Senafor is still in the process of capturing market share, dont help them accomplish that step so they can move into the shady shit
The easiest way to understand Signals is to go look at one yourself — it’s fundamentally a collection of links to stories from around the web about a topic, curated and summarized by a Semafor reporter. The twist is that Semafor built an AI-powered search tool called MISO (for “multilingual insight search optimizer”) to help those reporters find a broad range of stories in various languages to make that curation process more efficient. The company describes the tool as “a custom bot built on OpenAI’s platform and using Microsoft’s Bing search engine
Wow that’s really fucking lazy of them. Not suprising though.
They’ve said they want to eventually tailor articles presented, headlines, and even article content to users.
Nothing like keeping people in their echo chambers and safe spaces.
49% agreed to some extent that elections in the country don’t represent people like them; 51% agreed to some extent that the political system in the US “doesn’t work for people like me;” and 64% backed the statement that “America is in decline.” A whopping 65% agreed either strongly or somewhat that “nearly all politicians are corrupt, and make money from their political power”
Nearly all of these statements are, I think, undeniable if you’re paying attention. I’m surprised the percentages are so low.
“I think these statements blow me away, the scale of these numbers with young voters,” Evan Roth Smith, Blueprint’s lead pollster, told Semafor. “Young voters do not look at our politics and see any good guys.”
(Emphasis mine)
And that is exactly the point where the misinterpretation train leaves the station. The excitement generated by Bernie Sanders / Beto O’Rourke / etc seems to suggest otherwise.
If you wanted to check whether young voters feel that the right answer to that bleakness you asked them about is to give up on politics and let whatever happens happen, rather than to get involved and fix it, you could have asked them that directly. My observation is that they are voting and getting involved in protest movements a lot more so than other younger generations in the recent past, but it kinda sounds like you don’t want that to be true, so you asked them something different and then decided that they said something different than they did.
LAGOS — Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu vowed to usher in an era of renewed hope when he was inaugurated into office a year ago. Twelve months later, the prices of food and fuel have doubled, driving increasingly loud discontent....
If the people who run newsrooms ever did any self-reflection, the Washington Post's "consensus" -- and epic -- failure to publish what it knew years ago about "Justice" Alito's extremist household would be a case study for everyone.
Israel War Cabinet member Benny Gantz files motion to dissolve parliament (www.semafor.com)
Israeli War Cabinet member Benny Gantz announced Wednesday his centrist National Unity party has introduced a bill to dissolve the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, which would trigger an early election....
South Africa’s ANC on course to lose majority in early projections (www.semafor.com)
JOHANNESBURG — South Africa’s ruling African National Congress looks set to lose its parliamentary majority for the first time since coming to power after the end of apartheid 30 years ago, according to projections based on early election results....
‘A dying empire led by bad people’: Poll finds young voters despairing over US politics | Semafor (www.semafor.com)
Young voters overwhelmingly believe that almost all politicians are corrupt and that the country will end up worse off than when they were born, according to new polling from Democratic firm Blueprint obtained exclusively by Semafor....
How Nigeria’s economy cratered in President Tinubu’s first year (www.semafor.com)
LAGOS — Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu vowed to usher in an era of renewed hope when he was inaugurated into office a year ago. Twelve months later, the prices of food and fuel have doubled, driving increasingly loud discontent....