General Intelligence

OneZero’s General Intelligence is a roundup of the most important artificial intelligence and facial recognition news of the week.

Facebook researchers announced a breakthrough yesterday: They have trained a “self-supervised” algorithm using 1 billion Instagram images, proving that the algorithm doesn’t need human-labeled images to learn to accurately recognize objects.

Typically, the most accurate image recognition algorithms require humans to label images as containing dogs, horses, people, or any other subject, and then the algorithm can find similarities between images humans have indicated contain the same objects. Facebook’s chief A.I. scientist Yann LeCun has been on a mission to change…

There’s an idea in media criticism known as the “view from nowhere.” Popularized by Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, the phrase takes aim at the ethos of political agnosticism that news outlets have historically cultivated. He argues that “both sides” reporting, which treats competing viewpoints or arguments as equally valid, does a disservice to the truth. Journalism about the “climate debate,” which used to give industry shills equal airtime alongside climate scientists, is a famous example.

Social networks, perhaps Facebook most of all, have long embraced their version of the view from nowhere. …

I recently started posting regularly on my Instagram account, and I have about 1,200 followers. But I wouldn’t call myself an influencer, unless I’m influencing people to write more and drink coffee, which is pretty much all I post about.

My main goal, as anyone who checks out my account would be able to see in an instant, is to have a nice place to post selfies and share a bit more of my real life. It’s not to sell anything — I don’t have a single sponsored or branded post on my feed.

Nevertheless, brand after brand after brand…

Big Technology

Momentum inside the Federal Trade Commission is building toward a Facebook antitrust lawsuit. The lawsuit could drop at any moment, and my biggest worry as I type this is the FTC files it before I hit send, wiping out hours of work.

With the agency all but certain to bring a case, the biggest question now is which part of Facebook’s business it will attack. And the answer is most certainly Instagram.

That’s right — Instagram. When you examine previous big tech antitrust cases, the laws the FTC has at its disposal, and the state of Facebook’s business, it becomes…

The only thing that kept Jodi-Ann Burey sane this summer was binge-watching Hoarders. Within three weeks she was done with all 10 seasons.

The show helped her escape from the “visceral sadness” she was feeling as a Black woman in 2020. For Burey, this year has been draped in trauma — from the string of police brutality incidents, to the everyday acts of racism that showed up in her own life.

The day before Christian Cooper’s video of a white woman calling the police on him in New York’s Central Park went viral, a white man at a Walgreens in…

Microprocessing

When Instagram introduced the option to “heart” direct messages in 2015, my personal experience of the platform began its slow, steady descent into hell.

This nosedive accelerated in 2018 when Instagram introduced Quick Reactions to its Stories. Quick Reactions allow audiences to, yes, quickly react with one of eight emoji, including a clapping emoji, a fire emoji, and a crying emoji. These reactions show up in the direct messages folder, alongside actual thoughtful and considered responses to someone’s Story. Facebook introduced Messenger reactions in 2017, while Twitter released a similar feature for its direct messages at the beginning of 2020.

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Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram was a watershed moment for Big Tech. It demonstrated just how much wealth and power the industry holds — and how it could be wielded. Secret emails, published as part of a historic antitrust hearing, revealed that Mark Zuckerberg viewed the app as a threat to his own social network, and one to be neutralized at great cost. In this excerpt from No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram, author Sarah Frier offers a window into how this monumental deal unfolded behind the scenes — and what Silicon Valley power looks like in action.

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On the day after the pumpkin declared war and threatened martial law on Black American protesters, music executives from the industry’s most influential companies ordered all operations interrupted. The initiative and hashtag, #TheShowMustPause, created by Atlantic Records’ senior director of marketing, Jamila Thomas, and Platoon’s senior artist campaign manager, Brianna Agyemang, to “disrupt the work week” and, more importantly, “take a beat for an honest, reflective and productive conversation about what actions we need to collectively take to support the Black community,” scans strangely at a time when getting loud about frustrations in the face of fascism seems to be…