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Facebook slams executive order: ‘It will restrict more speech online’

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In an earlier interview, Mark Zuckerberg said he didn’t believe it was the “right reflex” to combat censorship with more censorship. “In general, I think a government choosing to censor a platform because they’re worried about censorship doesn’t exactly strike me as the right reflex there,” he said. 

He and Facebook are referring to a section of the executive order that says Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects tech companies from being legally liable for what their users say, should be “clarified” and its protections rolled back if a company isn’t acting in “good faith.”

The good news for Facebook and Twitter is that experts agree the order is largely unenforceable and at odds with the First Amendment.

But Facebook still has valid reasons to be worried about the future of Section 230. Joe Biden has also stated that 230 should be repealed and, even if Trump’s executive order ends up being mostly toothless, it could still result in lengthy legal battles for social media companies. 

Twitter, who one executive once described as “the free speech wing of the free speech party,” and has been dealing with targeted harassment of one of its employees, has yet to weigh in on the executive order. A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment, though CEO Jack Dorsey previously defended the company’s choice to fact-check Trump’s tweets. 

“We’ll continue to point out incorrect or disputed information about elections globally,” Dorsey tweeted, pointing to the company’s civic integrity policy. “Our intention is to connect the dots of conflicting statements and show the information in dispute so people can judge for themselves.”



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‘Outriders’ video shows off its RPG shooter gameplay

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When it comes to moment-to-moment gameplay, Outriders has more in common with Gears of War and Mass Effect: Andromeda than Destiny, which makes sense when you consider People Can Fly worked on Gears of War: Judgement. You control your character from the third-person perspective, and there’s even cover you can get behind. Each class has access to eight abilities, three of which you can use at any one time by binding them to your controller.

The most interesting aspect of the game People Can Fly showed was its “World Tier” difficulty system. If you’ve played Diablo 3, much of this will sound familiar. When you first start playing Outriders, you’ll begin at World Tier 01. There are 15 such levels, and you’ll progress up the ladder by earning experience separate from your character level. With each subsequent tier, the game’s enemies will become stronger, but they’ll also drop better weapons and equipment.

Additionally, each time you gain access to new a World Tier, Outriders will reward you with crafting materials, gear or both. The catch is that you’ll only earn World Tier experience while playing at the highest difficulty available to you. Moreover, if you die, your character will lose a percentage of the World Tier experience they’ve earned up to that point. To succeed at the highest difficulty levels, you’ll need to equip your character with the best possible gear. The game’s difficulty will also scale relative to the number of people you’re playing with so that you and your friends can’t blitz through content.   

Toward the end of the stream, People Can Fly mentioned the game’s in-game lore glossary. The studio said all of Outriders’ story would be “on the disk” — clearly a dig at Destiny, which initially relegated its Grimoire to a website you had to read outside of the game. The studio promised to share more about the game when it airs another gameplay stream in June. Outriders will come out this holiday season on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, as well as current-generation consoles and PC.  

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Overwatch League viewership doubled under its tournament format

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Overwatch League (OWL) viewership doubled this past weekend as Blizzard experimented with a tournament format. The average audience per minute (AMA) was 63,000 — a big increase from 31,000 the previous week. That marks OWL’s best viewership since the second week of the season, when the AMA was 74,000.

Two May Melee tournaments took place concurrently. The North America version pulled in an AMA of 68,000 (up from 36,000 the week before) and the Asia tournament drew 52,000, an increase of 29,000. Viewership peaked during each tournament’s final: 88,000 in North America and 77,000 in Asia. San Francisco Shock and Shanghai Dragons won their respective brackets.

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Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey disagree on fact checking the president

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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey fired back in a series of tweets. “We’ll continue to point out incorrect or disputed information about elections globally. And we will admit to and own any mistakes we make. This does not make us an ‘arbiter of truth.’ Our intention is to connect the dots of conflicting statements and show the information in dispute so people can judge for themselves. More transparency from us is critical so folks can clearly see the why behind our actions.”

Twitter subsequently labeled hundreds more tweets with fact-checking labels, the New York Times reported.

In the same interview with Fox News, Zuckerberg said he believes Facebook has a “stronger” record on defending free speech than other companies, but didn’t provide evidence of that claim. Facebook works with dozens of fact-checking organizations, but doesn’t allow posts from politicians to be fact checked — a policy that has been widely criticized.

Twitter didn’t place limits on Trump’s tweets about election fraud or make them less visible. Instead the company added a label, telling users to “get the facts” about mail-in ballots, and linked to publications that had fact-checked the claims. A Twitter spokesperson said the labels were added because the comments were “potentially misleading.”

Zuckerberg’s criticism comes as Trump signed an executive order that will attempt to put new restrictions on how social media platforms moderate content. It’s unclear how the order will be enforced, or how much impact it would ultimately have. 

The Facebook CEO, who had a private dinner with the president last year, said he doesn’t believe it’s the “right reflex” to place limits on social media companies. “In general, I think a government choosing to censor a platform because they’re worried about censorship doesn’t exactly strike me as the right reflex there,” he said.



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Uber sends thousands of Jump e-bikes to the recycling heap

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An Uber spokesperson told CNBC: “We explored donating the remaining, older-model bikes, but given many significant issues — including maintenance, liability, safety concerns, and a lack of consumer-grade charging equipment — we decided the best approach was to responsibly recycle them.”

Bike Share Museum shared a photo of Seattle’s Jump fleet: dozens upon dozens of e-bikes, with their Li-Ion batteries removed, ready to be sold for scrap. An e-bike without a battery is simply a regular analog bicycle; these bikes could be ridden as normal, even with the electronics still in place. 

Lime partners with a number of organizations that have a vested interest in promoting bike-friendly streets and micromobility access, like the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, Denver Streets Partnership and Seattle Neighborhood Greenways. Bike Durham, a North Carolina biking advocacy group, said on Twitter that they would be happy to take on these Jump bikes: “Our local bike co-op @DurhamBikeCoOp has been able to re-purpose many old @ridespin bikes that were donated. Contact us @Uber!  Let’s make better use of these bikes.” It’s hard to imagine any of these organizations couldn’t find a better use for thousands of e-bikes, even if they weren’t in perfect shape. 



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YouTube adds chapters to ease video navigation

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YouTube is making it easier to navigate longer videos with its new “chapters” feature, the video streaming site announced. After receiving positive feedback on chapters during a testing period, the feature will stay on YouTube permanently as of May 28th, YouTube told Engadget in a statement. Chapters are available on the web and in the Android and iOS YouTube apps.

Gif showing YouTube's new chapters feature.

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Viewers can click on chapters to jump to a specific part of a video and rewatch video clips —  a more convenient alternative to scrubbing. Chapters are visible at the bottom of the video player and show timestamps from the video description. Chapters are optional and will only appear if a video creator chooses to include them. Creators can only use chapters if the first chapter starts at 0:00, the video has at least three time stamps or chapters and if each chapter is at least 10 seconds.



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At last, you can watch early ‘Simpsons’ episodes as intended on Disney+

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In a blog post, Joe Rice, a Disney vice president, explained why showing the original episodes in 4:3 format wasn’t as easy as some might assume. If 4:3 versions of the episodes were added as standalone bonus content, Rice said, features available for modern HD content, like Continue Watching and Watchlists, wouldn’t be supported. 

To avoid that, Disney+ had to change how it packages and identifies content — such as video, various audio languages and subtitles — and metadata — like artwork, descriptions and credits. Previously, a content package could only have one version of a single video. But Disney+ wanted to avoid creating new content packages for every 4:3-format episode.

“It was clear that the cleanest path forward was to make a fundamental change to the content model to break the assumption that only a single version of video would be present in any given package,” Rice wrote.

Now, Disney+ is able to create content packages with two forms of a single video. For Disney+ users, all of this means that they can toggle between watching those early episodes in 4:3 aspect or 16:9 without losing any modern streaming features. For Disney+, the change could open up new ways of presenting content in the future.

Disney+ changed its content packages to allow multiple aspect ratio formats.

Disney+

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G Suite users can make Google Voice calls right inside Gmail

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You can also now transfer calls using the Google Voice mobile and web apps. Google will offer suggestions of people to whom you might want to transfer a call. Alternatively, you can search for a contact or manually punch in someone’s phone number.

It’s not clear if or when other Google Voice users will have access to call forwarding or the option to handle calls in Gmail. However, Google has a habit of adding features to G Suite first before rolling them out more broadly later on.

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Facebook will verify identities for suspiciously popular accounts

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Facebook has been verifying the identities of Page managers for a while in its quest to stamp out misinformation, but now it’s shifting that attention to individual accounts. The social network will now verify the identities of people behind profiles that both have a “pattern of inauthentic behavior” and whose posts “rapidly go viral” in the US. This could determine if a suspiciously popular account is really part of a propaganda campaign, to put it another way.

The company will reduce the distribution of viral posts if an account holder either has ID that doesn’t match the linked account or declines to verify the ID. It’ll also ban these people from posting on Pages they administrate until they identify through the existing Page Publisher Authorization process. Facebook said IDs would be “stored securely” and wouldn’t be shared on people’s profiles.

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Google put an anxiety self-assessment in search

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Google Anxiety Quiz

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The knowledge panel will also display information about anxiety-related symptoms and treatments. Google partnered with The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), one of the largest mental health organizations in the US, to source the information. The organization is quick to point out Google won’t collect or share any of the questionnaires people complete.

This is the third time the two have partnered together to provide Search users with access to support and information. You’ll also find questionnaires designed to help those who feel like they’re suffering from depression or PTSD. The survey comes at around the same time as various other tech companies, including Snapchat and Facebook, have deployed new mental health-related features to help their users through the coronavirus pandemic. Google says it hopes to make this latest resource available in other countries over time.

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