"Why GameStop shares are on a wild, Reddit-driven run" by Hamza Shaban Washington Post, January 25, 2021
GameStop shares spiked more than 140 percent Monday, forcing several trading pauses and extending a staggering rally sparked by the passions of retail investors on social media betting against the institutional wisdom of Wall Street, but that frenzied optimism flipped, sending the stock briefly into negative territory late in the morning before it did another U-turn. It finished the day up 18 percent, around $77 a share.
The video game retailer’s stock has soared more than 300 percent since the beginning of the year, charting an epic run for a brick-and-mortar business that, like other retailers, has seen its customers migrate online, forcing the company to shutter hundreds of stores last year, but unlike many other stocks that have flourished because of the disruptions of the coronavirus pandemic, GameStop’s mind-boggling run has been fueled by a confluence of trading dynamics, pushing the stock price to dizzying heights, largely divorced from the fundamentals of the business.
Short sellers, or investors who had planned to profit from GameStop’s fall, are now paying a hefty price, as the stock has not retreated as they had anticipated, compelling them to purchase GameStop shares at inflated prices to avoid even greater losses.
Getting bucked up really drove the price higher, huh?
The start of GameStop’s January rally can be traced back to August 2020, when Ryan Cohen, the cofounder of the online pet supply company Chewy, disclosed that he held a major stake in the company through his investment firm, RC Ventures. With a successful track record in e-commerce, Cohen has since pushed GameStop to move away from emphasizing its physical stores and reorient the business around digital sales, esports, streaming, and mobile gaming.
Before Cohen’s arrival, GameStop was seen by many on Wall Street as a relic of an earlier era, defined by a massive retail footprint and late-night lines for Black Friday and blockbuster game releases. With longer hardware life cycles, and the explosion of online and mobile games that transcend the older console model, the company struggled to adapt, drawing analogies to the fate of the record store. Last month, GameStop said net sales fell 30 percent in the third quarter compared with the same period in 2019.
In January, however, GameStop appointed Cohen and two other former Chewy executives to its board of directors, tasked with accelerating the company’s transformation into a tech-centric e-commerce power house. Shares nearly doubled the week after the announcement.
Touting the optimistic case for GameStop’s future, and the huge opportunity for gains in a company that many institutional investors had bet against, day traders on Reddit and other online communities snapped up the retailer’s shares. Through its meteoric climb, people claiming to have purchased GameStop shares have framed their efforts as a collective, financial rebellion of sorts, delivering payback to wealthy short sellers that grew complacent and overextended themselves.
This is not only reaching the point of wretched sickness, keep the general theme in mind for later.
Part of GameStop’s tremendous climb is tied to those who believe its shares will sink. At the start of the year, GameStop was among the most highly targeted companies by short sellers — investors who bet against a company and who stand to make money when a stock price falls. To short a company, a seller typically borrows a stock and then sells it, with the intention of buying the stock back at a later date, once the price drops. The seller then returns the shares to the entity from which it borrowed, and pockets the difference in price, but in cases where the pessimistic bet fails to pan out, and the stock price rises, short sellers still have to cover their borrowed shares and are forced to buy the stock back at the higher price. This is known as a “short squeeze.” In this situation, short sellers move to cut their losses and purchase shares that they expected to fall in value but in fact have risen. This money-losing “squeeze” can fuel a cycle of even higher prices, as short sellers buy more shares and drive costs upward.
I need to cut my lo$$es, if you know what I mean.
I would also like to remind the reader that the above behavior was also see in the 2008 MBS scandal, so nothing has changed down there.
From its lows last April, when GameStop traded at $2.80, shares have risen more than 2,600 percent.
Went up another 92% yesterday, and that's when the print ticker ran out of tape.
“The ‘short squeeze’ story is that shorts think it’s worth $20 or less, so at $25, they pressed, and when the stock went to $30, they covered, driving it to $35, where they shorted again. It’s a vicious (or virtuous) cycle,” said Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Securities. Pachter noted that roughly one-third of the company’s 65 million outstanding shares are owned by company insiders and activist investors, and that when one of them sells, the “bubble may burst.”
You know who will be blamed.
Stock traders experienced wider volatility on Monday, as other companies targeted by short sellers rose and fell in dramatic bursts, including AMC and Nordstrom.
“The sudden, sharp surge in GameStop’s share price and valuation likely has been fueled by a short squeeze, given the high short interest, and, to a lesser degree, speculation by retail investors on forecasts for the new gaming cycle and the involvement of activist RC Ventures,” said Joseph Feldman, an analyst at Telsey Advisory Group, in a note on Monday. “We believe the current share price and valuation levels are not sustainable, and we expect the shares to return to a more normal/fair valuation driven by the fundamentals.”
Better sell!
Telsey also downgraded its rating on GameStop to underperform.
For now, GameStop enthusiasts haven’t shown signs of wavering. Across consecutive sessions on Friday and Monday, trading was halted more than 10 times, as investors drove the price up by double digits.
Related:
"AMC Entertainment, the world’s largest movie-theater chain, has found a winning message with deep-pocketed investors: Cinemas will recover once the pandemic is over. For about a year, the chain has battled creditors who repeatedly urged the company to file for bankruptcy in the face of a devastating global pandemic that halted moviegoing. AMC said Monday that it has raised $917 million, enough for at least the next six months. It did so by reminding “doubters” that the industry has survived existential threats before, chief executive Adam Aron said in an interview. Theaters have been decimated by the pandemic, with health officials forcing them to close and Hollywood studios delaying almost all of the potential blockbuster movies that cinemas need to recover. Streaming services like Netflix Inc., investing heavily in movies, have made it easier than ever to skip the theater and see new films at home."
They aren't delaying movies!
They have been declared essential by Newsom because propagandizing the public mind is, and stink from the productions leaves one spoiling for a fight:
"Hollywood East: The state’s film production business roared back to life not long after Massachusetts entered phase three over the summer. That led to the obligatory Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio sightings. No need to close down streets for shooting, as almost everyone was home staring at their computer screens anyway. The biggest disturbance in the force came from the apparent news that the new “Star Wars” show about Ben Kenobi would be shooting in Boston. We wish. That’s Boston, England, folks. Cue the social media commentary: the lost promotional opportunities for Dunkin’, the tweets about “Kenobie Lake Park” and Boston’s version of the “Four Seasons Total Landscaping” moment....."
So how much tax loot is it costing the $et-upon citizens of this state?
Also see:
It's a big-budget comedy now filming around Boston, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence who are NOT WEARING MASKS or DISTANCING, and to add insult to injury, they went to a dinner party after the shoot.
Not that it matters because who would ever want to go see their filth these days, but it ju$t goe$ to show the hand of the Great Re$et as to which institutions it plans to keep after we are all long gone.
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
Other things being talked about yesterday:
The beneficiary is GE.
I see that as cover for the DEW weapons pushing forward the agenda and herding Californians into cities, but you make of it what you will. I'm sure my pre$$ is telling the gospel truth no matter how absurd.
"Ikea is going beyond making its Billy bookshelves environmentally sustainable, setting targets to help improve forest management and biodiversity across the globe. Having reached a goal of making more than 98 percent of wood used in its products either FSC-certified or recycled last year, the furniture giant wants to take the lead in making responsible forest management the norm. One way is to go beyond its own supply chain, working with suppliers to ensure they offer renewable production to all of their customers."
"Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire mogul behind Fox News, took issue with the silencing of debate on social media, saying censorship had hobbled discourse with “awful woke orthodoxy.” Murdoch, 89, made the rare public remarks during a brief video to accept a lifetime achievement award from the Australia Day Foundation. The clip was posted online by the Herald Sun, a Melbourne newspaper owned by the media mogul’s News Corp. The US Capitol riot on Jan. 6 was followed by a purging of the social media accounts of then-President Donald Trump and others, drawing complaints of censorship. On Monday, Twitter Inc. said it would seek to police the service more vigilantly for misinformation and introduced a new feature called Birdwatch. Fox News and other conservative outlets are under fire for fueling uncertainty about the US presidential election, which critics say contributed to the storming of the Capitol. Murdoch’s own son James Murdoch has joined the outcry, telling the Financial Times that outlets “that propagate lies to their audience have unleashed insidious and uncontrollable forces that will be with us for years.”
Well, it is TOO LATE NOW, Rupe (he could be stuck there for a while, too, and I once had hopes for James but no longer)!
You thought Demorat control would be great for business, and they are going to put you out of business!
"Twitter has banned MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell for amplifying misinformation, the latest blow to the ally of former president Donald Trump. Lindell was ’'permanently suspended’' for repeatedly violating the company’s civic integrity policy, a Twitter spokeswoman said in an e-mail. It was not immediately clear which tweets spurred the action, but the policy — implemented after the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol by a pro-Trump mob— prohibits postings that mislead people about civic processes, including false claims about election outcomes. Lindell’s continued allegations of widespread election fraud, for which there is no evidence, recently led to the threat of a costly lawsuit and the resignation of a board member from his Minnesota-based bedding company. Several prominent retailers have dropped the MyPillow brand, some citing low demand, but Lindell has charged ahead, making him one of the most prominent Trump allies who has refused to back down from fraud claims in the weeks since rioters stormed the Capitol seeking to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the Nov. 3 election. Five people died in the attack, including a police officer, and dozens of police officers were injured. In interviews Monday, Lindell doubled down on his claims, saying his focus now is to bring to light evidence of ’'all the new machine fraud’' that he says has emerged in the past few weeks. His target has primarily been Dominion Voting Systems, a manufacturer of voting machines. ’'It’s mostly Dominion where we have all our evidence,’' he said. ’'I hope they do sue me, because we have all the evidence.’' Lawyers for Dominion have taken legal action against other Trump allies, filing a $1.3 billion lawsuit on Monday against Rudy Giuliani, who has represented Trump and played a key role in pushing election-rigging allegations. The company also filed a lawsuit against pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell and sent a letter to Lindell last month, accusing him of participating in a ’'vast and concerted misinformation campaign to slander Dominion.’'
He is a major sponsor all night long so expect that $ource to dry up fa$t, and I wish him luck.
Watch your back, guy, and get some trusted security, too.
"Companies that hire people who worked as top aides to former president Donald Trump will be identified by a new liberal watchdog group formed to track the employment of ex-senior administration officials. The Campaign Against Corporate Complicity, which kicks off Tuesday, said it’s building a list of former officials and aides who were involved in what the group says were the Trump administration’s most controversial actions. The group said the initiative, which started in the fall, gained momentum after Trump egged on supporters who broke into the US Capitol on Jan. 6 as Congress prepared to certify Joe Biden’s election victory. The organization also cited the administration’s policy of separating migrant families and its response to the coronavirus pandemic among examples of acts and decisions it’s taking into account. The Campaign Against Corporate Complicity was formed by two public-interest groups in Washington, American Oversight and Accountable.US, which specialize in public records requests and research. Although they call themselves nonpartisan, they count significant staffing from Democratic and progressive groups and don’t disclose funding. Among the former officials on group’s list are former interior secretary David Bernhardt, former senior counselor Kellyanne Conway, senior adviser Stephen Miller, former homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, and former acting homeland security secretary Chad Wolf, a spokeswoman for the group said."
It's not a purge or anything by hateful, vengeful, spiteful scumbag Democrats or anything, though.
The other interesting thing is thing to note is the massive turn in coverage of Israel:
"President Joe Biden’s administration announced Tuesday it was restoring relations with the Palestinians and renewing aid to Palestinian refugees, a reversal of the Trump administration’s cutoff and a key element of its new support for a two-state solution to the decades-old conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Acting U.S. Ambassador Richard Mills made the announcement of Biden’s approach to a high-level virtual Security Council meeting, saying the new U.S. administration believes this “remains the best way to ensure Israel’s future as a democratic and Jewish state while upholding the Palestinians’ legitimate aspirations for a state of their own and to live with dignity and security.” Donald Trump’s administration provided unprecedented support to Israel, recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv, slashing financial assistance for the Palestinians and reversing course on the illegitimacy of Israeli settlements on land claimed by the Palestinians. Israel captured east Jerusalem and the West Bank in the 1967 war. The international community considers both areas to be occupied territory, and the Palestinians seek them as parts of a future independent state. Israel has built a far-flung network of settlements that house nearly 700,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Jerusalem since their capture in 1967."
You haven't seen phrases and terms like settlements on captured land and occupied territory in years, and the pre$$ has even called them an apartheid state.
"Mills stressed that “the U.S. will maintain its steadfast support for Israel” and the Biden administration welcomes the recent normalization of relations between Israel and a number of Arab nations and will urge other countries to establish ties, Mills said, “yet, we recognize that Arab-Israeli normalization is not a substitute for Israeli-Palestinian peace,” he said. Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki called for revival of the Quartet of Mideast mediators -- the U.S., U.N., European Union and Russia -- and reiterated Abbas’ call for an international peace conference. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Moscow is convinced that the Quartet, working closely with both sides and Arab states, “can play a very, very effective role.” In support of Abbas’ call for an international conference, Lavrov proposed holding a ministerial meeting this spring or summer with the Quartet and Egypt, Jordan, United Arab Emirates and Bahrain as well as Saudi Arabia to analyze the current situation and assist “in launching a dialogue” between Israeli’s and Palestinians. Arab League Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit said he is looking forward to Biden and regional parties to relaunch “a serious peace process,” but Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Gilad Erdan told the council that instead of focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it should focus on Iran, which “does not try to hide its intention of destroying the world’s only Jewish state.”
Yeah, that talk has to make Bibi sick.
You are next to go, you know.
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
Now back to work:
"The pandemic has probably boosted remote working permanently, according to Deloitte’s annual Readiness Report, which suggests a third of employees will work from home even after restrictions end. The survey of more than 2,000 managers and public-sector business leaders worldwide highlights how investments that allow home-working will be increasingly important. Just 22 percent of respondents said their organizations had the technologies they needed before the pandemic; 42 percent said they developed them out of necessity during the crisis."
Just as I'm told by my good governor that life will soon be going back to normal!
Related:
"Technology shares led gains in U.S. stocks as investors awaited earnings from some of the biggest companies. The Nasdaq 100 climbed amid gains for Apple Inc., Tesla Inc. and Microsoft Corp. The S&P 500 Index ended higher, though gains were limited after the top Senate Democrat said lawmakers said an aid package was unlikely before mid-March and a U.S. health official expressed concern about vaccination delays. GameStop Corp. extended its extreme volatility, more than doubling before paring most of the gains. The picture was more negative in Europe....."
Meanwhile, at the bottom off pages D2:
"Job losses from pandemic 4 times as bad as ’09 financial crisis" January 25, 2021
GENEVA — Four times as many jobs were lost last year due to the coronavirus pandemic as during the worst part of the global financial crisis in 2009, a UN report said Monday.
The International Labor Organization estimated that the restrictions on businesses and public life destroyed 8.8 percent of all work hours around the world last year. That is equivalent to 255 million full-time jobs — quadruple the impact of the financial crisis more than a decade ago.
As planned, and there is no end in sight despite the jerking around!
“This has been the most severe crisis for the world of work since The Great Depression of the 1930s. Its impact is far greater than that of the global financial crisis of 2009,” said ILO Director-General Guy Ryder. The fallout was almost equally split between reduced work hours and “unprecedented” job losses, he said.
The United Nations agency noted that most people who lost work stopped looking for a job altogether, likely because of restrictions on businesses that hire in big numbers like restaurants, bars, stores, hotels, and other services that depend on face-to-face interactions.
And are thus no longer counted in the unemployment numbers.
The drop in work translates to a loss of $3.7 trillion in income globally — what Ryder called an “extraordinary figure” — with women and young people taking the biggest hits.
The ILO report expects a bounce back in jobs in the second half of the year, but that depends on a reduction in coronavirus infections and the rollout of vaccines. Currently, infections are rising or remain stubbornly high in many countries and vaccine distribution is still slow overall.
More fal$e promi$es, and that was the full article folks.
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
Moving forward, this was found on the front page:
"Amazon plans to add 3,000 more jobs in a new Seaport building" by Tim Logan Globe Staff,Updated January 26, 2021
Amazon is delivering more jobs to Boston.
The e-commerce giant was set to announce on Tuesday a major expansion of its tech operations in the city, adding 3,000 jobs over the next few years in a 630,000-square-foot office to be built in the Seaport District. It will go up alongside a building under construction and expected to open early next year that will house 2,000 Amazon engineers, software developers, and other employees.
They are going the opposite way of Gamestop?
This is for after the Great Reset when Amazon basically will control commerce and other things, right?
The rapid expansion by the Seattle company represents an enormous investment in talent and brick-and-mortar space in Boston at a time when some tech firms are shrinking offices and going remote, but for Amazon ― which would have nearly 7,000 employees in Boston and Cambridge when the buildings are fully occupied ― having a major physical presence here will help it innovate and grow, said Rohit Prasad, a Boston-based vice president at Amazon.
“Boston is one of the seats of learning in the United States,” said Prasad, who is head scientist for Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant. “You have some of the world’s best universities and just this natural flow of talent into Amazon and other tech companies.”
Amazon will lease space in a 17-story building planned as part of WS Development’s 23-acre Seaport Square mixed-use project. The tower, at the corner of Congress Street and Boston Wharf Road, will be adjacent to a 430,000-square-foot space it signed a lease for three years ago. The new building needs design approval from the city but otherwise has all permits. WS hopes to start construction by summer and be finished by 2024.
The developer would also create a long-planned performing arts center for the Seaport, one of the few major civic spaces in the fast-growing district, which has been criticized for its lack of public access.
As part of the permitting for Seaport Square, WS and the Boston Planning & Development Agency negotiated space for a pair of theaters: a 500-seat performance center and a more intimate 100-seat venue. The complex would be smaller than what was envisioned by the Menino administration, but more in line with what arts groups in Boston today need, city officials have said. Now that construction is ready to start, WS executives said, they’ll start talking with potential tenants.
This is so in your face, Bostonians, I don' know how you take it.
As with its first building at Seaport Square, Amazon is eligible to receive a $5 million city property tax break for the second one if it creates 2,000 jobs within two years of opening, though a spokesman said the company does not plan to pursue that incentive.
What more is there to $ay, really?
I'm sorry your business, whatever it may be, didn't survive the CV $cam and tyrannical lockdowns that are to never end despite the chain-jerking of officialdom and its $ickening mouthpieces.
The deal will cement Boston’s status as one of Amazon’s largest tech hubs outside of its home in Seattle and its so-called second headquarters in Crystal City, Va. As Amazon’s footprint has grown in the Boston area, so has its presence in civic life. In December, the company hired a top Walsh aide to lead external affairs locally, and it has continued adding jobs here at a brisk pace. The region’s tech-oriented workforce and vibrant research scene make it attractive, Prasad said.
What's the carbon output on that?
“There’s a really diverse base of talent here,” Prasad said. “Everything we do is becoming so multidisciplinary in nature, and Boston really makes sense for us as a place to grow.”
While most of the company’s Boston tech employees are working remotely because of the pandemic, Prasad said Amazon plans to bring most of them back in-person at least some of the time, when health and safety conditions allow. In-person hours might become more flexible, he said, but the company has no plans to abandon central offices.
“We have learned to work better remotely,” Prasad said, “but we’re also a firm believer in the serendipity that happens when you’re co-located with people. It just doesn’t have the same feel if you’re working from home.”
Just don't try forming a union by mail-in ballot.
I gue$$ I'm expecting too much from the Bo$ton Globe when I expect them to point that out; however, they are trying to break their own union so.... the hypocrisy knows no bounds, and how can they live with themselves?
More companies deciding to adopt a similar strategy would be good news for Boston’s beleaguered downtown office market. Vacancy rates are the highest they’ve been in a decade, according to the real estate firm CBRE.
The place is literally a $hithole these days (the restrooms that have become a haven for the homeless and drug addicts).
Of course, that's not in the $eaport $ection where Amazon will be, is it?
In that light, having one of the best-known companies in the world commit to more than 1 million square feet is an enormous vote of confidence, said John Barros, the city’s director of economic development. Barros said he expects more companies to follow Amazon’s lead once the COVID-19 crisis subsides.....
?????
Once the crisis that is forever subsides?
What have you heard?
It's Biden, isn't it?
From the front page of yesterday's business section:
"Innovation Economy; The pandemic hasn’t slowed hiring at local biotech and tech companies; Job prospects remain good in sectors largely insulated from the state’s economic woes" by Scott Kirsner Globe Correspondent, January 25, 2021
What does it mean to be part of the “quaranteam?”
If you got hired last year at Constellation Pharmaceuticals, but no one has yet met you face-to-face, you’re on it.
The Cambridge company is developing an array of drugs to treat cancer, and it hired about 75 people over the course of 2020. Brenda Sousa, chief human resources officer, says she expects this year’s hiring to run at about the same rate, but as the quaranteam has grown, the company has been increasingly open to hiring people outside of Massachusetts, Sousa says; some will be expected to relocate as the pandemic wanes, but others will stay where they are “due to the nature of their roles.”
As the unemployment rate in Massachusetts spiked last year, much of the news was about layoffs and furloughs, but hiring was still happening at biotech and technology companies. Some, such as Constellation, have become more open to hiring from out of state, but others are planning for a return to the collaborative, office-based culture of the “before times.”
The Great Reset is occurring as you are shutdown and locked down!
Ed Nathanson, vice president of talent at EQRx, a biotech startup that raised $500 million this month, says it has been renovating a Kendall Square office during the pandemic, and “We all can’t wait to see it.”
One of the most aggressive talent-seekers in 2020 was Amazon, which added about 700 white-collar workers to what it calls its Boston Tech Hub, said spokesman Zach Goldsztejn. The hub includes teams working on speech recognition for Amazon’s Alexa devices, data security and cloud computing groups, and people designing and building the robots that move merchandise in Amazon’s warehouses.
No union needed!
Goldsztejn says there are more than 400 of these corporate and technology-focused job openings posted in the Boston area. The Amazon hub ended 2020 with about 3,700 employees.
“I refer to Amazon as Pac-Man,” says Beverly Kahn, founder and president of NDT, a Marblehead recruiting firm. “Amazon is gobbling up some of our finest.” Engineers can be offered a starting salary of $160,000 to $300,000, says Larry Kahn, a vice president at NDT.
“The real pull, however, is the equity,” he continued, “because Amazon stock has performed so well in recent years, the equity packages make it very attractive and hard to turn down,” and Amazon layers on additional stock options to encourage its employees to stick around, he adds.
Where else would they go at this stage?
Even some companies that cut jobs and executive pay in the early months of the pandemic, were hiring again by the end of the year.....
I'm told “business has bounced back really nicely,” one of the Nuances of a supplier of speech-recognition technology, and in the life-sciences industry, even amidst the pandemic, “hiring has actually ratcheted up a bit, surprisingly.”
Beverly Kahn, who started her recruiting firm in 1979, says she has lived through several recessions since then. She can remember stretches when dominant Massachusetts tech companies like Data General and Wang Laboratories were cutting jobs by the thousands.
“This has been a tough time,” she says, but opportunities still exist for people with skills that are in high demand.
“It’s not at all like previous recessions. There isn’t this negativity. I think people have acclimated to what’s going on, they’ve acclimated to remote work and remote hiring, and some companies are now planning to be back in the office three days a week, post-vaccine.”
Sorry, I'm already comfortable in my own skin and have been my whole life.
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
One thing working from home does is let you access the Clubhouse and a newer, more exclusive social media app:
"Fragmented and humbled: How social media could emerge from the post-election crisis" by Andy Rosen Globe Staff, January 24, 2021
The US Capitol riot and its aftermath created a moment of crisis and upheaval that has Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms facing existential questions about the massive power they hold in American civic life.
Really?
Where?
In circles of conspiracy theorist, terrorists, and the like?
Across the political and legal spectrums, people are calling for changes in the way the industry operates. The companies themselves are wrestling with the moment, in which an insurrection largely organized online led to widespread revocations of a sitting president’s ability to communicate, and experts say these events could have a profound impact on what the industry looks like in the future.
I see.
It's okay to organize if you are useful idiots like BLM and Antifa, but organize against the agenda and it's an insurrection and time to sensor.
It's been an honor to have served you so long, reader.
Social platforms have for years been at the center of debates over online privacy, misinformation, freedom of speech, and harassment. Now, with the United States having faced the greatest threat to its political stability in generations, the companies are under unprecedented pressure from users, policy makers, and advertisers, and they will have to rethink how they balance business interests with social responsibilities.
The events of the past few weeks “could be an ugly path that might get us toward a very different media environment,” said Ethan Zuckerman, a University of Massachusetts Amherst professor who has been working on ways to better orient social media toward civic conversation and public benefit.
The Jewi$h $upremacism is prevalent in my paper.
Indeed, the decision by major tech platforms to restrict Donald Trump and his followers could be a historic turning point. Twitter deactivated Trump’s account permanently, while Facebook banned him indefinitely. Apple, Amazon, and Google — tech giants whose reach goes beyond social media — have taken steps to throttle right-wing extremist content.
The END of FREE SPEECH and the BEGINNING of TOTALITARIAN CONTROL by OLIGARCHS!
What happens next could be an opportunity to improve the way billions of people around the world connect with each other, discover new interests, follow the news, and engage with their governments, but it could also be the start of an even darker turn, accelerating the retrenchment of likeminded people into private digital spaces dominated by extreme attitudes and conspiracy theories.
Try reading the lefti$t echo chamber that is the Globe every day.
“Censorship generally sends the message that the person you’re censoring has something important to say and we’re afraid of it being heard,” said Sarah A. Downey, operating partner at the Boston venture capital firm Accomplice. “So you throw more fuel on the fire and you martyr someone or something when you try to shut it up.”
She worries that overreach by the dominant platforms is going to leave a vast swath of people with no trusted place to have normal conversations, talk to friends and relatives, and keep up on current events.
“Most people are just trying to have a normal experience online,” Downey said. “Unfortunately, having these separate facilities and separate platforms is going to make people more extreme. People are just talking past each other, and now they’re not even on the same platform,” but the fragmentation of social media could also be an opportunity for richer discourse. Facebook, above all, has come to dominate the space, and some observers believe its scale has meant that it can crush, crowd out, or acquire many competitors who might otherwise reimagine how people connect online.
Fancy talk advocating censorship and banishment, and who cares.
Those platforms have discredited themselves with their blatant partisanship, and who wants to go where they post nothing but shit.
Zuckerman, who leads the UMass Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure, envisions a world in which people create and participate in many different and specialized social networks where users set their own standards and make their own transparent rules about who can post and what should be discussed.
Rather than logging into Facebook, say, a user might pull up an overarching social media browser that shows them updates from a network dedicated to their municipal government, a network of parents from a youth soccer league, and a network of photography enthusiasts who went to the same college. Facebook might be on the browser too, as a catch-all space or a way to keep up with relatives and old friends.
Nothing political, though.
The stench of fascism and communism is overwhelming in a 1984 sense.
Though services such as Facebook and Reddit offer some of the capabilities Zuckerman describes, these new networks would put full control in the hands of the users who would benefit. If such a change seems drastic and idealistic, he notes that the Internet landscape has shifted dramatically before. Anyone remember when Yahoo dominated the Web?
“What I want people to understand is that there’s no law of physics nor is there any act of god that says Facebook has to dominate social media,” Zuckerman said.
Some advocates have pushed for taxes on targeted advertising, which could both discourage the dominant business model for social media companies and provide revenue to support experimentation in the field.
Twitter, for its part, is supporting another effort, called Bluesky, that would create a more open standard for social media that anyone can use to innovate — and potentially compete with its services.
The discussion over the future of social media has been playing out amid the fraught transition of power in Washington, where Democrats have taken control of Congress and the White House. That means government oversight and reform could be a major driver of change. One likely area is user privacy, which is getting a fresh look after recent events.
Have fun on your $tate-controlled platforms as they spy on you.
Dipayan Ghosh, a former adviser to the Obama administration and to Facebook who now is a leader of Harvard’s Digital Platforms & Democracy Project, said the refusal of platforms such as Facebook to share sufficient information about how they target content and advertisements makes it hard for users to understand how their data are being collected and deployed.
It also makes the platforms less accountable, he said, and makes it harder for rivals to create competitive products.
“Really, it’s this data collection and algorithmic deployment on an opaque, sophisticated basis that’s pushing a lot of the problems in society,” Ghosh said.
That's where the Great Reset and its AI companion are taking us.
The targeting of content to emphasize user engagement on services including YouTube has also been blamed for contributing to radicalization, though the Google-owned platform has said it is working to minimize the threat.
Ghosh believes privacy reforms, such as requiring users to affirmatively agree to all data collection, might make the services feel less individualized, as they did in the earlier days of social media, when posts were generally arranged chronologically and content promoted based on broad popularity rather than individual niche.
Companies such as Facebook would be less profitable, Ghosh said, but he believes they could still make money and be better corporate citizens.
“I believe it would be for the better, because it would yield a social media that we would know and trust and have pushed for ourselves, rather than something over which we are at the whims of the company,” he said, and the pressure isn’t coming just from users and the government. Advertisers, who are critical to social networks’ bottom lines, are becoming frustrated, as well.
Katerina Sudit, chief media officer at Hill Holliday and its media arm Trilia, said it is becoming less clear that the benefits of targeted advertising on social media are worth the risks.
The tools that platforms use to tell advertisers where and how an ad will appear are not always sufficient, she said.
Last summer, several big advertisers joined an advertising boycott of Facebook, in an attempt to push the company to take more forceful steps against the spread of hate online. If things don’t change, Sudit said, advertisers may take more drastic steps.
“That is our strongest point of leverage currently,” she said. “If you cannot come to the table in a fundamentally transparent and accountable way, we cannot take the risk as advertisers of continuing to do business with you,” she said.
Better read the FINE PRINT before facing Up to AI.
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
Dan Shaughnessy of the Globe says that’s a good thing, and what a bunch of ungrateful bastards over at the Globe.
I guess Game Six with a bloody sock and the ending of 86 years of heartache and pain that he brought to an end doesn't mean squat now.
Now I wish they had never won it, and I guess the Globe has never forgiven him for moving his failed video game company to Rhode Island.
