What Happens When a Tech Company Makes an Enemy of the President
By: Will Oremus
Tags: Politics, Pattern Matching, News, Social Media, Technology

What Happens When a Tech Company Makes an Enemy of the President

Twitter draws a line in the sand, while Facebook ducks and covers

Photo: NurPhoto/Getty Images

Welcome back to Pattern Matching, OneZero’s weekly newsletter that puts the week’s most compelling tech stories in context.

From the moment Donald Trump was elected, it was obvious he’d present a conundrum for the social platforms that helped fuel his rise to power. After all, he’d broken into politics partly by pushing the racist conspiracy theory that President Obama had been born in Kenya, and insulted and demonized countless individuals and groups on his path to election.

In late November 2016, I asked both Facebook and Twitter if they’d enforce their rules against a sitting president, hypothetically, assuming he were to violate them. Facebook said it wouldn’t; by definition, anything an elected president might say would qualify as mainstream political discourse, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn’t want to be in the business of regulating that. Twitter, however, wouldn’t rule it out: “The Twitter Rules apply to all accounts, including verified accounts,” a spokesperson said.

Fast-forward three-and-a-half years, and the confrontation everyone expected long ago is finally here. Just as the companies signaled back in 2016, it was Twitter that ended up drawing the line, while Facebook conspicuously did not. As the week came to a close, the fallout was just beginning — with the legal underpinnings of the modern internet at stake.

The Pattern

Twitter vs. Trump

Undercurrents

Under-the-radar trends, stories, and random anecdotes worth your time

Instagram’s augmented reality filters are becoming more powerful. Thanks to an update in Facebook’s Spark AR platform earlier this week, Instagram filters will now be able to respond to music and be applied to pre-recorded media from your camera roll, TechCrunch reported. As my colleague Drew Costley reported on Monday, Instagram Stories have already become an unexpected and surprisingly robust platform for AR gaming. In a sense, Facebook is accomplishing what companies like Apple have struggled with for some time: getting normal consumers to use AR without clunky headsets. Why? Follow the money.

Thanks to an update in Facebook’s Spark AR platform earlier this week, Instagram filters will now be able to respond to music and be applied to pre-recorded media from your camera roll, TechCrunch reported. As my colleague Drew Costley reported on Monday, Instagram Stories have already become an unexpected and surprisingly robust platform for AR gaming. In a sense, Facebook is accomplishing what companies like Apple have struggled with for some time: getting normal consumers to use AR without clunky headsets. Why? Follow the money. Japan approved a bill to speed up the development of “super cities.” The plan is to make it easier to change regulations and roll out new technologies — like autonomous vehicles — in cities across the country, the Japan Times reported. “There are concerns about the use of personal information because various kinds of data will be gathered and used in such cities,” the report added.

The plan is to make it easier to change regulations and roll out new technologies — like autonomous vehicles — in cities across the country, the Japan Times reported. “There are concerns about the use of personal information because various kinds of data will be gathered and used in such cities,” the report added. “It’s like a noisy tech, a fake A.I. that just pretends to safeguard.” Walmart workers are lashing out against a self-checkout service that they say fails constantly, forcing human employees to intervene and needlessly risk exposure to the coronavirus. Wired reports following an earlier piece in HuffPost.

Walmart workers are lashing out against a self-checkout service that they say fails constantly, forcing human employees to intervene and needlessly risk exposure to the coronavirus. Wired reports following an earlier piece in HuffPost. Apple versus Netflix heats up. Only in a week as wild as this one could a deal like this be considered “under the radar,” but here you go: Apple is expected to sign a deal with Paramount to produce Martin Scorsese’s upcoming, $200 million film Killers of the Flower Moon. This will easily be the highest-profile offering from Apple’s original programming service, and it’s an unsubtle power play against Netflix, which previously released Scorsese’s film The Irishman.

Headlines of the Week

Marauding monkeys attack lab technician and steal Covid-19 tests

— Joe Wallen, the Telegraph

‘Feisty Old Polish Grandmother,’ 103, Beats Coronavirus Then Cracks Open A Beer

— Ed Mazza, HuffPost

Masks Work.

— Alexandra Sifferlin, the Medium Coronavirus Blog

Tweet of the Week

“Fun fact: The Constitution gives Congress the right to censure the president but when they don’t have the guts to do so, that responsibility will go to… *checks notes* …Twitter.”

— Sarah Cooper

Thanks for reading. Reach me with tips and feedback by responding to this post on the web, via Twitter direct message at @WillOremus, or by email at oremus@medium.com.