Techmeme
November 2, 2020, 7:30 AM

Top News

Washington Post:
Sources: Facebook skirted its own rules to give conservatives, including a pro-Trump super PAC and Donald Trump Jr., preferential treatment on rules enforcement  —  From a pro-Trump super PAC to the president's eldest son, conservatives have blown past Facebook's fact-checking guardrails, with few consequences.
Washington Post:
A look at the key social media feedback loops that help Trump, where his high-profile influencers and rank-and-file followers push messages both to and from him  —  Researchers say the online feedback loop between Trump, high-profile influencers and rank-and-file followers is more dangerous than Russian disinformation.
Financial Times:
Sources: Huawei is working on plans for a dedicated chip plant in Shanghai that aims to produce 28nm chips by the end of 2021 and 20nm chips by late 2022  —  Shanghai facility aimed at breaking Chinese company's dependence on American technology  —  Huawei is working on plans …
David Pierce / Protocol:
A profile of Discord, which lies at the center of the gaming world with 100M+ MAUs, as it pushes to turn into a communication tool for everyone, not just gamers  —  Most longtime Discord users have a similar origin story.  They liked playing video games, and liked playing with their friends …
Mark Graham / Internet Archive Blogs:
The Internet Archive starts adding banners on some Wayback Machine pages with links that provide contextual information from fact-checking organizations  —  Fact checking organizations and origin websites sometimes have information about pages archived in the Wayback Machine.
Tom Krazit / Protocol:
Profile of Google Cloud's Kelsey Hightower, a respected figure in cloud computing and one of the few prominent Black men in enterprise infrastructure tech  —  Peter Idah had met Kelsey Hightower before.  But this time, he brought his son.  —  It was March 2016, and the Kubernetes jamboree …
Will Oremus / OneZero :
Social media platforms made progress since the 2016 election in addressing the most blatant abuses, but the misinfo issues may be endemic to their core product  —  2016, everyone from Russian agents to British political consultants to Macedonian teenagers to randos in the American suburbs …
Eric Bellman / Wall Street Journal:
Online study company Chegg says its subscribers grew 69% YoY to 3.7M in the last quarter, as many parents from the US turn to online tutors, many from India  —  Coronavirus pandemic is boosting India's education-technology industry; 'We get that one-on-one attention they need and it's affordable'
Karen Hao / MIT Technology Review:
Researchers have developed a deep learning technique that can significantly decrease the computational capacity required to solve partial differential equations  —  Unless you're a physicist or an engineer, there really isn't much reason for you to know about partial differential equations.  I know.
More: arXivTweets: @negaciso, @diop_wb, @acronis, and @caltech
Elliott Ackerman / Wired:
Profile of Shield AI, which raised money from a16z and others to develop autonomous military drones that scan buildings to help soldiers clear them  —  On the battlefield, any doorway can be a death trap.  A special ops vet, and his businessman brother, have built an AI to solve that problem.

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Earlier Picks

Robert McMillan / Wall Street Journal: