THE ATLANTIC – Technology | Internet & Technology

In my neighborhood—a mobile-home park on the western side of Malibu—the power and gas have been out for days, and cell service is intermittent at best. If I drive to the right vantage points, I can see the Palisades Fire and Kenneth Fire—two of the five major fires blazing across Los Angeles—but they are still far away. My home is not in a mandatory evacuation zone or even a warning zone. It is, or is supposed to be, safe. Yet my family’s phones keep blaring with evacuation notices, as they move in and out of service.As far as I can tell, these notices have all been in error. Earlier today, Kevin McGowan, the director of Los Angeles County’s emergency-management office, acknowledged at a press conference that officials knew alerts like these had gone out, acknowledged some of them were wrong, and still had no idea why, or how to keep… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Like any good entrepreneur who found early success in one market, Elon Musk is now starting to expand to others. Yesterday, Musk—the entrepreneur turned Donald Trump megadonor—hosted a livestream on X with Alice Weidel, the leader of Germany’s far-right political party, Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD.“Only the AfD can save Germany, end of story,” Musk said during the 70-minute conversation, endorsing the party ahead of the country’s elections next month. This is not the first time Musk has publicly thrown his support behind the AfD. At the end of last month, he wrote an op-ed in a German newspaper endorsing the aggressively nativist party, whose members and staff have well-documented ties to neo-Nazis and other extremist groups. (The party, for its part, has expelled some politicians and staff over suspected links to such groups, though others still remain).Musk has spent recent days hyper-focused on replicating the influence campaign he has… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

The human cell is a miserable thing to study. Tens of trillions of them exist in the body, forming an enormous and intricate network that governs every disease and metabolic process. Each cell in that circuit is itself the product of an equally dense and complex interplay among genes, proteins, and other bits of profoundly small biological machinery.Our understanding of this world is hazy and constantly in flux. As recently as a few years ago, scientists thought there were only a few hundred distinct cell types, but new technologies have revealed thousands (and that’s just the start). Experimenting in this microscopic realm can be a kind of guesswork; even success is frequently confounding. Ozempic-style drugs were thought to act on the gut, for example, but might turn out to be brain drugs, and Viagra was initially developed to treat cardiovascular disease.Speeding up cellular research could yield tremendous things for humanity—new… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Yesterday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would end fact-checking on its platform. In the process, a partnership with the network of third parties that has provided review and ratings of viral misinformation since 2016 will be terminated. To some observers, this news suggested that the company was abandoning the very idea of truth, and opening its gates to lies, perversions, and deception. But this is wrong: Those gates were never really closed.The idea that something called “fact-checking” could be (or could have been) reasonably applied to social-media posts, in aggregate, is absurd. Social-media posts can be wrong, of course, even dangerously so. And single claims from single posts can sometimes be adjudicated as being true or false. But the formulation of those distinctions and decisions is not fact-checking, per se.That’s because fact-checking is, specifically, a component part of doing journalism. It is a way of creating knowledge invented… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Yesterday morning, donning his new signature fit—gold chain, oversize T-shirt, surfer hair—Mark Zuckerberg announced that his social-media platforms are getting a makeover. His aggrievement was palpable: For years, Zuckerberg said, “governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more.” No longer. Meta is abolishing its third-party fact-checking program, starting in the U.S.; loosening its content filters; and bringing political content back to Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Meta’s chief executive declared.In the announcement, Zuckerberg identified “the recent elections,” in which Donald Trump won the presidency and Republicans claimed both houses of Congress, as a “cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.” He said Meta will take direct inspiration from X’s “Community Notes” feature, which allows users to annotate posts—and surfaces the annotations based on how other users rate them—rather than granting professional fact-checkers authority to remove or… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.