Mid-Week Updates, No 27

Bears, Twitter, AI and Israel's Week

No, the photo is not a clever way to start talking about the Russian bear, although if we have to believe some the bear is attempting to create a man-made nuclear disaster. No, last Sunday I settled into a comfy chair on my lawn where there was some shade to finish reading this book. So I was reading and focused on the pages, enjoying the peace on a hot day. Yet I sensed something around me, not sure why exactly, and looked up and a sizeable adult brown bear was standing right next to me. When I looked him in the eyes he looked back, almost in an apologetic way, like ‘sorry, did not mean to bother you’. We were both surprised and each made a quick decision to move on, I stepped out of my chair and walked back to the house while the bear turned around and moved on to the neighbours.

It really was a beautiful moment and never in my twenty plus years here in the west have I had such a close bear encounter. It gives you the same sort of rush of energy when you first swim with or encounter dolphins, at some level it is a hard to describe emotional encounter that creates some deep felt energy. Not for a second was I scared or in panic mode, maybe the bear’s body language and eye contact made it all that more easy for both of us. So remember if you ever run into a bear: they are mostly on their own mission, not interested in you and fully realize what they need to do: move on.

Twitter

As I was writing on the riots in France there were rumours that Twitter had shut down in France. It was a rumour only, but what was actually happening was that Musk’s platform was restricting access to deal with extreme data scraping by AI companies. Alternative explanations rapidly emerged as ‘tweet consumption’ was now restricted to specific numbers whereby paying subscribers got more content to consume than the free user. Journalists who rely on Twitter were up in arms and rightly so, as I pointed out last week during the short-lived Prigozhin revolt, Twitter is the best go-to platform for the latest news, opinions and analysis instantly as events are happening.

At a more deeper level the discussion centred around the business case for all of this. Was it a deliberate ploy by Musk to force people to start becoming paid Twitter subscribers? Or had the aggressive cost cutting post-acquisition resulted to a lack of development resources who could have adequately dealt with the data scraping issue head on? There may be some truth to both, but I can’t verify it. One aspect that is overlooked but got some traction is that by limiting access to Twitter, Musk has frustrated the mass gathering of data that are used to develop censorship algorithms. In other words, government agencies that are trying to clamp down on certain information have just found out that there are limits to what they can do. Unrelated, but topical is that yesterday a federal judge ruled - on the 4th of July on less - that the Biden administration cannot keep communicating and influencing social media companies. The battle for information is on, now more than ever.

Whatever the case, if Twitter is into more turmoil that is good news for others who will jump in and try to take advantage: the competition. Tomorrow Facebook will launch a new app called ‘Threads’ that will attempt to do what Zuckerberg has been planning to do for a long time: end Twitter’s hegemony in the micro-blogging news space. Let’s see what happens. I hope Musk pulls it out of the fire, in particular because we simply cannot have social media concentration into one set of hands.

And Israel

It is a very difficult week in Israel with domestic protests against judicial reform trying to shut down Ben-Gurion international airport, terror attacks and military action on the West Bank to root out some of the most violent terror cells. The international media are of course in full force condemning Israel, nothing new here, but this BBC interview with former Israeli PM Naftali Bennett sets a new low in media objectivity.