Ars Technica: “Users shocked to find Instagram limits political content by default”

Instagram quietly introducing a ‘political’ content preference and turning on ‘limit’ by default is insane? wrote another X user named Matt in a post with nearly 40,000 views.

Instagram apparently did not notify users directly on the platform when this change happened.

Instead, Instagram rolled out the change in February, announcing in a blog that the platform doesn’t want to proactively recommend political content from accounts you don’t follow. That post confirmed that Meta won’t proactively recommend content about politics on recommendation surfaces across Instagram and Threads, so that those platforms can remain a great experience for everyone.

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For general Instagram and Threads users, this change primarily limits what content posted can be recommended, but for influencers using professional accounts, the stakes can be higher. The Washington Post reported that news creators were angered by the update, insisting that Meta’s update diminished the value of the platform for reaching users not actively seeking political content.

Ashley Belanger

I don’t see this particular setting in my Instagram account – I’m on Android and in the EU, both circumstances that may delay the rollout – but adding a very consequential switch and selecting a default without informing users feels very disingenuous. It’s fairly obvious why Meta is doing this, to eschew scrutiny over their moderation choices for political posts and hide behind flimsy justifications that its users don’t want to see political stuff, but their vague definitions of ‘political’ and these underhand tactics may draw more attention to Meta’s practices. It may also be a negotiating tactic against news organizations, to further reduce their reach and traffic, and then claim that people don’t want news on Meta’s platform.

ScreenRant: “12 Biggest Dune 2 Book Changes from Denis Villeneuve’s Sequel”

The director’s affinity for Herbert's original novel is well-chronicled, meaning that this adaptation should appease most readers watching Dune 2. Villeneuve once again did the work to adapt the second half of the book as closely as possible while still fitting within the confines of a nearly 3-hour runtime and building on any already established differences. However, this did mean that Dune 2 changed the book on more than one occasion. Whether it is entire characters missing from the story, character arc changes, or other story details differing, these are the biggest book differences in Dune 2.

Cooper Hood

As I suspected – and dreaded – Dune: Part Two makes several substantial changes to the book, revisions that are inexcusable to me and alter the narrative and characters beyond recognition. As I said before, I refuse to watch this movie in theaters, but from what I’ve read, this is nothing more than weak fanfiction that failed to grasp what drives the main characters and the intricate lore of the book. Then again, Herbert’s son Brian and Kevin J. Anderson worked as creative consultants – and praised the result; what better warning that the movie is disrespecting the original material than attaching these two to it?! I’m aware that commenting on a movie without watching it sounds presumptuous, and what follows is a rather long rant, so feel free to skip it if you don’t care about this topic.

USA Today: “Donald Glover’s ‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith’ is so weird you’ll either love it or hate it”

As for the overall tone and mood of the series, it isn’t to my taste and will likely be a hard sell for many. I can see what Glover was trying to do: Subvert expectations and make a series about marriage that also happens to have spies. It could have been profound, but it just doesn’t gel into something cohesive. “Smith” was originally meant to be a collaboration between Glover and Phoebe Waller-Bridge (“Fleabag” and “Indiana Jones 5”). Bridge departed due to creative differences, and this is one of the only times I believe that the phrase isn't a euphemism for some deeper conflict. Maybe they would have had more chemistry, but Bridge’s style and humor are brash and obvious, and Glover clearly wanted a more intimate, stranger vibe.

He certainly achieved strange. And that probably wasn’t for the best.

Kelly Lawler

It’s amazing how many glowing reviews for this series (and a whole lot of critics who contorted words beyond meaning to sound positive) I skimmed to find a few that somewhat match my impressions of the show. I guess this is one of the instances where the Rotten Tomatoes score accurately reflects its quality – a 90% critics rating together with a 66% Audience Score is the marking of a poor series in my view.

The eXiled: “The Day America’s Empire Died”

It was on this second visit to ruins of Tskhinvali, as dusk approached and the violence seemed to already acquire a kind of abstract tone, that I started to realize that I was looking at something much bigger than the current debate about Russian aggression or who was more guilty of what — pulling the camera much farther back on this scene, I understood that I was looking at the first ruins of America’s imperial decline. It’s not an easy thing to spot. It took years after the real collapse for Russians to finally accept that awful reality, and to adjust accordingly, first by retrenching, not overplaying an empty hand, slowly building up without making any loud noises while America ran wild around the world bankrupting itself and bleeding dry.

And now it’s over for us. That’s clear on the ground. But it will be years before America’s political elite even begins to grasp this fact. In the meantime, Russia is drunk on its victory and the possibilities that it might imply, sending its recently-independent neighbors into a kind of frenzied animal panic. Experience has taught them that it’s moments like these when Russia’s near abroad becomes, once again, a blood-soaked doormat in the violent epochal shifts — history never stopped here, it just froze up for a decade or so. And now it’s thawing, bringing with it the familiar stench of bloated bodies, burned rubble, and the sour sweat of Russian infantry.

We have entered a dangerous moment in history — America in decline is reacting hysterically, woofing and screeching and throwing a tantrum, desperate to prove that it still has teeth. Which it does — but not in the old dominant way that America wants or believes itself to be. History shows that it’s at this moment, tipping into decline and humiliation, when the worst decisions are made, so idiotically destructive that they’ll make the Iraq campaign look like a mere training exercise fender-bender by comparison.

Mark Ames

Another perspective on the 2008 Russo-Georgian War. While the author’s assertions about American’s imminent decline are quite hyperbolic in my opinion – he frequently shares similar takes on Twitter, so I’m familiar with his point of view – it’s remarkable how well some of these conclusions have materialized years later in Ukraine’s invasion.

The Lightroom Queen: “What’s New in Lightroom Classic 13.2 & Lightroom Ecosystem (February 2024)?”

Sort Order

There are a few new options in the Sort Order pop-up: City, State, Country, Aperture, Focal Length, Shutter Speed, and ISO Speed.

Filters & Smart Collections

There are a few new options in the Metadata Filter and Smart Collection criteria:

• Uses Masking shows images that have any kind of mask.
• Uses AI Mask shows images that have an AI-based mask (Sky, Subject, Background, Object or People).
• Uses Lens Blur uses the Early Access Lens Blur tool.
• Uses Healing shows images that use any kind of healing adjustment (Clone, Heal or Remove).
• Uses AI Heal shows images that use the AI-based Content-Aware Remove tool.

Victoria Bampton

Nice to see Lightroom expanding its sorting and filtering options, but as I have recently discovered, they remain oddly underdeveloped.

TechCrunch: “Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI”

Specifically, Mozilla plans to scale back its investment in a number of products, including its VPN, Relay and its Online Footprint Scrubber. Mozilla will also shut down Hubs, the 3D virtual world it launched back in 2018, and scale back its investment in its mozilla.social Mastodon instance. The layoffs will affect roughly 60 employees. Bloomberg previously reported the layoffs.

Going forward, the company said in an internal memo, Mozilla will focus on bringing “trustworthy AI into Firefox”. To do so, it will bring together the teams that work on Pocket, Content and AI/Ml.

Frederic Lardinois

It’s frankly astounding how much time and resources Mozilla has squandered over the years chasing the latest tech hype instead of investing in its one successful product. Public tech giants can easily afford various wasteful side-projects and course corrections, and examples abound: from Google’s countless aborted social media attempts and messaging products to the perpetually work-in-progress self-driving cars, to Meta’s exorbitant VR ambitions, and most recently, Apple’s failed electric car project. But a non-profit, existing at the goodwill of donors alone, should be more focused and disciplined. Who can forget the time when Mozilla attempted to build an entire mobile OS, a feat even Microsoft failed at?