Hello, good morning, happy Friday. This week I have been judging a lot of moot court back at the Law School, and it is always heartening to see so many law students who are already skilled oral advocates. The commute from Logan Square to Hyde Park is a bit of a hike, but it’s worth it. Also my birthday was great, thanks to everyone who came to join me at the pub! There was cake.
Fine, we’ll do it ourselves
I am really excited to share this cool article with you about millenial attorneys fighting for important changes to the legal system:
It's not hard to see how a vision of ambitious systemic change has captured the next generation of attorneys and advocates.
They earned their law degrees in the years when then-Judge Merrick Garland's nomination to the Supreme Court was blocked without a hearing, when the #MeToo movement began, when top law firms faced high-profile discrimination suits, and when the COVID-19 pandemic upended everything from office culture to licensing.
Attorneys and organizers who lived through these political milestones are approaching the legal profession with a new lens. They have rallied to end the written bar exam, to impose term limits for Supreme Court justices, and to end the use of forced arbitration at law firms, explicitly targeting structural issues that the legal industry's establishment has been reluctant to address.
And in the era of a modern civil-rights movement to end police violence against Black Americans, along with visible labor campaigns calling out working conditions during an ongoing public-health crisis, young attorneys are devising ways to connect the work of lawyering more directly to public service.
All of the incredible people featured in this article are extremely deserving of the attention and praise. Especially if you are a non-lawyer, you should read this and learn about what young attorneys are fighting for. It matters!
About face
We have a fair bit of Facebook ground to cover this week, so let’s do it rapid-fire style. First, ANGERY:
Five years ago, Facebook gave its users five new ways to react to a post in their news feed beyond the iconic “like” thumbs-up: “love,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad” and “angry.”
Behind the scenes, Facebook programmed the algorithm that decides what people see in their news feeds to use the reaction emoji as signals to push more emotional and provocative content — including content likely to make them angry. Starting in 2017, Facebook’s ranking algorithm treated emoji reactions as five times more valuable than “likes,” internal documents reveal. The theory was simple: Posts that prompted lots of reaction emoji tended to keep users more engaged, and keeping users engaged was the key to Facebook’s business.
Facebook’s own researchers were quick to suspect a critical flaw. Favoring “controversial” posts — including those that make users angry — could open “the door to more spam/abuse/clickbait inadvertently,” a staffer, whose name was redacted, wrote in one of the internal documents. A colleague responded, “It’s possible.”
The warning proved prescient. The company’s data scientists confirmed in 2019 that posts that sparked angry reaction emoji were disproportionately likely to include misinformation, toxicity and low-quality news.
Next, follow the money:
In 2019, Facebook researchers began a new study of one of the social network’s foundational features: the Like button.
They examined what people would do if Facebook removed the distinct thumbs-up icon and other emoji reactions from posts on its photo-sharing app Instagram, according to company documents. The buttons had sometimes caused Instagram’s youngest users “stress and anxiety,” the researchers found, especially if posts didn’t get enough Likes from friends.
But the researchers discovered that when the Like button was hidden, users interacted less with posts and ads. At the same time, it did not alleviate teenagers’ social anxiety and young users did not share more photos, as the company thought they might, leading to a mixed bag of results.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, and other managers discussed hiding the Like button for more Instagram users, according to the documents. In the end, a larger test was rolled out in just a limited capacity to “build a positive press narrative” around Instagram.
Finally, batten down the hatches:
Facebook has told employees to “preserve internal documents and communications since 2016” that pertain to its businesses because governments and legislative bodies have started inquiries into its operations, according to a company email sent on Tuesday night.
The move, known as a “legal hold,” follows intense media, legal and regulatory scrutiny over the social network’s harms. Lawmakers and the public are up in arms after Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee turned whistle-blower, provided thousands of internal documents to lawmakers and the media showing how much the company knew about some of its ill effects, such as spreading misinformation and exacerbating body image issues in some teenagers.
Those files, known as the Facebook Papers, were initially published by The Wall Street Journal.
“As you are probably aware, we’re currently the focus of extensive media coverage based on a swath of internal documents,” Facebook said in the email to employees, which was obtained by The New York Times. “As is often the case following this kind of reporting, a number of inquiries from governments and legislative bodies have been launched into the company’s operations.”
In the Facebook Papers, company researchers debated how to fix many of the issues that arose in some of its products over the years. Over time, Facebook’s core features — such as Likes, shares, groups, recommendations — were not only used to expand the company, but were manipulated by some to harm users, the documents showed. Many Facebook employees wrestled with how to rein in the fallout, according to the documents.
Also, Facebook isn’t Facebook anymore, I guess, now it’s called Meta? It’s still Facebook though.
WWJD
Please read this important and well-cited piece:
In some hands, a wooden spoon is an innocuous object, a kitchen tool for stirring and scooping. In others, it is a weapon. “My mom wasn’t averse to carrying around a wooden spoon to hit us with,” Liz van Noggeren, 46, told me. “She broke that wooden spoon on me more than once.”
If you strike a child enough times and with enough force with a wooden spoon, it will shatter. Many of the people who wrote to me about their childhoods had spoon after spoon broken on their thighs and backs. At 23, Riley refuses to have one in her house. “I don't even keep them in my kitchen for cooking purposes,” she said. “They're not allowed in my house at all.”Wooden spoons are insulated and relatively nonreactive and are excellent implements for stirring even the hottest and sourest of things. They are also instruments of pain that linger in the memory far longer than any taste could linger on the tongue.
I started researching evangelical Christian corporal punishment quite recently, though I had known for years it was and remains a common practice in millions of American households. Knee-deep into parenting guides that read, to me, like alien and sadistic torture manuals, I realized I wanted—and needed—to supplement my reading with the voices of people who had lived with the tactics laid out on paper. So I put out a simple Tweet, asking people who had had such childhoods to reach out to me for a research project.
The response was immediate, and wide-ranging, and intense. Within 48 hours, one hundred people had reached out to me, sharing pieces of their stories on email and DM. Within 72 hours, fifty more had reached out. I wound up designing a 12-question survey—What was your experience of corporal punishment like? What parenting books or doctrines do you recall your parents using? Do you feel childhood corporal punishment has affected you as an adult?—and the responses contained so much candid anguish I marveled the words didn’t etch holes in my screen.
CW: SA
I don’t have anything witty to say here, these students deserve better:
When Elizabeth Axley first told Liberty University officials she had been raped, she was confident they’d do the right thing. After all, the evangelical Christian school invoked scripture to encourage students to report abuse.
“Speak up for those who can’t speak for themselves, for the rights of all who need an advocate. —Proverbs 31:8.” It was quoted in large type across an information sheet from the school’s office tasked with handling discrimination and abuse.
Inside job
It turns out that the shitty coup corps. had help from Republicans, because of course:
As the House investigation into the Jan. 6 attack heats up, some of the planners of the pro-Trump rallies that took place in Washington, D.C., have begun communicating with congressional investigators and sharing new information about what happened when the former president’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. Two of these people have spoken to Rolling Stone extensively in recent weeks and detailed explosive allegations that multiple members of Congress were intimately involved in planning both Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss and the Jan. 6 events that turned violent.
Rolling Stone separately confirmed a third person involved in the main Jan. 6 rally in D.C. has communicated with the committee. This is the first report that the committee is hearing major new allegations from potential cooperating witnesses. While there have been prior indications that members of Congress were involved, this is also the first account detailing their purported role and its scope. The two sources also claim they interacted with members of Trump’s team, including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who they describe as having had an opportunity to prevent the violence.
Tilt
“We are being silenced by Twitter,” conservatives scream in their tweets posted on Twitter that are also amplified by Twitter:
Twitter reported last week that its timeline algorithm is more likely to amplify right-wing politicians than left-wing politicians.
The social media company prioritizes content (presenting it higher in the timeline) if it thinks that you are more likely to engage with that content, based on your past behavior or what other readers have been interested in. These algorithms remain highly controversial, because in some cases they can promote harmful information. According to documents leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen and outside academic research, for example, Facebook’s algorithms appear to have led to increased outrage on the platform, incentivizing people to post controversial content (and then argue about it).
There is an incredible graph here though:
No surprise that the Republicans get ratio’d on a regular basis, but it is extremely funny that Sinema and Machin take the cake. And by a significant margin!
Pop goes the weasel
Zillow sowing / Zillow reaping:
Faced with the fastest-rising real estate prices in U.S. history, Zillow Group Inc. tweaked the algorithms that power its home-flipping operation to make higher offers.
It ended up with so many winning bids that it had to stop making new offers on properties. Now, after buying more homes in the third quarter than it ever has before, the company is working through a backlog of houses that need to be fixed up and sold while facing an unpleasant reality: Slowing price appreciation means it will sell many homes at a loss.
Zillow put a record number of homes on the market in September, listing properties at the lowest markups since November 2018, according to research from YipitData. It also cut prices on nearly half of its U.S. listings in the third quarter, according to Yipit, signaling that its inventory was commanding prices lower than it expected.
You deserve some good animal content
Have a good weekend.
Addendums
The Case Against Winston Churchill. Meet the guy who spends just $150 a year to eat all his meals at Six Flags. Crypto Investors Are Bidding to Touch a 1,784-Pound Tungsten Cube Once a Year. Why America’s New Apartment Buildings All Look the Same. A Union Scandal Landed Hundreds of NYPD Officers on a Secret Watchlist. That Hasn’t Stopped Some From Jeopardizing Cases. Mastodon Lawyers Tell Trump Social Network to Make Source Code Public. Big Teacher Is Watching: How AI Spyware Took Over Schools. Newsweek and the Rise of the Zombie Magazine.