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The road to a more ethical Twitter

Good morning! This Thursday, Twitter is hiring the biggest names in ethical AI, Netflix might be losing its edge, T-Mobile is up to its old marketing tricks, and a brilliant interview with a very successful "Leading Investor."
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Twitter is on an impressive hiring spree, adding the biggest names in ethical AI to its META team, which stands for machine learning, ethics, transparency and accountability. And, oh look, they all happen to be women!
Twitter ML leader Ari Font volunteered to help run the team in mid-2020, taking ML ethics on a company-wide roadshow to persuade Jack Dorsey that META deserved an operationalized place, a new leader, more headcount and a sizable bump in budget.
Hiring these ethical AI superstars is a massive coup for Twitter, especially after the forced dismissal of Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell at Google made the world pay attention to the ethics research community. At the same time that this was happening, and Facebook was trying (and failing) to persuade politicians and researchers that it did not have the power to manipulate the way algorithms amplified misinformation, Twitter was giving the META team the resources and leeway to hire people who could actually act on the company's promise to listen to its researchers.
The META team now has a huge task: to prove that a tech company can actually take the principles of ethical, responsible algorithms and apply them in a practical way for users. It frames its work around the idea that Twitter's ML engineers don't have bad intentions; they just might not understand the importance of an ethical approach or how to go about it in a practical way.
And this won't be easy. Or quick. "There's a life cycle to enacting change," Williams told me. "You have to focus on enhancement; your first iteration or two is more on monitoring than it is on auditing. This as a concept is so new that focusing very directly on discipline and enforcement, you can't really drive change through fear."
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Masa Son came up with … quite the comparison for SoftBank's future:
Google's Ruth Porat said she supports Biden's plan to increase taxes on the wealthy:
The case against sideloading iPhone apps is all about safety, Apple's Erik Neuenschwander said:
Elon Musk should maybe cool it with the crypto tweets, Binance's Changpeng Zhao said:
Netflix has lost its edge, Hollywood mogul Kenya Barris said:
Chris Krebs joined the board at SentinelOne. The former U.S. cybersecurity chief is a pretty big get for the company.
Warren Buffett left the board of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Buffett also announced $4.1 billion in new giving, meaning he has officially given away half his net worth.
Jeff Pedersen is Angi's new CFO, joining from Stripes.
Matt Garratt is a new general partner at CRV, joining from Salesforce Ventures.
On Protocol: EA bought Playdemic for $1.4 billion, giving it an even larger stake in the mobile gaming biz.
On Protocol | Fintech: Visa is buying Tink for $2.2 billion, just five months after its Plaid deal collapsed under regulatory scrutiny.
The easiest way to justify bringing your employees back to the office is to say something along the lines of, "being together fosters creativity." Something something, water-cooler conversations, right? Well, let's do away with that excuse: Turns out there's really no evidence that that kind of spontaneous, collaborative creativity exists, the New York Times reported.
You could take that as bad news, but you should see it as an opportunity: It's time to reimagine the office completely, to figure out how a space can better foster team-building and personal bonding and all the things being together is actually good for. Or, at the very least, get a better reason to bring everybody back. Like … free lunch.
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Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the full name of the Center for Critical Internet Inquiry. This story was updated on June 24, 2021.
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