DL 304

A Better Way to Count

Welcome back, friends! Here's Digitally Literate, issue #304.

🔖 Key Takeaways

📚 This Week’s Highlights

Coronavirus is affecting all of us. It's taking a toll on our mental health and psychological well-being. This video from the Stanford Center for Health Education is a good starting point for discussions.

I also value this video from the International Committee of the Red Cross and this video from Osmosis.
Why this matters: Prioritizing mental health is critical in uncertain times.

This week we celebrate Chris Gilliard. Anytime Chris writes something, it is a mandatory read and inclusion in this newsletter.

Take some time this weekend to skim through this great Twitter thread compiled by Charles Logan.

Chris Gilliard grew up with racist policing in Detroit. He sees a new form of oppression in the tech we use every day.
Why this matters: Surveillance disproportionately affects marginalized communities, perpetuating inequality.

I've slowly been digging into the Facebook Files, A Wall Street Journal investigation. Each week in this newsletter we'll slowly unpack these stories and add some context.

A program, known as “cross check” or “XCheck,” was initially intended as a quality-control measure for actions taken against high-profile accounts, including celebrities, politicians, and journalists. Today, it shields millions of VIP users from the company’s normal enforcement process. Some users are “whitelisted”—rendered immune from enforcement actions—while others are allowed to post rule-violating material pending Facebook employee reviews that often never come.

“We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly,” said the confidential review. It called the company’s actions “a breach of trust” and added: “Unlike the rest of our community, these people can violate our standards without any consequences.”

Facebook is not actually doing what they say publicly. Facebook routinely makes exceptions for powerful actors. This problem is pervasive, touching almost every area of the company.
Why this matters: This reveals a breach of trust and undermines Facebook’s public claims of equality and fairness.

More from the Facebook Files.

For the past three years, Facebook has been conducting studies into how its photo-sharing app affects its millions of young users. Repeatedly, the company’s researchers found that Instagram is harmful to a sizable percentage of them, most notably teenage girls.

In public, Facebook has consistently played down the app’s negative effects on teens and hasn’t made its research public or available to academics or lawmakers who have asked for it.

Craig Silverman points out in this thread that people inside Facebook try to enact real change but ultimately are shut down by leadership and culture at the top of the organization. Growth, revenue, and public image all win out...over what is best for the humans using the social network.
Why this matters: Transparency and accountability are crucial for social media platforms influencing youth.

Some 4 million people quit their jobs in April. But the spike in the quit rate is partly due to pent-up demand after two years of employees sitting tight during a volatile economic environment. We’re also relatively on-trend with respect to the rising quit rate over the last decade.

Scott Dust with research suggesting that employees might be reprioritizing their lives, and employment status based on the following categories.

Five reasons that would likely cause an employee to begin a search:

Five reasons that would be the least likely to spur a job search:

6. How Finger Counting Reflects Cultural Diversity

It's no coincidence that we have 10 digits on our hands and the most common number systems have 10 digits. This way of counting (called a base 10 system) probably arose because we have 10 fingers. If we had evolved with 8 or 12 fingers, our number system might be quite different. And the word "digit" in the sense of numerals comes from the Latin digitus, meaning finger or toe – because of the way we use them to count.

But it turns out that people around the world have vastly different techniques for keeping track of numbers on their hands.
Why this matters: Exploring diverse counting systems highlights the intersection of culture, cognition, and education.

🛠️ DO: Update Your Devices

iOS, Windows, and Chrome all have zero-day vulnerabilities that hackers are going after. Now that the fixes are here, you need to install them ASAP.

A couple of weeks ago, we discussed a zero-click attack known as Forced Entry in this newsletter. Citizen Lab points out that this attack was primarily focused on political dissidents, but that will not stop you from getting targeted at some point.

Go add your security patches now.

Learn more here.

🌟 Closing Reflection

“Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside while still alive. Never surrender.”
— Tupac Shakur

Reflect and Engage

Thank you for reading Digitally Literate. Stay tuned for more insights and discussions. Connect with me at hello@digitallyliterate.net or explore Newsletter Index for all past issues.

Lately, I've been reading up on the latest books about how and why COVID-19 crushed us. Here are some book reviews by Alex Tabarrok to get you going.

I'm enjoying The Premonition right now. I love everything by Michael Lewis, so this is an easy recommendation.

Next up is Uncontrolled Spread and then Nightmare Scenario.