Out of Scope #119: The One Thing Twitter Can’t Kill
Plus: The Anthropocene and a new Gerber baby
Happy Friday! While we probably won’t get a Northern Lights show in the US this week, we all got to bear witness to more Twitter nonsense instead. But first…
📡ON OUR RADAR
The New York Times has shuttered its sports desk, and (in an uneasy transition) moved its sports coverage operation to news site The Athletic. This move doubles down on the Times’ $550M grab of the site last year to (hopefully) compete in an increasingly crowded digital sports media ecosystem.
2023 has a new queen: Gerber Baby Madelyn Mendoza, the child of a first-generation military family. The pick reflects a consistent evolution that has successfully kept the manufacturer relevant since 1928.
The latest generative AI copyright-related lawsuit comes courtesy of star comedian Sarah Silverman, who—along with fellow authors Chris Golden and Richard Kadrey—went after both Meta and OpenAI last Friday over the training of the companies’ large language models (LLMs) on their copyrighted books.
💡ON OUR MINDS: The One Thing Twitter Can’t Kill
Like the sinking ships that preceded Twitter, and while many have fled for the lifeboats, a reliable, steadfast band plays on. In this case, the band is misogyny.
Actress Keke Palmer found herself the subject of viral, sexist tweets from her partner, Darius Jackson. Shortly after, professional surfer Sarah Brady came forward with accusations of controlling behavior against actor Jonah Hill, citing texts in which he attempts to restrict her outfit choices and freedom to surf with other men.
The flurry of tweets about policing women’s bodies caught traction on Twitter, with accounts defending Jackson and Hill in claiming their respective partners were violating the boundaries their male counterparts set for them.
Now that many consumers and brands have ditched Twitter, the last surviving users are surrounded by a sea of low-brow content propagated by Elon Musk’s free speech guidelines. Hate speech has been on the rise for months on the once-popular social media platform. Turns out, it won’t just be Cher and cockroaches at the end of the world!
Brands beware—as more people continue to leave the app for more-regulated dry land, the quality of content will likely continue to drop, meaning your messaging may find itself caught in the riptide of unregulated, simply bad content.
🥊QUICK HITS:
In case you missed these reads.
Overwhelming evidence suggests a lake in Ontario represents the start of the Anthropocene era, a geologic period defined by human activities, like nuclear weapons tests and fossil fuel combustion.
A routine product review veers into an impactful piece of civic journalism when Wired reviews the vigilante-favorite Ring Camera.
A vote for Polar in the seltzer wars reminds us that the best brand play is a high-quality product.
Thanks for reading,
HL
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This week’s newsletter is brought to you by the latest aquatic alleged criminal, a surf-board jacking sea otter.