Welcome to episode 218 (“Facebook’s Doom Looms”) of the EdTech Situation Room from May 5, 2021, where technology news meets educational analysis. This week Jason Neiffer (@techsavvyteach) and Wesley Fryer (@wfryer) discussed the decision of the Facebook Oversight Board to maintain (for now) Donald Trump’s ban on the platform, Section 230 and possible tech company regulation by the US Congress, and “the normalization of deviance” on Facebook. Twitter’s AI bot flagging ‘mean tweets,’ Facebook’s plea to users to allow life tracking on iOS 14.5, Signal’s jarring (and revealing) advertisement campaign on Facebook, and China’s efforts to dominate the global electric car market were also discussed. A new CRISPR-challenger for gene editing, a decade old Dell security flaw, AirTags and privacy, and news from the ongoing Apple vs. Epic lawsuit were topics rounding out the show. Geeks of the Week included some recommended Star Wars videos on YouTube and Hacker News. Please see our shownotes for links to all these articles and resources! Our show was live streamed and archived simultaneously on YouTube Live as well as our Facebook Live page via StreamYard.com, and compressed to a smaller video version (about 100MB) on AmazonS3 using Handbrake software. Please follow us on Twitter @edtechSR for updates, and join us LIVE on Wednesday nights (normally) if you can at 10 pm Eastern / 9 pm Central / 8 pm Mountain / 7 pm Pacific or 3 am UTC. All shownotes are available on http://edtechSR.com/links.
Shownotes
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- Jason Neiffer (@techsavvyteach) – blog: blog.ncce.org
- Wes Fryer (@wfryer) – wesfryer.com/after
- Facebook ban on Trump upheld by Facebook Oversight Board, but decision opens door to his possible return (USA Today, 5 May 2021)
- Trump ban: Republicans threaten to break up Facebook after Oversight Board decision (Fox News, 5 May 2021)
- Video: ‘Nightmare situation for Facebook’: What the Trump ruling means (CNN, 5 May 2021)
- Good Riddance, Donald Trump? (OpEd by Kara Swisher, NYT, 5 May 2021) – via @pgeorge
- Section 230 (English WikiPedia)
- Facebook and the Normalization of Deviance (New Yorker, 2 May 2021)
- Twitter begins to show prompts before people send ‘mean’ replies (NBC News, 5 May 2021)
- Donald Trump’s ‘social media platform’ has launched and it’s just a blog (The Verge; 4 May 2021)
- Facebook encourages iOS 14.5 users to enable tracking so its apps remain ‘free of charge’ (9 to 5 Mac; 2 May 2021)
- Signal Tries to Run the Most Honest Facebook Ad Campaign Ever, Immediately Gets Banned (Gizmodo; 4 May 2021)
- As Cars Go Electric, China Builds a Big Lead in Factories (NY Times, 4 May 2021)
- Harvard scientists create gene-editing tool that could rival CRISPR (Engadget, 1 May 2021)
- Dell security flaw from 2009 affects ‘hundreds of millions’ of PCs: How to fix it (PC Magazine; 5 May 2021)
- How to Set Up Every iOS 14.5 Feature Worth Knowing About (LifeHacker; 5 May 2021)
- AirTag review: An easy-to-use item tracker empowered by a network of a billion iPhone users (9 to 5 Mac; 4 May 2021)
- I tracked my kid with Apple’s Airtags to test its privacy features (CNN; 5 May 2021)
- The Epic vs. Apple Hearing Is Already a Disaster (Gizmodo, 3 May 2021)
- As Epic case begins, senior Google engineer undermines one of Apple’s arguments (9 to 5 Mac; 3 May 2021)
- Wes’ Geeks of the Week: Celebrating May the 4th in a Galaxy Far, Far Away and Star Wars 1978 Remix (Lubbock, Texas)
- Jason’s Geek of the Week: Hacker News
