Gregory's ServerFeedly is really out here pretending they didn't just advertise "track[ing] strikes that pose a risk to company assets"
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This was the feature image in the blog post: two worker strikes and a boycott. Separately, it's very weird that Feedly decided to feature in the image a result from LifeNews, an anti-abortion advocacy site that was listed on NewsGuard's "Ten Most Influential Misinformers" list for publishing false claims about abortion safety and COVID-19. https://www.newsguardtech.com/special-reports/special-report-the-u-s-best-and-worst-of-2021/ Another image in the post boasts how the model identifies a union strike as a "risky protest". Feedly also managed to land a puff piece in PCMag. "The title and wording were vague enough for some users to easily imagine the various ways a corporation could deploy AI to suppress employee-sponsored protests". https://www.pcmag.com/news/feedly-faces-backlash-over-protest-tracking-ai-models Vague?? Seemed pretty clear to me. The whole piece argues that the feature "was never designed to help companies silence legitimate protests", and that it could clearly be used that way was just a wild misunderstanding by us crazies rather than something Feedly themselves advertised. At no point do they ask Feedly CEO Edwin Khodabakchian to address the fact that the tool is not only surfacing union strikes, boycotts, and "legitimate protests" (as he puts it), but was explicitly marketed for its abilities to do so. @molly0xfff Well, you see, you just have to define "legitimate protests" as "protests that do not pose a risk to your companies assets." @molly0xfff I really miss the first 50 years of my life when companies were much more careful not to give off such "just another day in 1930's Germany" vibes. @molly0xfff We need an federated, ActivityPub integrated open rss reader interface so badly @cupcakezealot @molly0xfff can you tell me more? Would it be an RSS reader with Mastodon integration, or something different? @cupcakezealot @molly0xfff what do you mean by activitypub integrated open RSS reader? I like this idea but can you clarify? @filipesm @molly0xfff Traditional adding of rss feeds like normal plus an aggregator for links to posted by topic? I dunno just noodling some ideas I know there's Lemmy but that's more focused around reddit style discussions so simpler than that  @filipesm @cupcakezealot @molly0xfff Flipboard is just a really pretty graphical “boost other people’s content” interface, sadly, and the UI doesn’t really scale once you’re following more than a few feeds.  @cupcakezealot @filipesm @molly0xfff I'm not sure if this is what you have in mind, but you can follow RSS feeds in Friendica (https://friendi.ca) the same way you follow ActivityPub accounts. If you paste an RSS feed into the search box on Friendica, it will bring it up like it was an account. If you follow it, its posts will appear in the same timeline as ActivityPub posts. @molly0xfff Thank you and thank you to your followers for recommending NetNewsWire, which is open source and which imported my Feedly OPML file perfectly.   @molly0xfff Fuck strike breakers. Fuck those that would "inadvertently" support strike breakers. Breaking strikes is nothing but oppression. @molly0xfff right? I mean, the blog post clearly had "Protests" and "Violent Protests" as two separate filtering criteria. Why do publications do this? Is it that they're friends with their subjects, have been to their events etc? Are they afraid of losing advertising? Do they just not care about ethics? Is it something else? @molly0xfff Maybe companies just need to know about strikes and protests so they can immediately meet all the demands and do an extremely sincere apology. @molly0xfff From the article, “ Feedly heard from around 20 users who were upset about the feature” 20 people seems low to cause this amount of backpedaling @molly0xfff So they seriously just quacked like a duck, then went on air saying that them quacking like a duck could have been misconstrued as quacking like a duck but quacking like a duck was not what they were actually doing.  @molly0xfff It reminds me of how the Rspberry Pi folks were trying to pretend they were just misunderstood and weren't talking up their new hire's pride in his history of using their products for police surveillance.    @drdrowland @molly0xfff that sounds fine, can't imagine a cotton producer in the deep south treating workers poorly  @molly0xfff At *best* this requires you to believe that “your company’s assets” == “their journalists”, which I guess isn’t 100% implausible, but ew. @molly0xfff yup... As a long time feedly user this was quite disturbing to see @molly0xfff To say nothing of the fact that they have separate models for “protests” and “violent protests”. If this is just about keeping journalists safe, what’s with the non-violent model? :| @molly0xfff Feedly, they seem to be a bad company, so I guess I'll have to switch to something else. @molly0xfff I've been using Feedly since Google killed Reader and its been really sad to witness how the enterprise SaaS-brain infection has absolutely destroyed this product. Time to look for a replacement, I guess. p.s. 100% convinced that we will look back at Google Reader shutting down as THE moment when it all went to shit @molly0xfff when their feature update emails went from "check out this cool new interface for saving articles" to "monitor cybersecurity threats with your team using Slack integrations" I knew the infection had spread and their condition was terminal 😢 @molly0xfff if this were true, they are calling journalists a company's "assets" which isn't great, either. What a disingenuous response @molly0xfff I find myself more amused than upset. Their product almost certainly can't solve either set of use-cases. The use-cases they're claiming are ones where you definitely wouldn't trust a LLM for predictions. Even most political scientists would argue over whether and how you can predict political violence. As for the rest, the Pinkertons left that business decades ago, I can't imagine it's that lucrative. It would be like running a private detective agency in East Germany... @UncivilServant it's not LLM prediction, they're surfacing real news articles and the supposed AI is for determining relevancy @molly0xfff That's what I mean, I doubt they can determine the relevancy. Political protests are fairly common in many countries. Some places joke that you can't tell the difference between a protest and a soccer match. Other countries almost never see protests. I guess I just think that if an LLM can really figure out which incident will spark an intifada, that would have profound implications, but it would also be a highly extraordinary claim, that's all I mean. @UncivilServant @molly0xfff Amazon spent $14 million on union-busting last year That's one company, one year Maybe your imagination for what's "lucrative" is a little limited @molly0xfff "Our best paying customers need this" doesn't hand waive an ethics issue. That just draws a pretty clear line in the sand. I've seen this with so many startups lately. I'd drop them now before they close their free plan to end the criticism.  @molly0xfff At times like this i remember the saying "hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue." @molly0xfff I hadn’t actually used Feedly for a long time, but I’m very glad I canceled my account, at least as a symbolic protest. I’ve been using Reeder for ages and certainly hope I don’t find anything dodgy about them. @molly0xfff weird how gaslighting is just the outward (PR) language of tech companies now @molly0xfff Does Feedly want us to believe they are selling technology that can make the right call on some of the riskiest and most volatile job situations, and then refer to the benefits as assets and not human lives? They already forgot what they wrote. |
https://web.archive.org/web/20230329200225/https://blog.feedly.com/how-to-track-protests-in-your-market-with-feedly-ai/