Deepa Seetharaman
@dseetharaman
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WSJ tech reporter writing about AI + its influence on society & business. Ping me at deepa.seetharaman @wsj .com or dseetharaman.23 on Signal.
San Francisco, CA
Joined May 2008
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Selena Gomez emailed Sheryl Sandberg last year to take her to task about hate on Facebook, per
@AP
.
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New from
@JeffHorwitz
& me: Facebook spent years studying the its role in polarization, according to sources and internal documents. One internal slide laid out the issue like so. ”Our algorithms exploit the human brain's attraction to divisiveness.”
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A number that stopped me at my tracks: a man diagnosed with coronavirus spent six weeks in the hospital. His hospital bills totaled roughly $1.9M.
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Legitimate scientists are trying to go viral on social media due to "sheer frustration with seeing the misinformation that is going out there.” But they’re drowned out by conspiracy theorists & anti-vaccine groups whose COVID posts do v well platforms.
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Good questions re that strange Priyanka Chopra - Nick Jonas piece. The writer
@mRiah
has apologized for it — and that’s good — but what about her bosses? How’d this happen?
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A couple Amazon employees bought condos in Long Island City *before* the company disclosed that would be its new HQ, and lawyers say that’s legal.
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The Weather Channel quits Facebook. “We went along for the ride every single step of the way. But we noticed, over the course of two years, that we were being paid in all types of currencies — followers, shares, views — that did not feel like money."
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Surprised and bummed to not see Jennifer Lopez on this list. She was magnetic in Hustlers.
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NEW from me: some light holiday reading about Joel Kaplan, one of the most controversial & influential executives at Facebook, & his growing ability to kill, postpone & shape $fb products that risk making conservatives angry.
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Ken Chenault is leaving Facebook’s board, following disagreements with $FB officials over political policies & mounting frustration that Zuckerberg wasn’t taking his advice, per sources. Story w/
@JeffHorwitz
.
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“From 12:03 to 12:46, 911 dispatchers received numerous calls from within the classroom, including repeated calls from a child whispering that people were dead and begging ‘Please send the police now.’”
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The concern predates the election. A 2016 slide shows showed extremist content thriving in more than one-third of large German political groups. “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools.” “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”
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New from me &
@byrontau
: House Democrats are preparing to release the full cache of 3,000 Facebook ads bought by the Internet Research Agency.
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***putting my former autos reporter hat on*** — Cars are ~heavily~ regulated, down to the color of the blinker, & regularly tested for safety problems. That industry also needed to be -shoved- into mandating seat belts & other safety features despite knowing they’d save lives.
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Tuesday, the white nationalist Baked Alaska livestreamed himself yelling, "Trump or war!” The next day he livestreamed himself in Nancy Pelosi's office as a mob ransacked the Capitol, per our
@wsj
story on how rioters openly organized on social media.
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NEW: After the Facebook whistleblower went public, FB’s Washington team told some Republicans that she was trying to help Democrats. They told Dems that Rs would use this as a chance to talk about censorship. Their goal: divide Congress.
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QAnon has exploded in popularity on Facebook & Instagram since the lockdowns.
@Storyful
analyzed 10 large public QAnon groups on FB and found membership grew almost 600%. Some of they IG accounts they found quadrupled in following.
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Facebook deleted a case study showing how it helped the Scottish National Party win in 2015. GREAT find by the Telegraph. h/t
@CaseyNewton
(archived version here: )
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Raise your hand if you’ve ever covered a congressional hearing wearing bridal henna. :::raises hand::: I’m here and waiting for Zuckerberg’s hearing to kick off.
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But top executives shelved the effort. Policy exec Joel Kaplan considered the initiative “paternalistic,” per sources. The moves also affected right-leaning pages too much & risked growth. More here:
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Instagram wants "recovering quants" to staff its New York office. NY to be hub of machine-learning expertise.
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Thousands of ILWU workers stopped working for an 8 hour shift today, shutting down 29 ports along the West Coast. The union has a history of protest. During apartheid, they refused to unload ships from South Africa.
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“In general we collect data on people who are not signed up for Facebook for security purposes,” Zuckerberg said a few minutes ago. What security purposes? How else is that data used? Do those users know that FB has the info and can they delete it?
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New story from me: in 2016, a senior Trump official singled out a Facebook employee embedded with the campaign as an “MVP.” Now James Barnes is Democrat, trying to beat Trump in 2020.
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NEW: $fb gave Mueller sensitive info abt Russian ad buys that co typically only provides under a search warrant.
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In Ukraine, you've seen accounts w/ millions of followers go from posting beach vacations to sharing news footage of maimed bodies. One travel influencer posted instructions for making a Molotov cocktail on IG stories. Here's what she told me (came too late for pub):
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The “common ground” team at Facebook wasn’t trying to change people’s minds. They were trying to stop the vilification of the other side. And they came up with different product ideas to tone down the rhetoric on Facebook.
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Social-media trivia --
@rsg
was one of the 1st ex-Facebook employees to speak out against news feed's design after the 2016 election. "Sadly, News Feed optimizes for engagement," he said. "As we've learned in this election, bullshit is highly engaging."
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It's the Friday before Christmas, so $FB is launching a tool to figure out if you liked/followed a Russian page on FB or Insta. It's buried in the help center so here's a link:
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BTW, if Kaplan sounds familiar, it’s bc he’s the $fb exec who sat behind Kavanaugh during his hearings about sexual misconduct allegations. () Employees were / remain angry abt his appearance; some directly confronted him abt it.
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For example: Until recently, $fb was exploring news-feed products to fight polarization. 1 reason it stalled: fears of anti-conservative bias after $fb research showed right-leaning users were less exposed to different points of view than those on the L.
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A good example of a pervasive problem that
@georgia_wells
,
@shelbyholliday
and I raised last month: visual misinformation is hard to detect.
Justy a sample of what NRA supporters are doing to teenagers who survived a massacre (real picture on the right).
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New from me: This week, an anti-vaccine Instagram account urged its 52,000 followers to “go visit Bill Gates Instagram and let him know what you think.” They did. His Instagram page is now overrun with 225K-plus comments accusing him of crimes of humanity.
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New from me: Facebook employees get what’s called a ‘Sauron alert’ when a colleague accesses their personal profile. Meanwhile, regular users have no idea if a Facebook employee logs into their account.
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New from me: Inside Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg adopts a “wartime” posture, chafing several top executives and sometimes leading to tensions with COO Sheryl Sandberg.
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Flynn reassured Russian ambassador "that U.S.-Russia relations would be more favorable to Moscow in the years ahead,"
@wsj
confirms.
National Security Adviser Mike Flynn discussed sanctions with Russian ambassador before Trump took office
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Kaplan spoke on the record for this story & defended his vetting process (code: Eat Your Veggies). For more background, here’s our profile of Kaplan from Dec. 2018.
NEW from me: some light holiday reading about Joel Kaplan, one of the most controversial & influential executives at Facebook, & his growing ability to kill, postpone & shape $fb products that risk making conservatives angry.
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Professional* news: After nearly 4 (!) fascinating years covering Facebook day in & day out, I'll soon be shifting to an enterprise reporting gig focused on social media. Apply for my soon-to-be old job! DM me w/ Qs.
* tweets like this is def professional, not personal news.
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Another development: a Facebook engineer publicly quits over the company’s policies. “I’m watching my company do nothing to challenge the increasingly dangerous status quo.”
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NEWS: Facebook employees are surveyed 2x a year about their sentiment + happiness. I got some figures from last month’s results: 52% said they were optimistic about Facebook’s future, down from 84% the year before. That’s a 32 pctg point difference.
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Neymar has one of the top accounts on Instagram and, as
@WSJ
/
@JeffHorwitz
reported, was protected by
@Meta
’s XCheck program. His status meant that in 2019 when he posted what one FB document referred to as “revenge porn,” FB veered from its policy of deleting his account.
Calling all ⚽ fans —
@neymarjr
will now stream exclusively on
@FacebookGaming
! Watch his first livestream this Friday, 12/17 at 11am PST/ 4pm BRT / 8pm CET @
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New: Facebook says its AI can root out a huge amount of hate & violence. The reality: "we do not and possibly never will have a model that captures even a majority of integrity harms.” Latest Facebook Files drop by me,
@JeffHorwitz
&
@ScheckWSJ
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An Indian journalist posted last week’s
@WSJ
story about Facebook’s hate-speech compromises in India. Facebook’s top policy executive in the country filed a criminal complaint against the reporter & others who posted the link.
Here's a copy of Facebook Ankhi Das' complaint to Delhi Police which she's selectively shared only with BJP's OpIndia.
While naming the accused who threatened her, she's also added my tweet to the complaint as "being defamatory". 🤦♀️
BJP is scared & now trying all tactics.
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Scoop: $fb's female coders had code rejected more than men, an engineer found last fall, per screenshots/sources.
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Here’s our story about Shadow, the app it built & its problems during the Iowa caucuses. Per sources, DHS offered to vet the app but IDP turned it down. w/
@AlexaCorse
&
@EmilyGlazer
.
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The WSJ editorial board says this letter from nearly 300 WSJ news staffers is a sign of cancel culture. (…) You can read the letter, which points out factual errors & asks for a greater separation between news and opinion, below.
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Kaplan is v involved in news-feed ranking changes, esp those around fake news, I’m told. He’s also argued that $FB should allow
@DailyCaller
’s fact-checking unit to join $fb’s fact-checking program. That was hugely controversial internally.
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Two things stick out. 1) Bickert now calling the documents “stolen” 2) the defense that the majority of teens like Instagram. If a minority of teens are damaged, is that canceled out by those having fun?
Facebook's Monika Bickert goes on CNN after the Facebook whistleblower hearing.
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“70% of the top 100 most active US Civic Groups are considered non-recommendable for issues such as hate, misinfo, bullying & harassment,” $FB's staffers said in Aug. “Our existing integrity systems aren’t addressing these issues.” A+ story by
@JeffHorwitz
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"I have a daily crisis of integrity, working at Facebook. I'm pretty much always thinking about whether I should stay or leave,” current $FB software engineer tells
@NBCNews
.
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A scorcher of a scoop by
@JeffHorwitz
. "When a Meta security expert told Mark Zuckerberg that Instagram’s approach to protecting teens wasn’t working, the CEO didn’t reply. Now the former insider is set to tell Congress about the predatory behavior."
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A 2018 change to Facebook's algorithm boosted local conservative groups, researchers said in a new paper. "By July 2019, posts from local Republican parties were being shared more than three times as often as posts from local Democratic parties."
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New from me: Details of what led to the surprise resignation of Instagram's co-founders Mon afternoon. Among the issues: product changes that seemed to promote $FB growth at Insta's expense & a management overhaul that inserted a layer bw Systrom & Zuck.
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It’s a busy Facebook news week but you won’t hear much from me because of this whole I’m-getting-married thing. Back on Tuesday.
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Lawmakers starting to focus on visual misinformation. Researchers say doctored images / videos are harder to detect than fake news stories in part because people are more likely to believe images and videos than text.
“Fake News” may only be the beginning. We need to start thinking about the consequences of fake video technology and how we maintain trust in a digital-based economy when you may not be able to believe your own eyes anymore.
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“Meanwhile, at least 19 law enforcement officers waited in the hallway, because the commander on scene believed no lives were at risk and it was better to wait until a tactical team could get keys to the classroom before entering, according to Mr. McCraw.”
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NEW via
@JeffHorwitz
+ me: As a mob overtook the Capitol last Wed, Facebook's warning bells blared. User reports of violent posts jumped >10-fold from the AM. One employee deck noted: "business as usual isn’t working."
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This is the second public tweet I’ve seen from a Facebook employee criticizing the company this weekend. Two may not sound like a lot but I’ve been writing about $FB for five years & can’t recall seeing that sort of public response before. (The other: )
I work at Facebook and I am not proud of how we’re showing up. The majority of coworkers I’ve spoken to feel the same way. We are making our voice heard.
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Susan Fowler's blog post goes up Feb. 19. Uber's CEO steps aside 4 months later. That's quite a turn of events.
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TFW you have a front-page byline, above the fold, on your birthday. 💁🏽♀️
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New: It was once nigh impossible to get Mark Zuckerberg interested in politics. But over the last few years, as Facebook has lurched from one controversy to the next, he’s built himself into something of a political operator. Story w/
@EmilyGlazer
.
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There were *at least* 60 rallies, protests & marches publicized / financed by 8 Russia-backed Facebook accounts.
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News coming: Hundreds of Facebook employees are outraged by Joel Kaplan's appearance at Judge Kavanaugh's hearing, per sources. Facebook is planning to hold a town hall meeting with senior executives, including Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, tomorrow.
@wsj
TK.
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thread by Facebook’s VP of ads. worth a read.
Most of the coverage of Russian meddling involves their attempt to effect the outcome of the 2016 US election. I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was *NOT* the main goal.
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New from me: Fresh docs shed more light on Facebook’s Instagram deal & Zuckerberg’s competitive streak. At one point, Systrom asks if MZ will go into “destroy mode” if IG rebuffs FB. The answer: “probably.”
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We found 40 events created or cohosted by the fake pages Facebook deleted this week. All promoted progressive/ left-leaning causes. Most expressly anti-Trump. Many were cohosted with legit grassroots groups.
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NEW: Facebook is preparing for the possibility of election-related conflict in the U.S. with tools it initially made for countries facing ethnic bloodshed, sources tell
@JeffHorwitz
+ me. MZ says a decisive victory on Nov. 3 would reduce risks.
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“Google this year moved to tighten control over its scientists' papers by launching a ‘sensitive topics’ review, and in at least three cases requested authors refrain from casting its technology in a negative light, according to internal communications”
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former operations manager on Facebook’s platform team in 2011/2012 criticizes co’s approach to privacy & ability to regulate itself.
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NEWS: Facebook says it will start ranking news sources by quality, as determined by user surveys. Last week's ranking change means news will go from 5% of news feed globally to 4%.
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*Visa Drops out of Facebook's Libra Payments Network -- Source
So that's 5 Libra partners total, 4 of which have pulled out within the last hour or so.
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In 2018,
@jack
said Twitter would boost healthy discourse & enlisted top academics to help. But the co failed to follow through. “They’ve failed to do—or even allow others to do—the actual work,”
@SusanBenesch
told me.
I do not celebrate or feel pride in our having to ban
@realDonaldTrump
from Twitter, or how we got here. After a clear warning we’d take this action, we made a decision with the best information we had based on threats to physical safety both on and off Twitter. Was this correct?
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Some 30
@wsj
reporters & researchers worked on this day-by-day tick tock of how American companies — Goldman Sachs, Facebook, Macy’s, Uber, FedEx, Walmart and ~so~ many others— responded to the global pandemic and the ensuing chaos last month.
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Very impt op-ed from someone who was diagnosed with cancer & then was flooded with pseudoscience ads on Facebook.
“The evidence is clear: Death rates are much higher for people with cancer who choose alternative therapies instead of standard care.”
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New: a deep dive from
@laurenweberWSJ
& me on the people who scrub the Internet: content moderators.
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Here’s my story about
@halloapp
, a startup cofounded ex WhatsApp execs including
@neerajarora
, and how the service represents a new way of thinking about social media: smaller, fewer features, & a lot more friction.
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hi all, I'm back from (a glorious) maternity leave. I'll be writing about a lot of different topics now, including how social-media cos like
@facebook
are handling their growing political / regulatory challenges.
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NEW: Doctored photos & videos are a big, unresolved problem for tech companies who need to stamp out misinformation. Russian propagandists knew that.
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Apple PR strategy in one graf. (
@trippmickle
still pulled off a great Tim Cook profile tho)
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$FB confirmed this timeline to me: Bug found on Sept. 25 / Europe informed Nov. 22. I asked why $FB waited 3.5 weeks to inform the public after it informed European regulators. They say they needed time to build a notification page & translate it into multiple languages.
Here's the story on Facebook's latest privacy bug with some details on Facebook's GDPR reporting. FB told
@JoshConstine
it found the bug on Sept. 25. I'm told it wasn't reported until Nov. 22.
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“a schedule laid down by the PR team” is also known as an embargo, which many organizations (including Facebook) use to announce news.
Right now 30+ journalists are finishing up a coordinated series of articles based on thousands of pages of leaked documents. We hear that to get the docs, outlets had to agree to the conditions and a schedule laid down by the PR team that worked on earlier leaked docs.
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Facebook just published a response to our story yesterday. You can read their post below.
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Yup. Interesting that they both stayed silent on the protests, esp Sandberg, author of "Lean In" & vocal advocate for women.
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In response to questions from
@wsj
, Facebook said it is suspending data-analytics firm Crimson Hexagon and while it examines how it shares public user-data from social media platforms.
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I'm back to work today after a memorable maternity leave with TWO kiddos. So grateful for
@WSJ
's 20-week paid leave policy which allowed me to devote myself to my family & step away from daily news. Now we're all sleeping better & I'm ready to hear your stories. DM / emails open.
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$fb wouldn’t make Kaplan available to chat, but other senior execs said the policy’s increased involvement in product is about managing risk — and something employees are still getting used to.
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NEW from
@KirstenGrind
+ me: what all went down between WhatsApp’s founders and Facebook as the two sides wrangled over how to make money from the messaging app.
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Here’s the
@WSJ
’s new “About Us” page, which explains the differences between the news and opinion sections and helps you become a source to our journalists.
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I’ll end this thread with a little professional news: I now write about AI for
@WSJ
. I’m looking to speak to founders, investors, researchers, lawyers, policymakers & other smart / well-informed folks who can speak to its implications for business & society. Excited to dig in.
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