"Adobe doesn't want third-parties to pirate its software, so the company regularly sends out DMCA notices to remove infringing copies," reports TorrentFreak. In a recent tweet, F-Secure researcher Mikko Hypponen mentioned that the software company removed one of his tweets that linked to an old copy of Acrobat Reader for MS-DOS, which came out more than 27-years ago, shortly after the PDF was invented. From the report: The security researcher posted the tweet five years ago and at the time there were no issues. The message was copied a few weeks ago by his own Twitter bot, which reposts all his original tweets five years later. "They sent a DMCA notice to my bot (@mikko__2016) when it posted that tweet on the tweet's 5th anniversary. The original tweet is fine," Hypponen notes. While the original tweet is still up, the reposted message was swiftly removed by Twitter. Not just that, the bot's account was locked as well, which is standard practice nowadays.

Looking more closely at the takedown notice, we see that it was sent by the "brand protection analyst" at Incopro, which is one of Adobe's anti-piracy partners. It doesn't provide any further details on the reasons for taking it down, other than an alleged copyright infringement. Things get even more curious when we look at the full DMCA notice, posted by the Lumen database. This shows that the tweet was listed among other links, which all point to "infringing' copies of more recent software. Intriguingly, the notice also reveals that Hypponen's original tweet was targeted as well, albeit indirectly. The takedown notice lists t.co/tbAT0CH25o, which still points to the 2016 tweet today, so Twitter decided not to take action there.

We wonder if the DMCA notice is intentional at all. Over the years we have seen many bizarre takedown claims, which are often the result of automated filters. That may be a plausible explanation here as well. In that case, it shows that DMCA takedown process is far from perfect. However, if Adobe seriously has a problem with the fact that a 27-year-old copy of Acrobat Reader is being shared on an external site, it's more effective to target the site where it's hosted. Not the person who links to it in a tweet.

"A federal judge in Washington blocked the Defense Department from restricting U.S. investment in the Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi Corp," reports Bloomberg: In the final days of the Trump administration, the Defense Department placed Xiaomi on a list of companies with alleged links to the Chinese military, triggering financial restrictions that were scheduled to go into effect next week. But on Friday, U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras put a temporary halt to the ban, siding with Xiaomi in a lawsuit that argued that the move was "arbitrary and capricious" and deprived the company of its due process rights. Contreras said Xiaomi was likely to win a full reversal of the ban as the litigation unfolds and issued an initial injunction to prevent the company from suffering "irreparable harm." After the ban was announced, the smartphone manufacturer faced the prospect of being de-listed from U.S. exchanges and deleted from global benchmark indexes.

Xiaomi is the third-largest smartphone manufacturer in the world by volume. In the third quarter, it surpassed Apple Inc. in smartphone sales, according to the International Data Corporation.

An official version of the popular 7-zip archiving program has been released for Linux for the first time. Bleeping Computer reports: Linux already had support for the 7-zip archive file format through a POSIX port called p7zip but it was maintained by a different developer. As the p7zip developer has not maintained their project for 4-5 years, 7-Zip developer Igor Pavlov decided to create a new official Linux version based on the latest 7-Zip source code. Pavlov has released 7-Zip for Linux in AMD64, ARM64, x86, and armhf versions, which users can download [via their respective links].

"These new 7-Zip binaries for Linux were linked (compiled) by GCC without -static switch. And compiled 32-bit executables (x86 and armhf) didn't work on some arm64 and amd64 systems, probably because of missing of some required .so files." "Please write here, if you have some advices how to compile and link binaries that will work in most Linux systems," Pavlov stated on his release page.

Google and Microsoft engineers might collaborate on the Chromium browser code, but that hasn't stopped corporate politics between the pair. From a report: Google has launched a scathing attack on Microsoft today, accusing it of trying "to break the way the open web works in an effort to undercut a rival." Google is upset about what it believes is an attack by Microsoft to undermine the company's efforts to support journalism and publishers.

In January, Google threatened to remove its search engine from Australia, in response to a law that would force Google to pay news publishers for their content. Australia passed the law in February, just days after Google caved and cut a deal with News Corp. and other publishers that ensured its services continue to be available in Australia. In the middle of all of this, Microsoft was very public about its support of Australia's new law, and it even teamed up with European publishers to call for online platforms to reach deals to pay news outlets for content. Google isn't happy about Microsoft getting involved and this is the first big public spat we've seen since the Scroogled era. "They are now making self-serving claims and are even willing to break the way the open web works in an effort to undercut a rival," says Kent Walker, Google's head of global affairs, in a blog post. "This latest attack marks a return to Microsoft's longtime practices. Walker links to the Wikipedia entry for Fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD), and accuses Microsoft of muddying the waters to distract from recent security issues."

"It's no coincidence that Microsoft's newfound interest in attacking us comes on the heels of the SolarWinds attack and at a moment when they've allowed tens of thousands of their customers ... to be actively hacked via major Microsoft vulnerabilities," says Walker. "Microsoft was warned about the vulnerabilities in their system, knew they were being exploited, and are now doing damage control while their customers scramble to pick up the pieces from what has been dubbed the Great Email Robbery. So maybe it's not surprising to see them dusting off the old diversionary Scroogled playbook."

MojoKid writes: Some may think it strange to design and build an entire PC and custom enclosure, dedicated to running a 20-year-old screensaver, but retro computing fans and well-seasoned enthusiasts may remember the SereneScreen Marine Aquarium. This classic screensaver from the late 90s was created by the legendary artist of Defender of the Crown and more, Jim Sachs. SereneScreen's combination of beautiful fish and technology is still mesmerizing, so why not build a miniature, 3D-printed aquarium and power it with a single board computer like the Rock Pi X and a 1920X480 resolution IPS LCD display? That's just what product developer Colton Westrate did.

Searching for an x86 PC in a Raspberry Pi-sized form factor, Westrate chose the Rock Pi X that purportedly packs the perfunctory punch to push the Windows OS and aquarium screen saver's pulsating pixels. The Rock Pi X is based on a circa 2016 Intel x5-Z8350 processor, which is a 2-watt, quad-core Cherry Trail Atom chip. From there, with a little Fusion 360 parametric modeling, a clear acrylic napkin holder, and some serious skills, Westrate created this adorable pint-sized digital fish tank. There's a full parts list and how-to guide on HotHardware, along with links to the CAD files up on Thingiverse, so you can build yourself one too, if you're feeling inspired.

Russia has announced that it is imposing restrictions on social media platform Twitter for failing to remove illegal content from its platform. CNBC reports: The Federal Communications, Information Technology, and Mass Communications Oversight Service, also known as Roskomnadzor, announced Wednesday that it is slowing down the speed of Twitter. The communications watchdog said it was taking the measures to keep Russia's citizens safe and that it could end up blocking the service completely if Twitter doesn't respond accordingly.

Speeds will be reduced on all mobile devices and 50% of non-mobile devices, such as computers, Roskomnadzor said in a statement on its website. Roskomnadzor accused Twitter of failing to remove content that encourages minors to commit suicide, as well as child pornography, and drug use. The regulator said it asked Twitter to remove links and publications more than 28,000 times between 2017 and March 2021. It said that other social networks had been more co-operative than Twitter on removing content that encourages minors to commit suicide.

The Next Web tells the story of an AI researcher who discovered the results of a machine learning research paper couldn't be reproduced. But then they'd heard similar stories from Reddit's Machine Learning forum: "Easier to compile a list of reproducible ones...," one user responded.

"Probably 50%-75% of all papers are unreproducible. It's sad, but it's true," another user wrote. "Think about it, most papers are 'optimized' to get into a conference. More often than not the authors know that a paper they're trying to get into a conference isn't very good! So they don't have to worry about reproducibility because nobody will try to reproduce them." A few other users posted links to machine learning papers they had failed to implement and voiced their frustration with code implementation not being a requirement in ML conferences.

The next day, ContributionSecure14 created "Papers Without Code," a website that aims to create a centralized list of machine learning papers that are not implementable...

Papers Without Code includes a submission page, where researchers can submit unreproducible machine learning papers along with the details of their efforts, such as how much time they spent trying to reproduce the results... If the authors do not reply in a timely fashion, the paper will be added to the list of unreproducible machine learning papers.

Apple has added iPhone and MacBook repairability scores to its online store in France to comply with a new French law that came into effect this year. From a report: MacGeneration reports that the rating takes into account features like how easily a device can be disassembled and the availability of repair manuals and spare parts. Links to each product's final score, with details for how they were calculated, are available on this support page. The ratings for Apple's products vary between products and generations. Its iPhone 12 lineup all have scores of six out of 10 for example, while the previous year's iPhone 11s are rated lower at between 4.5 and 4.6. The improvement, according to the detailed scoring assessment, is due to the newer iPhones being easier to dismantle than the previous year's models, and spare parts being cheaper compared to the cost of the phone itself. There's less of a spread between the company's different MacBook models, whose scores range from 5.6 to 7.

Facebook on Monday said it had struck a deal with Australian lawmakers to pay local publishers for their news content, after the government finally agreed to change some of the terms within its new media code. From a report: The agreement ends Facebook's temporary ban on sharing news links on its platform in the country. Data showed that the link-sharing ban caused news traffic to plummet in the region. It also ends Facebook's global ban on users' sharing links to Australian news publishers. Facebook's decision to stop link-sharing was made in response to a new law that would have forced Google and Facebook to pay Australian news publishers for content, including headlines and links, with terms set by a third party, if they weren't able to come up with payout agreements with local publishers themselves. Google struck last-minute payout deals with big Australian publishers last week so that it wouldn't have to skirt the law and pull Google Search from the country. Facebook did not. The law was intended to benefit publishers, but the impact of Facebook's link ban showed the power the tech giants have over publishers, who lost a large volume of traffic during the confrontation.

Peter Daszak is part of the World Health Organization's 14-member team investigating the origins of the coronavirus. This weekend on Twitter he described "explaining key findings of our exhausting month-long work in China" to journalists — only to see team members "selectively misquoted to fit a narrative that was prescribed before the work began."

Daszak was responding to a New York Times article which painted China as uncooperative for failing to hand over some raw data. But ironically, the next day the Times published a longer interview they'd done with Daszak, which acknowledges that Daszak "said that the visit had provided some new clues..."

The Times had even specifically asked him if China's attitude made their work difficult, to which Daszak had explicitly answered: no. "You've got a task to do. You've volunteered. You know what it's going to be like. You get caught up in the historical importance. I don't know if we were the first foreigners to walk around the Huanan seafood market, which is blocked off even to Chinese citizens. The only people that have been in there have been the Chinese disease investigators. We met with the doctors that treated the first known Covid patients."
The Times also asked if they'd learned anything they didn't know before. Daszak's response: From Day 1, the data we were seeing were new that had never been seen outside China. Who were the vendors in the Huanan seafood market? Where did they get their supply chains? And what were the contacts of the first cases? How real were the first cases? What other clusters were there? When you asked for more, the Chinese scientists would go off, and a couple of days later, they've done the analysis, and we've got new information. It was extremely useful.
The team also learned how extensively China's disease-control center had investigated the Wuhan market: They'd actually done over 900 swabs in the end, a huge amount of work. They had been through the sewage system. They'd been into the air ventilation shaft to look for bats. They'd caught animals around the market. They'd caught cats, stray cats, rats, they even caught one weasel. They'd sampled snakes. People had live snakes at the market, live turtles, live frogs. Rabbits were there, rabbit carcasses... Animals were coming into that market that could have carried the coronavirus. They could have been infected by bats somewhere else in China and brought it in. So that's clue No. 1... Some of these are coming from places where we know the nearest relatives of the virus are found. So there's the real red flag...

There were other markets. And we do know that some of the patients had links to other markets. We need to do some further work, and then the Chinese colleagues need to do some further work...

What is the next step?

For the animals chain, it's straightforward. The suppliers are known. They know the farm name; they know the owner of the farm. You've got to go down to the farm and interview the farmer and the family. You've got to test them. You've got to test the community. You've got to go and look and see if there are any animals left at any farms nearby and see if they've got evidence of infection, and see if there is any cross-border movement.
The Times' interview begins by specifically acknowledging Daszak's statement about new information obtained on the visit, "which all of the scientists, Chinese and international, agreed most likely pointed to an animal origin within China or Southeast Asia.

"The scientists have largely discounted claims that the virus originated in a lab, saying that possibility was so unlikely that it was not worth further investigation."

"Microsoft has said the USA should copy Australia's plan to force Google and Facebook to pay for links to news content," reports The Register, "and suggested that doing so will help improve social cohesion and strengthen democracy." But Google has fired back with a statement asserting that Microsoft's motives are impure. "Of course they'd be eager to impose an unworkable levy on a rival and increase their market share," wrote Kent Walker, Google's chief legal officer.

Microsoft's suggestion to the Biden administration came from company president Brad Smith arrived in a Thursday blog post that opens: "As the dust slowly settles on a horrifying assault on the Capitol, it's apparent that American democracy is in a fragile state." Smith attributed much of that fragility to disinformation spreading on social media and "the erosion of more traditional, independent and professional journalism... The internet eroded the news business as dotcoms like Craigslist disrupted advertising revenue, news aggregators lured away readers, and search engines and social media giants devoured both," Smith wrote...

Smith also points out that Microsoft's decision to support Australia's plan and pay local news outlets quickly saw Google CEO Sundar Pichai call Australian prime minister Scott Morrison, then asserts that Pichai only did so once the prospect of increased competition roused him to action.

"At the end of the day, what is wrong with compensating independent news organizations for the benefits the tech gatekeepers derive from this content?" Smith asks.

The standard model of physics can't accommodate some observed phenomena, notes Popular Mechanics. Yet "In a new study, scientists say they can explain dark matter by positing a particle that links to a fifth dimension." While the "warped extra dimension" (WED) is a trademark of a popular physics model first introduced in 1999, this research, published in The European Physical Journal C, is the first to cohesively use the theory to explain the long-lasting dark matter problem within particle physics...

The scientists studied fermion masses, which they believe could be communicated into the fifth dimension through portals, creating dark matter relics and "fermionic dark matter" within the fifth dimension.

Could dimension-traveling fermions explain at least some of the dark matter scientists have so far not been able to observe? "We know that there is no viable [dark matter] candidate in the [standard model of physics]," the scientists say, "so already this fact asks for the presence of new physics...." This pocket "dark sector" is one possible way to explain the huge amount of dark matter that, so far, has eluded detection using any traditional measurements designed for the standard model of physics. Fermions jammed through a portal to a warped fifth dimension could be "acting as" dark matter...

All it would take to identify fermionic dark matter in a warped fifth dimension would be the right kind of gravitational wave detector, something growing in prevalence around the world. Indeed, the answer to the dark matter conundrum could be just around the corner.

Scientific researchers worry that the capacity for spreading misinformation "goes far beyond the big-name social media sites," warns the Washington Post. Citing pre-print servers and unvetted "research repositories," they note that "Any online platform without robust and potentially expensive safeguards is equally vulnerable." "This is similar to the debate we're having with Facebook and Twitter. To what degree are we creating an instrument that speeds disinformation, and to what extent are you contributing to that?" said Stefano M. Bertozzi, editor in chief of the MIT Press online journal "Rapid Reviews: COVID-19...." Bertozzi added, "Most scientists have no interest in getting in a pissing match in cyberspace..."

Nonscientists also scan preprint servers for data that might appear to bolster their pet conspiracy theories. A research team led by computer scientist Jeremy Blackburn has tracked the appearance of links to preprints from social media sites, such as 4chan, popular with conspiracy theorists. Blackburn and a graduate student, Satrio Yudhoatmojo, found more than 4,000 references on 4chan to papers on major preprint servers between 2016 and 2020, with the leading subjects being biology, infectious diseases and epidemiology. He said the uneven review process has "lent an air of credibility" to preprints that experts might quickly spot as flawed but ordinary people wouldn't.

"That's where the risk is," said Blackburn, an assistant professor at Binghamton University. "Papers from the preprint servers show up in a variety of conspiracy theories...and are misinterpreted wildly because these people aren't scientists..."

[The executive director of ASAPbio, a nonprofit group that pushes for more transparency and wider use of preprint servers], added, in general, "Preprint servers do not have the resources to be arbiters of whether something is true or not."
MIT Press's new "Rapid Reviews: COVID-19" journal recently appended a scathing editor's note to its critique of articles that had been published on pre-print servers.

"While pre-print servers offer a mechanism to disseminate world-changing scientific research at unprecedented speed, they are also a forum through which misleading information can instantaneously undermine the international scientific community's credibility, destabilize diplomatic relationships, and compromise global safety."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Russian news outlets connected to election disinformation campaigns in the United States have set their sights on a new target: convincing Spanish-speaking countries that the Russian coronavirus vaccine works better than its American competitors, according to researchers and State Department officials. The Russian campaign has focused on Latin American nations, including Mexico, which this week signed a deal to acquire millions of doses of the Russian vaccine, and Argentina, which last month began vaccinating its citizens with it.

The Russian vaccine, Sputnik V, was named after the first satellite to orbit the earth, which the Soviet Union launched in 1957. Sputnik V is considered less expensive and easier to transport than vaccines made by the American companies Pfizer and Moderna. But some researchers say the criticism in Russian outlets of the Western vaccines has been misleading. "Almost everything they are promoting about the vaccine is manipulated and put out without context," said Bret Schafer, a fellow with the Alliance for Securing Democracy, an advocacy group that tracks Russian disinformation. "Every negative story or issue that has come out about a U.S.-made vaccine is amplified, while they flood the zone with any positive report about the Russian vaccine."

Media outlets backed by the Russian government posted to Facebook and Twitter hundreds of links to news stories that reported potential ties suggesting American vaccines may have had a role in deaths, the researchers said. The accounts left out follow-up reports that found the vaccines most likely played no role in the deaths. "This was a coordinated effort that was part P.R. campaign and part disinformation. It is one of the largest operations we've seen to promote a narrative around the vaccine in Latin America, and it appears to have had an effect," said Jaime Longoria, a disinformation researcher at First Draft, a nonprofit that supports journalists and independent researchers. "Russia steadily seeded a narrative that has grown and been, to some degree, accepted."

Software giant Microsoft is confident its search product Bing can fill the gap in Australia if Google pulls its search over required payments to media outlets, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Monday. From a report: Australia has introduced laws that would force internet giant Google and social media heavyweight Facebook Inc to negotiate payments to domestic media outlets whose content links drive traffic to their platforms. However, the Big Tech firms have called the laws unworkable and said last month they would withdraw key services from Australia if the regulations went ahead. Those services include Google's search engine, which has 94% of the country's search market, according to industry data. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has since spoken with Morrison about the new rules, the tech company told Reuters, and on Monday, Morrison said the software company was ready to grow the presence of its search tool Bing, the distant No. 2 player.

SpaceX has begun launching Starlink satellites with laser links that will help provide broadband coverage in polar regions. As SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on Twitter on Sunday, these satellites "have laser links between the satellites, so no ground stations are needed over the poles." From a report: The laser links are included in 10 Starlink satellites just launched into polar orbits. The launch came two weeks after SpaceX received Federal Communications Commission approval to launch the 10 satellites into polar orbits at an altitude of 560km. "All sats launched next year will have laser links," Musk wrote in another tweet yesterday, indicating that the laser systems will become standard on Starlink satellites in 2022. For now, SpaceX is only including laser links on polar satellites. "Only our polar sats have lasers this year & are v0.9," Musk wrote. Alaskan residents will benefit from the polar satellites, SpaceX told the FCC in an application to change the orbit of some of its satellites in April 2020.

Google released Chrome 88 this week — and besides improving its dark mode support, they removed support for both Adobe Flash and FTP.

PC World calls it "the end of two eras." The most noteworthy change in this update is what's not included. Chrome 88 lays Adobe Flash and the FTP protocol to rest. RIP circa-2000 Internet.

Neither comes as a surprise, though it's poetic that they're being buried together. Adobe halted Flash Player downloads at the end of 2020, making good on a promise made years before, and began blocking Flash content altogether a couple weeks later. Removing Flash from Chrome 88 is just Google's way of flushing the toilet.

On the other hand, FTP isn't dead, but it is now for Chrome users. The File Transport Protocol has helped users send files across the Internet for decades, but in an era of prolific cloud storage services and other sharing methods, its use has waned. Google started slowly disabling FTP support in Chrome 86, per ZDNet, and now you'll no longer be able to access FTP links in the browser. Look for standalone FTP software instead if you need it, such as FileZilla.

That's not all. Mac users should be aware that Chrome 88 drops support for OS X 10.10 (OS X Yosemite). Yosemite released in 2014 and received its last update in 2017...

But Google killing Flash and FTP might be the footnotes that hit old-school web users in the feels.
Chrome 88 will also block non-encrypted downloads originating from an encrypted page, the article reports. And the Verge notes Chrome also offers less intrusive website permission requests (as an experimental feature enabled from chrome://flags/#permission-chip ), while Bleeping Computer describes Chrome 88's new experimental feature for searching through all your open tabs.

And Chrome's blog points out some additional features under the hood: Chrome 88 will heavily throttle chained JavaScript timers for hidden pages in particular conditions. This will reduce CPU usage, which will also reduce battery usage. There are some edge cases where this will change behavior, but timers are often used where a different API would be more efficient, and more reliable.

With the release of Brave 1.19 today, Brave has become the first major browser maker to support IPFS, a peer-to-peer protocol meant for accessing decentralized or censored content. From a report: Released in 2015, IPFS stands for InterPlanetary File System. It is a classic peer-to-peer protocol similar to BitTorrent and designed to work as a decentralized storage system. IPFS allows users to host content distributed across hundreds or thousands of systems, which can be public IPFS gateways or private IPFS nodes. Users who want to access any of this content must enter an URL in the form of ipfs://{content_hash_ID}. Under normal circumstances, users would download this content from the nearest nodes or gateways rather than a central server. However, this only works if users have installed an IPFS desktop app or a browser extension.

Brave says that with version 1.19, users will be able to access URLs that start with ipfs://, directly from the browser, with no extension needed, and that Brave will natively support ipfs:// links going forward. Since some major websites like Wikipedia have IPFS versions, users in oppressive countries can now use Brave's new IPFS support to go around national firewalls and access content that might be blocked inside their country for political reasons and is available via IPFS.

The New York Times reports on an "exodus" of tech workers from the San Francisco Bay Area, where "Rent was astronomical. Taxes were high. Your neighbors didn't like you" — and your commute could be over an hour. The biggest tech companies aren't going anywhere, and tech stocks are still soaring... But the migration from the Bay Area appears real. Residential rents in San Francisco are down 27% from a year ago, and the office vacancy rate has spiked to 16.7%, a number not seen in a decade. Though prices had dropped only slightly, Zillow reported more homes for sale in San Francisco than a year ago. For more than a month last year, 90% of the searches involving San Francisco on moveBuddha were for people moving out...

There are 33,000 members in the Facebook group Leaving California and 51,000 in its sister group, Life After California. People post pictures of moving trucks and links to Zillow listings in new cities.
They've apparently scattered across the country — even to tropical islands like Puerto Rico and Costa Rica They fled to more affordable places like Georgia. They fled to states without income taxes like Texas and Florida... The No. 1 pick for people leaving San Francisco is Austin, Texas, with other winners including Seattle, New York and Chicago, according to moveBuddha, a site that compiles data on moving. Some cities have set up recruiting programs to lure them to new homes.
The Times also notes "there is a very vocal Miami faction, led by a few venture capital influencers, trying to tweet the city's startup world into existence," as other cities begin to realize that "the talent and money of newly remote tech workers are up for grabs." Topeka, Kansas, started Choose Topeka, which will reimburse new workers $10,000 for the first year of rent or $15,000 if they buy a home. Tulsa, Oklahoma, will pay you $10,000 to move there. The nation of Estonia has a new residency program just for digital nomads. A program in Savannah, Georgia, will reimburse remote workers $2,000 for the move there, and the city has created various social activities to introduce the newcomers to one another and to locals...
But the article also points out that "More money was made faster in the Bay Area by fewer people than at any other time in American history," and speculates on what long-time residents may be thinking: People who distrusted the young newcomers from the start will say this change is a good thing. Hasn't this steep growth in wealth and population in a tiny geography always seemed unsustainable? These tech workers came like a whirlwind. Virtually every community from San Jose in the south to Marin County in the north has fought the rise of new housing for the arrivals of the last decade. Maybe spreading the tech talent around America is smart.

Locals have also seen this play before. Moving trucks come to take a generation of tech ambition away, and a few years later moving trucks return with new dreamers and new ambitions.
UPDATE (7/18/2021): "Tech workers who swore off the Bay Area are coming back," the New York Times reported six months later.

An anonymous reader shares a report: As Georgians head to the polls to vote on their two U.S. Senators -- and effectively, partisan control of Congress -- on Tuesday, voters face an online landscape far different from what they saw in the weeks surrounding November's general election. In the fall, Facebook -- by far the most popular social network -- clamped down on sponsored posts about politics in order to ensure that misinformation would not spread the way that it had during the 2016 presidential election. But a few weeks before the Georgia race, Facebook turned off this safeguard in Georgia. The Markup decided to take a look behind the curtain to see if we could determine the impact on Georgia voters' news feeds. We recruited a panel of 58 Facebook users in the state and paid them to allow us to monitor their feeds, starting in late November, using custom software we built for our Citizen Browser project. The Citizen Browser project is a data-driven initiative to examine what content social media companies choose to amplify to their users.

While Facebook's controls were in place, we found that links to traditional news sites were present in almost all election-related posts that appeared on our Georgia panelists' feeds. After Dec. 16, however, when Facebook flipped the switch to turn on political advertising for the Georgia election, we noticed that partisan content quickly elbowed out news sites, replacing a significant proportion of mentions of the election in our users' feeds. The Markup defined election-related content as anything containing mentions of Trump or Biden, the names of the four major-party senate candidates, or the terms "senate," "vote," "election," or "ballot." We looked at the URLs attached to those election-related posts and tabulated the most common domains. For the first half of the month, the most commonly appearing election-related content came primarily from news outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. But after Dec. 16, just over one third of the most commonly appearing domains were partisan campaign sites buying ads, including WrongForGeorgia.com, an attack site targeting the Democratic candidates; and DeserveBetter.org, an attack site targeting the incumbent Republican senators. We discarded any domains that only appeared on a single panelist's feed.