Meta’s Chief Censor for Israel Brags About Silencing Dissent
In a resurfaced video, Jordana Cutler — Meta’s “Director of Public Policy for Israel and the Jewish Diaspora” — boasts about her success in getting political opinions banned from Facebook and Instagram.
“We’ve removed more content and accounts than ever before that cross the line on Israel and antisemitism,” Cutler says, framing the censorship of pro-Palestine voices as a “victory” for her team.
Her comments expose how Meta’s moderation policies are deeply entangled with Israeli political agendas, silencing journalists, activists, and ordinary users criticizing Israel’s actions in Gaza and the occupied territories.
Critics say this level of state-aligned censorship represents one of the gravest threats to free speech in the West.
tbh, I hadn't heard of her, so I checked Wikipedia:
Jordana Cutler is the Director of Public Policy for Israel and the Jewish Diaspora at Meta Platforms and was formerly a senior official in the Israeli government and adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu.
"Baker & Taylor has been in the book business just short of 200 years. Its primary focus was distributing physical copies of books to public libraries. The company also provided librarians with tools that helped them do their jobs more effectively related to collection development and processing.
But the company has spent decades being acquired by and divested from private equity firms, served as a revolving door for senior leadership, and was sued by a competitor earlier this year for alleged data misuse and was almost acquired again in September, this time by a distributor that works with mass-market retailers like Walmart and Target. That deal fell through.
On October 7, Publishers Weekly reported B&T let go of more than 500 employees the day the internal announcement was made. At least one law firm is currently investigating B&T for allegedly violating the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, and it took the company weeks to let account holders know.
Since the internal announcement, Kennedy says customer service staff at B&T have not received guidance on how to respond to inquiries from libraries, leaving them on the frontline and in the dark on issues ranging from whether existing orders would be fulfilled to securing refunds for materials they may have already paid for.
“Some libraries didn’t realize we are much closed as of right now,” Kennedy added."
One of the largest distributors of print books for libraries is winding down operations by the end of the year, a huge disruption to public libraries across the country, some of which are warning their communities the shut down will limit their ability to lend books.
“You might notice some delays as we (and more than 6,000 other libraries) transition to new wholesalers,” the Jacksonville Public Library told its community in a Facebook post. “We're keeping a close eye on things and doing everything we can to minimize any wait times.”
The libraries that do business with the distributor learned about the shut down earlier this month via Reddit.
Upon learning of her company’s closure, Jennifer Kennedy, a customer services account manager with Baker & Taylor, broke the news on October 6 on r/Libraries Reddit community.
“I just wanted the libraries to know,” Kennedy told 404 Media. “I didn’t want them to be held hostage waiting for books that would never come. I respect them too much for all this nonsense.”
Kennedy’s post prompted other current and former B&T employees to confirm the announcement and express concern for the competitors about to be inundated with requests from the libraries who would be scrambling for new suppliers.
B&T in Memoriam
Baker & Taylor has been in the book business just short of 200 years. Its primary focus was distributing physical copies of books to public libraries. The company also provided librarians with tools that helped them do their jobs more effectively related to collection development and processing.
But the company has spent decades being acquired by and divested from private equity firms, served as a revolving door for senior leadership, and was sued by a competitor earlier this year for alleged data misuse and was almost acquired again in September, this time by a distributor that works with mass-market retailers like Walmart and Target. That deal fell through.
Since the internal announcement, Kennedy says customer service staff at B&T have not received guidance on how to respond to inquiries from libraries, leaving them on the frontline and in the dark on issues ranging from whether existing orders would be fulfilled to securing refunds for materials they may have already paid for.
“Some libraries didn’t realize we are much closed as of right now,” Kennedy added.
B&T did not respond when asked for comment.
Kennedy has been with B&T for 16 years. At a time when it's uncommon to remain with one company more than a few years, that’s exactly what many of B&T’s employees have been able to do, until now. The same was true of the libraries who did business with them. Andrew Harant, director of Cuyahoga Falls Library had to consider the library's longstanding business relationship with the company against the roughly 20 percent of books the library had ordered from the beginning of the year they had never received.
“For us, that was about 1,500 items,” which Harant told 404 Media that for a small library is a lot of books they were ordering and not receiving.
Release dates for new books come and go on B&T’s main software platform for viewing and managing orders, Title Source 360. Better known as TS360, Harant realized the platform was updating preordered books never received to on backorder, which was “not sustainable”.
In September, Cuyahoga Falls Library canceled all outstanding orders with B&T.
“We needed to step up and make sure that we’re getting the books for our patrons that they needed,” he said.
Cuyahoga Falls Library was fortunate to have an existing account with the other main distributor on the scene, Ingram Content Group. This has been true for many of the libraries 404 Media reached out to for this story.
“The easier part is re-ordering the book,” Shellie Cocking, Chief of Collections and Technical Services for the San Francisco Public Library, told 404 Media. “The harder part is replacing the tools you use to order books.”
Integrated Fallout
Of the ancillary services B&T offered customers, TS360 was Cocking’s favorite. It helped her streamline collection development tasks, for instance, anticipating how popular a title might be or determining how many quantities of a book to purchase, which for larger libraries with dozens of branches, could be complicated to figure out manually. Once titles were ordered in TS360, B&T shared a Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) record that was automatically shared with the library’s API integration using data derived from B&T’s record set. This product, BTCat, was the subject of a lawsuit brought by OCLC earlier this year.
OCLC owns WorldCat, the global union catalog of library collections that lets anyone see what libraries own what items. OCLC alleged in a U.S. district court filing that B&T misused their proprietary bibliographic records to populate its own competing cataloguing database. OCLC also accused B&T of inserted clauses into its contracts where there was overlap with the businesses and customers, requiring libraries to grant B&T access to their cataloging records so the libraries could then license the records back to B&T for BTCat. B&T has denied these claims, accusing OCLC of stifling fair competition in an already consolidated marketplace.
Marshall Breeding, an independent consultant who monitors library vendor mergers has been following all of this rather closely. He says B&T's closure creates a number of bottlenecks for libraries, the primary one being whether suppliers like Ingram or Brodart can absorb thousands of libraries as customers all at once.
“Maybe, maybe not,” Breeding told 404 Media. “It’s going to take them a while to set up the business relationships and technical things that have to be set up for libraries to automatically order books from the providers.”
But one thing is evident.
“Libraries are kind of in a weaker position just scrambling to find a vendor at all,” he added.
Less competition in the market makes for more challenging working conditions all around. Just ask Erin Hughes, director of the Wood Ridge Memorial Library in New Jersey, made the move over to Ingram after a series of negative experiences with B&T in 2021 from late and damaged deliveries to customer service calls that went poorly, to say the least. Hughes worries her experience with B&T will happen again, only this time with Ingram.
Since the Reddit announcement, she's noticed it's a little more difficult to get a rep on the phone and the number of shipments to the library is smaller. But the other way Hughes is seeing the problem play out involves the consortium her library belongs to. While she may have foregone B&T years ago, her network hasn't, which affects the operability of InterLibrary Loan lending.
“The resource sharing is going to be off for a bit,” Hughes told 404 Media.
“No, we do have a little bit of pause around Amazon,” she added. “But we’re at a point now where Ingram actually does supply most of the books for Amazon. So we’re already in the devil’s pocket. It’s all connected. It’s all integrated. And as much as I personally don’t care for the whole thing, I don’t really see a lot of other options.”
It's hard not to think this outcome was predictable and also preventable. We know what happens when private equity gets involved with businesses not expected to generate high growth or returns, as well as what happens when there's too little market competition in any given sector. It can't be a cautionary tale because market consolidation is in itself a cautionary tale.
But it’s also worth acknowledging how the timing could not be worse. Library use is way up right now, which is indicative of the times. People are buying less for various reasons. People also seem to like the idea of putting a little friction between their media consumption habits and Big Brother, even at the expense of a little convenience.
“We kind of made our own bed a little bit because we didn’t branch out,” said Hughes. “We didn’t find other solutions to this, and we were relying essentially on two giant companies, one of which folded so quick it was not even funny.”
Gotta say, I'm really impressed with @joeycastillo's Sensor Watch. I'm a seasoned computer watcher, but embedded has never been my area, and now I"m putting features into my wristwatch in C.
OROMOCTO, NB – A local man almost lost his home yesterday after his Amazon Alexa smart home device burst into flames. Lloyd Wentworth, 38, says the fire started as he was preparing dinner in his bungalow on Waasis Road. “I wanted to make some gumbo so I asked Alexa to give me a recipe,” he […]
OROMOCTO, NB - A local man almost lost his home yesterday after his Amazon Alexa smart home device burst into flames. Lloyd Wentworth, 38, says the fire started as he was preparing dinner in his bungalow on Waasis Road.
E' stato lo stesso Koji Sato, presidente & ceo e membro del board di direzione di Toyota ha presentare e dettagliare quella che potrebbe essere definita la 'visione democratica della mobilità per il grande Gruppo giapponese. (ANSA)
Autocorrect: saving you from a dire fate at the hands of the scribe-tormenting Tutivillus?
"Tutivillus complains that “I muste eche day [...] brynge my master a thousande pokes full of faylynges, & of neglygences in syllables and wordes… else I must be sore beten."
Indigenous communities worldwide have long faced challenges related to technological dependence, environmental degradation, and lack of data sovereignty. The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) and computational technologies has exacerbated these disparities, creating a digital divide and contributing to unsustainable practices such as e-waste (See, Figure 1). This proposal leverages the concept of Earth Friendly Computation (EFC) to build technological independence for Indigenous communities through the decentralization of micro-data centers powered by reanimated Zombie GPUs (ZGPUs).
Whether you or someone you know is planning to live outside of the US, make sure signing up for Democrats Abroad is on the to do list! Becoming a member is a great way to make new friends, find opportunities to volunteer and get the help you need to vote in state and federal elections. Visit democratsabroad.org to sign up today! #JoinUs #DemocratsAbroad #AmericansLivingAbroad #VotefromAbroad
The image shows a close-up shot of a brown glass dropper bottle and a few green mint leaves on a white surface. The dropper is partially visible, with the bulb appearing yellow. Three drops of a clear liquid are hanging from the dropper's tip. The mint leaves are scattered to the left of the bottle. The text "2-3 drops" is written in a white circle next to the drops. The background is plain white.
Provided by @altbot, generated privately and locally using Gemma3:12b
Il tema dell’affido diventa fumetto. Ai Comics "Legami stellari" di Bigo Promosso dal centro affidi del Comune di Lucca, il fumetto è stato presentato ieri in San Girolamo. La striscia, ideata in collaborazione con la cooperativa La Luce, sarà distribuito gratuitamente alle famiglie.
The image features a white sedan vehicle against a dark blue background. The car is positioned slightly angled to the right, showcasing its side profile. The vehicle's design is modern and streamlined, with sleek lines and a prominent chrome grill. The car's headlights are visible and appear bright. The text "NYX TUAH HQ" is displayed in white font in the top right corner of the image.
Provided by @altbot, generated privately and locally using Gemma3:12b
The administration announced the programme for Afrikaners in February, saying that white South African farmers face discrimination and violence at home.
Que Choisir épingle les chargeurs USB de Shein et Temu L'indispensable Que Choisir s'est mis en test de vérifier les risques liés à des achats de chargeurs USB noname. Le résultat est catastrophique.. minimachines.net/?p=136911 #business
une grosse nuance : ce n’est pas un choix des marques, mais une obligation de l’UE. C’est vraiment compliqué, la logique écologique est bonne mais les effets secondaires que tu décris vraiment pas terribles, et prévisibles
La cultura se mueve contigo. Accede en un solo lugar a una cartelera de actividades que se desarrollan en los espacios públicos y privados de nuestras 16 regiones y a contenidos culturales digitales nacionales e internacionales
battute a parte, quando vedo concentrazioni umane di un solo genere sessuale automaticamente tendo a squalificare l'intera popolazione di quel posto. Per me significa solo che non va per niente bene.
he calls himself king... he destroys the white house... we sends the army to fight the citizens... he removes funding from social products... he befriend (other) dictators.... he funds a genocide.. he restarts nuclear weapons testing...
when are the owners of guns gonna defend their country from tyranny?
I am easily impressed, I admit. But the self-healing power of the human body never fails to impress me. Knee and elbow looked bad after my bicycle accident, but now, a week later, my body has done a lot of work and the pain is gone, the movement is fully restored and I am almost repaired 😀 Thank you, body and your complex systems fro all of that!
"The web was designed without the concept of personal identity at all, and without any tracking system built in. It was designed for anybody to be able to create what they want, and even for anybody to be able to make their own web browser. Not long after its invention, people came up with ideas like cookies and made different systems for logging in, and then big companies started coming in and realized that if they could control the browser, they'd control all the users and the ways of making money. Ever since, there's been a long series of battles over privacy versus monetization, but there's been some small protection for users, who benefitted from those smart original design choices back at the birth of the web.
It's very clear that a lot of the new AI era is about dismantling the web's original design. The last few decades, where advertising was targeting people by their interests instead of directly by their actual identity, now sees AI companies trying to create an environment of complete surveillance. That requires a new Internet where there's no concept of consent for either users or those who create content and culture — everything is just raw materials, and all of us are fair game.
The most worrisome part is that Atlas looks so familiar, and feels so innocuous, that people will try it and mistake it for a familiar web browser just like the other tools that they've been using for years. But Atlas is a browser that actively fights against the web, and in doing so, it's fighting against the very idea that you should have control over what you see, where you go, and what watches you while you're there."
Che poi continuo a pensare che parlare di guerra a Gaza non ha senso, non mi risulta che i Palestinesi stiano facendo guerra allo stato di Israele. Chiamamoli bombardamenti a tappeto per eliminare un popolo dopo aver già raso al suolo la città.
30 novembre 1990 - 30 novembre 2025 35 anni di Lupo Alberto the Videogame. Tutta la grafica, 5 mesi di lavoro, di idee, di prove, di scarti sono ancora memorizzati in questi 10 floppy da 720K.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
@ggg cover bellissima, ma a me è piaciuto anche il video devo dire, poi più leggo i commenti di quellə che ne capiscono più mi acquista valore (c'è una citazione esplicita di Tarkovskij che io non avevo colto, per esempio)
так же как вторая мировая может трактоваться как наказание за классоцид дворян, казаков, крестьян и прочих, современные события на наших землях могут иметь причиной тот факт, что постсоветские люди начали торговать собой. Человек, который является плодом искренних не испорченных буржуазной моралью отношений, не имеет права становиться содержанкой или нацпредателем на возмездной основе, а сейчас ведь это стало повсеместно. Т.е. конечно он может, но это будет крючок преступления, за которое можно платить и каяться бесконечно, точнее тут конец наступает либо с раскаянием и исправлением либо с истреблением. #politics #history
We really need to get the ball rolling on us landing an apartment before we're rounded up for the homeless camps.
However, our rental history the past two years have not been ideal. I don't suppose there's anyone local to Utah that would be willing to be a.. shall we say, "creative" rental reference for us to explain the past two years since we had to give up our apartment and start down this long, winding road of poverty?
In #Africa, dependence on natural resources undermines #foodsecurity thru the quality of institutions, income #inequality & #conflicts. Economic & agricultural diversification should be encouraged and money made from natural resources be invested in #agriculture projects: doi.org/10.1007/s411...
"Back in the days people believed anything that had tech in it. Remember how they all went crazy about a thing they called AI and it crashed the whole system and destroyed the Citizens Trust Principle?"
"Haha yeah, people were really stupid in the 30s 😂"
Honestly If a billion dollars suddenly landed in my bank account no strings attached my new full time job would be giving it away for the greatest possible benefit of mankind. Full stop, period.
Oh and maybe a supercharger would find its way on to the Camaro.
But my point is why do these guys feel compelled to keep score with their net worth. Start giving it away!
"For us human beings, using language is not a skill like any other — it is the way we do almost anything at all. Philosophers have disputed whether beings could exist that could think despite lacking language, but it is clear that humans cannot do so. We grasp the very contours of our world in and through language. But we are not born with a language. We have to acquire and develop our linguistic capacities through immersive practice with other human beings. For hundreds of years, in advanced societies this has meant cultivating an intimate familiarity with human writing.
Many people invoke a distinction between illicit uses of A.I. (such as the composition of entire drafts) and innocent auxiliary functions — outlining, for instance. But it is these seemingly benign functions that are the most pernicious for developing minds. Take the summary: Letting A.I. take over this rote task seems like a harmless shortcut. Sure, students who read only A.I. summaries will be subjected to predictable analysis and homogeneous prose, but they could save time and energy. In truth, the ability to determine what is being argued for and how is not dispensable. No aspect of cognitive understanding is perfunctory.
Without the chance to develop these capacities, young people would not be able to understand a news report, medical documents and consent forms or the merit of an argument (including this one). A depleted conceptual reservoir would render our lives crude and our experience of the world undifferentiated and coarse. Worst of all, cognitive degradation threatens our claim to self-rule: It is far from obvious that the denizens of the subcognitive society would be fit to participate in the democratic processes that determine how we structure our societies and lives."
Suposo que titular amb Aliança Catalana és un pesca clics avui en dia, ja que les enquestes els hi donen una pujada molt forta, per sobre de 20 escons. No voldria pensar que Vilaweb vol manipular eleccions...
El Tribunal de Comptes sanciona Aliança Catalana per excés de despesa electoral en les municipals del 2023
https://www.vilaweb.cat/noticies/tribunal-comptes-sanciona-alianca-catalana-exces-despesa-electoral-municipals-2023/
An early 20th century uranium glass plate glowing under UV illumination. It's only slightly radioactive: 180 CPM from my 1987 Soviet G-M tube, where background is under 30 CPM.
Gibt es eine (vernünftige) Erklärung dafür, dass Bahnfahrkarten, die über international-bahn.de als Teil einer internationalen Bahnreise innerhalb Deutschlands bei der DB gebucht wurden, in der Bahn App nicht als gebuchte Fahrt auftauchen und auch über die Auftragsnummer da nicht zu finden sind? Und die spezifische Auftragsnummer mit drei Buchstaben am Anfang nicht als gültiges Auftragsnummernformat akzeptiert wird?
Librarians, help us celebrate 1 trillion web pages preserved by the @internetarchive 🌐
Our guide has templates, visuals & event ideas to bring your community into the web’s history. From “Then/Now” displays to talks, it’s easy to showcase your role in saving digital history. 🎉
Discover emerging library services and updates from the Internet Archive. Join the conversation on how libraries empower 21st-century research. REGISTER NOW for the free, virtual session.\n
It's autumn here in the Northern hemisphere, and that means I spend a lot of time under a kotatsu (Japanese-style heated table). Kotatsu table is very, very comfortable.
If you live in a 110V-mains country, you can just order a cheap heater from Japan, any table, and build your own heated table. If you live in a 220V-mains country, you either can get a transformer, or order a heater from China (and hope that it's _really_ 220V-rated and won't catch fire), or...
SANAA, Oct. 30 (YPA) - In a damning testament to the brutality of the Israeli aggression and the complicity of global silence, the Entesaf Organization for Women and Child Rights revealed on Thursday a shocking human rights report titled "The Tyranny
Today I got properly started on the coppice plot for this winter. There's so much big, heavy overstood hazel in there. I shall be very glad of the help of the people who have offered. 😊 #woodland #coppiceworking #coppice
Timothy Ridout, viola, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hannu Lintu play:
SCHNITTKE: Viola Concerto.
SHOSTAKOVICH: Symphony No. 8 in C Minor.
Recorded....
Antoine Tamestit, viola, and the RAI National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrés Orozco-Estrada play:
RAVEL: Alborada del gracioso.
WALTON: Viola Concerto.
SHOSTAKOVICH: Symphony No. 9 in E-flat major, op. 70.
RAVEL: La valse.
Live....
"Resist the introduction of AI in our own software. Ban AI use in the classroom. Cease normalising the AI hype. Fortify our academic freedom. Sustain critical thinking on AI.
It’s with these five action points that Olivia Guest, Iris van Rooij and a bunch of colleagues conclude their open letter directed to Dutch universities and colleges. Guest and van Rooij know what they’re talking about: both work at the School of Artificial Intelligence and the Donders Centre for Cognition of Radboud University in Nijmegen.
Guest, van Rooij and their colleagues further explain their reasons for resisting in a position paper. Put simply, the technology that OpenAI and co are pushing threatens the very raison d'être of universities. The authors of the position paper oppose this and insist that “university leaders and administrators must act to help us collectively turn back the tide of garbage software”.
AI scientists advocating a ban on AI use in classrooms: it sounds like a hallucination of an AI chatbot, but the popularity of the open letter shows it’s anything but that. As of today (23/10), it’s been signed more than 1,400 times, including by students and non-academics."
Rust 1.91 Promotes Windows On 64-bit ARM To Tier-1 Status
The Rust project announced today the release of Rust 1.91 as the latest update to this popular programming language priding itself on memory safety capabilities... phoronix.com/news/Rust-1.91-Re…
?
Fou
in reply to Fou • • •Her comments expose how Meta’s moderation policies are deeply entangled with Israeli political agendas, silencing journalists, activists, and ordinary users criticizing Israel’s actions in Gaza and the occupied territories.
Critics say this level of state-aligned censorship represents one of the gravest threats to free speech in the West.
Tofu Golem
in reply to Fou • • •Reminder: white supremacists are a "protected class" on Facebook, but Black children are not.
Stay the hell away.
Oyu F'ka
in reply to Fou • • •tbh, I hadn't heard of her, so I checked Wikipedia:
Jordana Cutler is the Director of Public Policy for Israel and the Jewish Diaspora at Meta Platforms and was formerly a senior official in the Israeli government and adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu.
'nuff said.