Despite Elon Musk’s opaque approach, the “Twitter Files” give a peek at moderation at scale and are a win for transparency, while failing to prove systemic bias (Devin Coldewey/TechCrunch)

Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch:
Despite Elon Musk’s opaque approach, the “Twitter Files” give a peek at moderation at scale and are a win for transparency, while failing to prove systemic bias  —  Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, is feverishly promoting his “Twitter Files”: selected internal communications from the company …

Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch:
Starlink in Ukraine: Musk, SpaceX, and its government partners should stop finger-pointing, commit to transparency, and figure out a long-term funding solution  —  What appeared earlier this year to be a selfless act of technotopianism, the widespread deployment of Starlink terminals in Ukraine …

Cecilia D’Anastasio / Bloomberg:
Microsoft’s Xbox publishes its first transparency report on content moderation and reveals it took action against more than 4.3M inauthentic accounts in H1 2022  —  Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox released its first transparency report on Monday, detailing how the gaming giant moderates its 3 billion global players.

Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch:
Metalenz, which makes metasurface optics for 3D imaging and sensing, raised a $30M Series B led by Neotribe Ventures, and says it is shipping millions of orders  —  The cameras in our phones, laptops, and increasingly home robots and the like are about as small as they can get unless …

Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Instagram debuts transparency tools to let users with professional accounts, like businesses and creators, know if their content is ineligible to be recommended  —  Instagram announced today that it’s introducing new transparency tools so you can see whether your photos and videos are recommended in the app.

Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch:
Stadia was doomed from the start, because Google knows nothing about gaming, and users hesitated to invest in it, not trusting Google to keep it alive for long  —  There’s a lot of chatter right now about the “surprise” shutdown of Stadia, Google’s game-streaming service.