The music-streaming company Spotify was granted a patent for technology that aims to interpret users’ speech and background noise to better curate the music it serves up.
Why it matters: Aside from being a little weird and invasive, the technology is an example of a future trend in computing: emotion recognition.
Facebook is looking externally for a new U.S. policy chief as it moves Kevin Martin, a Republican who now holds the job, to a different position, per a memo seen by Axios.
Between the lines: Facebook is moving on from the Trump era in which Republicans held most of the power in Washington and Facebook was particularly eager among tech companies to forge warm relations with GOP policymakers.
Maya Sharma's debut book,on sale this week, features interviews with 25 women who charted their own course to success. It's a topic she knows a lot about — she can now call herself a published author before even graduating high school.
The big picture:Sharma, the 16-year-old daughter of prominent wireless industry consultant Chetan Sharma, said the women featured in "Paving: Conversations with Incredible Women Who are Shaping Our World" all have different stories but that she hopes young girls take away one key lesson: "She did it, and so can I."
Facebook on Friday said it's testing new advertiser "topic exclusion controls" to help address concerns marketers may have that their ads are appearing next to topics in Facebook's News Feed that they consider bad for their brand.
Why it matters: As Axios has previously noted, the chaotic nature of the modern news cycle and digital advertising landscape has made it nearly impossible for brands to run ads against quality content in an automated fashion without encountering bad content.
Faced with the increasingly daunting task of consistent content moderation at scale, Big Tech companies are tossing their hardest decisions to outsiders, hoping to deflect some of the pressure they face for how they govern their platforms.
Why it matters: Every policy change, enforcement action or lack thereof prompts accusations that platforms like Facebook and Twitter are making politically motivated decisions to either be too lax or too harsh. Ceding responsibility to others outside the company may be the future of content moderation if it works.
Amid the sea of pollution on social media, another class of apps is soaring in popularity: The creators are paid, putting a premium on talent instead of just noise.
The big picture: Creator-economy platforms like Patreon, Substack and OnlyFans are built around content makers who are paid. It's a contrast to platforms like Facebook that are mostly powered by everyday users’ unpaid posts and interactions.
Retail investors’ battle against short sellers who had bet against GameStop and AMC— and other heavily shorted stocks with depressed share prices — offers a window into what happens when Reddit culture spills out into the real world.
The big picture: Reddit is a microcosm of mainstream internet culture, a massive clearinghouse for all sorts of interests that's populated mostly by young men with a vaguely anti-establishment bent. That's caused major trouble at times, but is now propelling a populist-progressive unity movement that's rattling Wall Street.
