In this issue: US AI executive order / Ex-Moz CEO on leaving his company / Who wins the Halloween streaming wars? / Instagram feature add / Twitter subscription pricing / ArtForum troubles / TikTok propaganda wars / Camera watermarks / TwitterX hemorrhaging value + more!
Welcome to Context Collapse, the world’s best comms newsletter. I’m Neal Ungerleider. I run Ungerleider Works and used to work as a reporter for Fast Company, write op-eds for the LA Times, and work as a senior copywriter for R/GA. This newsletter helps readers navigate the weird new world of media and gleefully ignores all the conventional wisdom about journalism, public relations, marketing, and advertising.
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It’s been a long weekend! Parenting is busy when you have a young kid. Helping older parents with health issues is difficult. When you run a small business, there’s always a lot of work to do and too little time to do it in. Try to prioritize your tasks and manage your tasks? Haha nope there will be a dozen unexpected things to take care of ASAP.
Hahahahahahahah damn it so this is what being in your forties is like.
Now on to the links:
“President Biden on Monday signed an executive order creating new standards for safety and privacy protections over artificial intelligence, a move the White House insists will safeguard Americans' information, promote innovation and competition, and advance U.S. leadership in the industry.
With laws lagging far behind technological advances, the administration is touting the new EO as building on prior voluntary commitments from some of the leading tech companies on the safe and secure development of AI. In remarks Monday, the president called his executive order "the most significant action any government anywhere in the world has ever taken on AI safety, security and trust."
“For 17 years I had one job. A job that defined my adult life, my self-worth, the majority of my friendships, and entirety of my personal finances. On February 27, 2018, I left. Or, depending on who’s telling the story, got pushed out.
It wasn’t just scary, it was heart-wrenching. My insides felt torn up. I couldn’t sleep. I wasn’t eating.
The company I’d founded and led as CEO didn’t want me around.”
“I think that Max, Paramount+, and Peacock organize their Halloween collections really well, and Netflix and Disney+ do a good job as well. Conversely, Hulu has some smart, varied collections...but they’re buried at the bottom of the page. To me, the ideal order would probably be something like the most popular horror content on the first line in the collection, then family films and comedy (because, as I showed above, that’s the most popular horror content), then get creative. I like Peacock’s strategy of using “collections” of titles (because Universal has such a large library), but I would have put this higher up the page.”
”Instagram is testing a new feature that will let your friends add to your posts. When you’re about to post a carousel, Instagram will give you the option to let followers submit their own photos and videos that they want to include.
The submissions won’t get added to your post by default, as you’ll have to approve each photo and video before they’re added.”
“X, formerly known as Twitter, is introducing two new tiers for its subscription offering in order to bring in additional revenue. The social media giant is adding a new Premium+ tier that costs $16 per month and offers the “largest reply boost” and removes ads from the For You and Following feeds. The tier also comes with revenue-sharing, along with access to other creator tools.
The second tier launching today is called “Basic” and costs $3 per month. The tier doesn’t come with a blue checkmark, but includes basic features like the ability to edit posts and post longer text and videos. It also offers a “small reply boost.”
”Velasco was fired on Thursday, a week after the magazine published an open letter calling for a cease-fire in Gaza that did not mention the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks against Israel. The former editor-in-chief accused Artforum of having “bent to outside pressure” and told the New York Times, “I have no regrets.”
”Is Israel “losing the information war” on TikTok? That’s the central argument of a widely-shared thread on X reposted by several influential writers, right-wing voices, and a Republican senator. It claimed that TikTok poses a threat to U.S. national security by spreading false information and serving overwhelmingly pro-Palestine videos to young people.
Audiences on TikTok do appear to be more receptive to content that leans pro-Palestine, with Palestine-related hashtags getting more views than Israel-related tags.”
”As AI photo editing apps become more accessible and pervasive, software and hardware makers are building tools to help consumers verify the authenticity of an image starting from the moment of capture, Ina reports.
Driving the news: Leica announced Wednesday that its new M 11-P camera will be the first with the ability to apply Content Credentials from the moment an image is captured.
Why it matters: Adobe, Microsoft and others are adding metadata called Content Credentials to note when AI has been used to create or alter an image. But extending content verification all the way to the camera is seen as a critical step in the battle against deepfakes.”
”The banks that financed Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter are still struggling a year later to contain the damage to their balance sheets.
Seven banks including Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Barclays lent Musk around $13 billion to buy Twitter a year ago this coming Friday. Under normal circumstances, they would have unloaded the debt to Wall Street investment firms soon thereafter. But investor appetite for Twitter, which Musk has since renamed X, has cooled since the billionaire took over, forcing the banks to hold the debt on their own balance sheets at a discounted value.
The banks currently expect to take a hit of at least 15%, or roughly $2 billion, when they sell the debt, people familiar with the matter said.”