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Techmeme
November 21, 2021, 9:10 PM

Top News

Jennifer Meierhans / BBC:
Spotify removes the shuffle button from all album pages for premium users, so that tracks play in the order artists intended, after Adele requests the change  —  Adele has persuaded Spotify to take the shuffle button off all album pages so tracks play in the artist's own order.
Andrés Engler / CoinDesk:
El Salvador plans to build a “Bitcoin City” initially funded by a $1B “bitcoin bond”, with $500M to build mining infrastructure and $500M to buy more bitcoin  —  El Salvador, the only country in which bitcoin is a legal tender, is going to build an entire city based …
Michael D McDonald / Bloomberg:
Inside “Bitcoin Week”, a series of events in El Salvador that let industry experts and crypto proponents celebrate their bitcoin allegiance  —  Bitcoin bulls, as undeterred as ever, flocked to a week of events and revelry in the first country to make the cryptocurrency legal tender.
Dan Milmo / The Guardian:
Washington Post:
Sources and internal docs show Facebook's race-blind policies around hate speech left minorities more likely to see derogatory and racist language on the site  —  Last year, researchers at Facebook showed executives an example of the kind of hate speech circulating on the social network …
Adam Minter / Bloomberg:
Apple's Self Service Repair, likely created to ward off regulatory pressure, may increase repairability of its own devices and spur an industry-wide change  —  A new approach to fixing products will benefit consumers, designers and the environment.  —  Years ago, long before the iPhone …
Karen Hao / MIT Technology Review:
Investigation shows how Facebook and Google fund misinformation globally by paying millions of dollars in ad revenue to the operators of clickbait pages  —  A month after the fall of the democratic government.  —  In 2015, six of the 10 websites in Myanmar getting the most engagement …
Adi Robertson / The Verge:
A look at projects like the Voguverse and companies like Pixel Vault that are trying to build media franchises around their NFT collectibles  —  There's a long way to go  —  In the online auction market OpenSea, you can pay around $600 to buy a portrait of a robot in streetwear — and, if you're lucky, a stake in a new media empire.
Casey Newton / Platformer:
Twitter's AI ethics researchers on getting public feedback about algorithmic bias, why responsible AI is hard, why they think algorithms can be saved, and more  —  While other tech giants hide from their internal researchers, Twitter is doing its failing — and fixing — in public

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Earlier Picks

Issie Lapowsky / Protocol:
Alex Sherman / CNBC:
Mary Ann Azevedo / TechCrunch:
Sean Hollister / The Verge: