Glenn Greenwald in U.S. TV Provides Ample Platform for American Torturers, But None to Their Victims:

Ever since the torture report was released last week, U.S. television outlets have endlessly featured American torturers and torture proponents. But there was one group that was almost never heard from: the victims of their torture, not even the ones recognized by the U.S. Government itself as innocent, not even the family members of the ones they tortured to death. Whether by design (most likely) or effect, this inexcusable omission radically distorts coverage.

Luke O’Neal in the Washington Post on Black Friday and how it is advertised:

It’s hard to avoid the message of those ads. We’ve been bombarded with them for weeks now, from corporations eager to entice shoppers with so-called “door-buster” deals. And then, once the shopping public falls for them, a privileged segment of the population sits back and dehumanizes them for its collective amusement. Look at these hilarious poor people, struggling to take advantage of a deal on something they might not otherwise be able to afford on items that we take for granted, we joke on Twitter. The message is the same: this is shameful, materialistic behavior. And by pointing it out, we differentiate ourselves, reaffirm our class status as being above the fray of the lowly and desperate.

Read the rest.

Danah Boyd thinks deeply about Facebook emotion experiment: What does the Facebook experiment teach us? Here’s a bit of it:

Somehow, shrugging our shoulders and saying that we promoted content because it was popular is acceptable because those actors don’t voice that their intention is to manipulate your emotions so that you keep viewing their reporting and advertisements. And it’s also acceptable to manipulate people for advertising because that’s just business. But when researchers admit that they’re trying to learn if they can manipulate people’s emotions, they’re shunned. What this suggests is that the practice is acceptable, but admitting the intention and being transparent about the process is not.

There’s even better stuff further on, and you should read the post.

I would put it this way: the fewer people use RSS, the better content providers can allow RSS to be.

Tyler Cowen in Are home pages dying? And what is the value of a shadow reader?

Ten years later, those freedoms are still embedded in every copy of WordPress downloaded, including the 9.2 million downloaded in the past month …

WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg writes about The Four Freedoms, Richard Stallman’s software bill of rights.

One of the rules of modern life is that you can’t choose your billionaires; they choose you.

Paul Ford explains why Jeff Bezos would purchase the Washington Post