An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motor1: Roads are lined with unattractive billboards many of us ignore on our daily commutes, but Ford's new tech will make sure we don't miss them anymore. The system works by scanning the billboards, interpreting the information on the sign, and delivering the most useful bits right into the vehicle's display. It sounds invasive and distracting, with a side of Orwellian creepiness tossed on top for good measure. For now, though, this is just a patent application and may never see implementation, but it's not difficult to see how this could be useful to automakers and advertisers. Ford's application says the tech could display an advertiser's products or services, directions to the store, or the phone number.

It's not a stretch to imagine a future where you're driving down the road, and your car sees a sign for your favorite restaurant, prompting you to place an order because the vehicle knows Thursday is take-out night. Cars are only getting infused with more technology designed to assist people in their day-to-day lives, and this would be another avenue to do just that, creating a tailored driving experience. It could also force advertisers to pay Ford to access to its fleet of billboard-scanning-equipped cars, expanding revenue streams beyond the car itself. In a comment to Motor1, Ford says the company submits "patents on new inventions as a normal course of business, but they aren't necessarily an indication of new business or product plans."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: As of now, California wants to implement an 80-20 mix where 80% of new cars sold will be totally electric or hydrogen-powered, and 20% may still feature a plug-in hybrid powertrain. Essentially, automakers will still be able to plop an engine under the hood come 2035. However, PHEVs will need to follow far more stringent definitions of the powertrain. California wants any plug-in hybrid to achieve 50 miles of all-electric range to meet the categorization -- a huge ask. Only two plug-in hybrids in recent years meet that criteria: the Chevrolet Volt (no longer on sale) and the Polestar 1 (soon to exit production). To achieve such a lofty range, automakers need to fit larger batteries, and when you're talking about a big battery and an internal-combustion engine, things get complex (and costly) quickly.

But, that's not all the state will need. Future PHEVs to qualify under these regulations will need to be capable of driving under only electric power throughout their charged range. So, no software to flick on the engine for a few moments to recoup some lost energy. While these regulations would actually benefit drivers to shift PHEVs away from "compliance cars" to something far more usable, the complexities may just turn automakers to focus exclusively on EVs. It all remains to be seen, however since the plans remain open for public comment until June 11 of this year. After that, the board will vote and detail a full proposal later this year.

eBay is joining the NFT frenzy, telling Reuters today that going forward it will allow the sales of NFTs on its platform, a mainstream embrace that follows billions of dollars in NFT purchases over the past few months. TechCrunch reports: The e-commerce company seems poised to slowly build up sales of digital collectibles on the platform, starting with a smaller group of verified sellers on the platform. "In the coming months, eBay will add new capabilities that bring blockchain-driven collectibles to our platform," eBay exec Jordan Sweetnam told them. eBay has invested heavily in infrastructure for physical collectibles like trading cards, as well as items like sneakers and watches which they help verify for buyers.

Southern California has adopted a new air pollution rule aimed at slashing noxious emissions from warehouse trucks that move goods sold by Amazon and other e-commerce retailers. Ars Technica reports: Diesel pollution from heavy trucks causes everything from asthma to heart attacks, and even Parkinson's disease. Previously, such pollution tended to be concentrated around shipping ports and highways, but the growth of e-commerce has created a new source that is affecting neighborhoods farther inland. There are nearly 34,000 warehouses enclosing 1.17 billion square feet of space in the Los Angeles region alone. The rule, which was adopted late last week by a 9-4 vote of the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD), would cover around 3,300 warehouses that are larger than 100,000 square feet. The rule seeks to reduce the amount of diesel particulate matter and nitrogen oxides produced by trucks serving these facilities. The district covers more than 17 million people, or nearly half the state's population.

The way the South Coast AQMD is approaching warehouse-related pollution is novel. Rather than attempting to control traffic flow to and from the facilities, the regulator will require warehouse owners to take various steps to reduce pollution in the area. That could include buying electric or fuel-cell trucks, adding solar panels to the building roofs, or installing air filters at nearby homes, hospitals, and schools. Each of these measures is assigned a point value, and warehouse operators must achieve a certain total to offset the emissions from their truck traffic. If they cannot meet the goal through mitigation measures, they can pay a fee instead. South Coast AQMD is phasing in compliance depending on the size of the facility. Warehouses that are over 250,000 square feet must meet their goals by June 30, 2022. Warehouses over 150,000 square feet must comply by the same day the following year, and those over 100,000 square feet get until June 30, 2024. Amazon's typical warehouses, for example, range in size from 600,000 to 1 million square feet. [...] The new rule is expected to save 150 to 300 lives and prevent 2,500 to 5,800 asthma attacks between 2022 and 2031. Overall, the public health benefits could be as large as $2.7 billion over the same timeframe.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Amazon's Alexa has a voice familiar to millions: calm, warm, and measured. But like most synthetic speech, its tones have a human origin. There was someone whose voice had to be recorded, analyzed, and algorithmically reproduced to create Alexa as we know it now. Amazon has never revealed who this "original Alexa" is, but journalist Brad Stone says he tracked her down, and she is Nina Rolle, a voiceover artist based in Boulder, Colorado. The claim comes from Stone's upcoming book on the tech giant, Amazon Unbound, an excerpt of which is published here in Wired. Neither Amazon nor Rolle confirmed or denied Stone's reporting, which he says is based on conversations with the professional voiceover community, but Rolle's voice alone makes for a compelling case.

Here's how Stone writes up the process in selecting Alexa's voice: "Believing that the selection of the right voice for Alexa was critical, [then-Amazon exec Greg] Hart and colleagues spent months reviewing the recordings of various candidates that GM Voices produced for the project, and presented the top picks to Bezos. The Amazon team ranked the best ones, asked for additional samples, and finally made a choice. Bezos signed off on it. Characteristically secretive, Amazon has never revealed the name of the voice artist behind Alexa. I learned her identity after canvasing the professional voice-over community: Boulder, Colorado -- based voice actress and singer Nina Rolle. Her professional website contains links to old radio ads for products such as Mott's Apple Juice and the Volkswagen Passat -- and the warm timbre of Alexa's voice is unmistakable. Rolle said she wasn't allowed to talk to me when I reached her on the phone in February 2021. When I asked Amazon to speak with her, they declined."

Alphabet's Google plans to double the size of its team studying artificial-intelligence ethics in the coming years, as the company looks to strengthen a group that has had its credibility challenged by research controversies and personnel defections. From a report: Vice President of Engineering Marian Croak said at The Wall Street Journal's Future of Everything Festival that the hires will increase the size of the responsible AI team that she leads to 200 researchers. Additionally, she said that Alphabet Chief Executive Sundar Pichai has committed to boost the operating budget of a team tasked with evaluating code and product to avert harm, discrimination and other problems with AI. "Being responsible in the way that you develop and deploy AI technology is fundamental to the good of the business," Ms. Croak said. "It severely damages the brand if things aren't done in an ethical way." Google announced in February that Ms. Croak would lead the AI ethics group after it fired the division's co-head, Margaret Mitchell, for allegedly sharing internal documents with people outside the company. Ms. Mitchell's exit followed criticism of Google's suppression of research last year by a prominent member of the team, Timnit Gebru, who says she was fired because of studies critical of the company's approach to AI. Mr. Pichai pledged an investigation into the circumstances around Ms. Gebru's departure and said he would seek to restore trust.

The US Federal Communications Commission has unanimously approved the final rules to implement the $7.17 billion Emergency Connectivity Fund Program. The FCC program will provide funding for schools and libraries across the country to buy laptops, tablets, Wi-Fi hotspots and broadband connections to help students and teachers to access the internet for online learning during the pandemic. From a report: The program is part of President Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. It also follows the FCC approving a plan in February to administer $3.2 billion in emergency relief to subsidize broadband for millions of Americans during the pandemic. That program will provide $50 per month to low-income households and $75 per month to households on Native American lands to cover the cost of broadband services starting May 12. It also provides $100 toward buying a laptop or tablet. "Between this Emergency Connectivity Fund Program and the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program, we are investing more than $10 billion in American students and households," Jessica Rosenworcel, acting chairwoman of the FCC, said in a statement Monday. "These investments will help more Americans access online education, healthcare and employment resources. They will help close the homework gap for students nationwide."

Facebook was ordered to stop collecting German users' data from its WhatsApp unit, after a regulator in the nation said the company's attempt to make users agree to the practice in its updated terms isn't legal. From a report: Johannes Caspar, who heads Hamburg's privacy authority, issued a three-month emergency ban, prohibiting Facebook from continuing with the data collection. He also asked a panel of European Union data regulators to take action and issue a ruling across the 27-nation bloc. The new WhatsApp terms enabling the data scoop are invalid because they are intransparent, inconsistent and overly broad, he said. "The order aims to secure the rights and freedoms of millions of users which are agreeing to the terms Germany-wide," Caspar said in a statement on Tuesday. "We need to prevent damage and disadvantages linked to such a black-box-procedure." The order strikes at the heart of Facebook's business model and advertising strategy. It echoes a similar and contested step by Germany's antitrust office attacking the network's habit of collecting data about what users do online and merging the information with their Facebook profiles. That trove of information allows ads to be tailored to individual users -- creating a cash cow for Facebook.

Following Twitter's lead, Facebook is trying out a new feature designed to encourage users to read a link before sharing it. TechCrunch reports: The test will reach 6% of Facebook's Android users globally in a gradual rollout that aims to encourage "informed sharing" of news stories on the platform. Users can still easily click through to share a given story, but the idea is that by adding friction to the experience, people might rethink their original impulses to share the kind of inflammatory content that currently dominates on the platform.

The strategy demonstrates Facebook's preference for a passive strategy of nudging people away from misinformation and toward its own verified resources on hot-button issues like COVID-19 and the 2020 election. While the jury is still out on how much of an impact this kind of gentle behavioral shaping can make on the misinformation epidemic, both Twitter and Facebook have also explored prompts that discourage users from posting abusive comments.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: The Department of Homeland Security has begun implementing a strategy to gather and analyze intelligence about security threats from public social media posts, DHS officials said. The goal is to build a warning system to detect the sort of posts that appeared to predict an attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 but were missed or ignored by law enforcement and intelligence agencies, the officials said. The focus is not on the identity of the posters but rather on gleaning insights about potential security threats based on emerging narratives and grievances. So far, DHS is using human beings, not computer algorithms, to make sense of the data, the officials said. "We're not looking at who are the individual posters," said a senior official involved in the effort. "We are looking at what narratives are resonating and spreading across platforms. From there you may be able to determine what are the potential targets you need to protect."

The officials didn't describe what criteria or methods the analysts would use to parse the data. They said DHS officials have been consulting with social media companies, private companies and nonprofit groups that analyze open-source social media data. Law enforcement officers and intelligence analysts are legally entitled to examine -- without warrants -- what people say openly on Twitter, Facebook and other public social media forums, just as they can take in information from reading newspapers. But civil liberties groups generally oppose government monitoring of social media, arguing that it doesn't produce much intelligence and risks chilling free speech.

Developers are sharing their salaries on Twitter under the hashtag #GameDevPaidMe to encourage pay transparency in their industry. Axios reports: The hashtag started circulating last year, but has returned periodically as developers fight for better working conditions. Salary sharing is a way to equalize the field. By removing the secrecy, as well as the stigma, around discussing pay, workers have more power to advocate for themselves when negotiating salaries and raises. In 2020, Blizzard employees shared their salaries anonymously via a spreadsheet to compare compensation. The pay gap between people at the top, and workers on the ground is measurable in hundreds of thousands of dollars -- even when those CEOs take pay cuts.

What they're saying:
A lead designer on "Hearthstone" working for Blizzard Entertainment: "I started getting paid fairly once I started asking questions. I only started asking questions once I better understood what I was worth. Understanding what your worth can be a difficult question, but this helps."

A lead designer at Blackbird Interactive: "Every single person who plays games should take a good look at #GameDevPaidMe and get a sense for what the people who make your art actually make."

A senior game designer at Reflector Entertainment: "Don't wait for your employer to give you the raise you deserve, be open to talking to other companies even if you feel you are at a 'great' spot."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Electric cars and vans will be cheaper to produce than conventional, fossil fuel-powered vehicles by 2027, and tighter emissions regulations could put them in pole position to dominate all new car sales by the middle of the next decade, research has found. By 2026, larger vehicles such as electric sedans and SUVs will be as cheap to produce as petrol and diesel models, according to forecasts from BloombergNEF, with small cars reaching the threshold the following year. The falling cost of producing batteries for electric vehicles, combined with dedicated production lines in carmarkers' plants, will make them cheaper to buy, on average, within the next six years than conventional cars, even before any government subsidies, BloombergNEF found.

The new study, commissioned by Transport & Environment, a Brussels-based non-profit organization that campaigns for cleaner transport in Europe, predicts new battery prices will fall by 58% between 2020 and 2030 to $58 per kilowatt hour. A reduction in battery costs to below $100 per kWh, is viewed as an important step towards greater take-up of fully electric vehicles, and would largely remove the financial appeal of hybrid electric vehicles, which combine a battery with a conventional engine.

Clubhouse finally has an Android app that you can download from the Play Store -- provided you live in the U.S. From a report: The voice-based social network launched its beta Android app on Play Store for users in the U.S. on Sunday, and said it will gradually make the new app available in other English-speaking countries and then the rest of the world. The social network, valued at about $4 billion in its most recent fundraise, launched as an iPhone-only app last year. The app quickly gained popularity last year, attracting several high-profile celebrities, politicians, investors, and entrepreneurs. Clubhouse began developing the Android app early this year and started to test the beta version externally this month. In a town hall earlier Sunday, the startup said availability on Android has been the most requested product feature. "Our plan over the next few weeks is to collect feedback from the community, fix any issues we see and work to add a few final features like payments and club creation before rolling it out more broadly," the team wrote. As Clubhouse struggles to maintain its growth -- data from mobile insight firms including AppMagic suggests that Clubhouse installs have drastically dropped in recent months -- the Android app could prove pivotal in boosting the startup's reach across the globe.

Forty-four attorneys general sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg asking him to abandon plans to create a version of Instagram for children under 13. From a report: "Facebook has historically failed to protect the welfare of children on its platforms," according to the letter, signed by attorneys general from New York and Massachusetts, among others. "The attorneys general have an interest in protecting our youngest citizens, and Facebook's plans to create a platform where kids under the age of 13 are encouraged to share content online is contrary to that interest."

Pentagon officials are considering pulling the plug on the star-crossed JEDI cloud-computing project, which has been mired in litigation from Amazon and faces continuing criticism from lawmakers. From a report: The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract was awarded to Microsoft in 2019 over Amazon, which has contested the award in court ever since. A federal judge last month refused the Pentagon's motion to dismiss much of Amazon's case. A few days later, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said the department would review the project. "We're going to have to assess where we are with regard to the ongoing litigation around JEDI and determine what the best path forward is for the department," Ms. Hicks said at an April 30 security conference organized by the nonprofit Aspen Institute. Her comments followed a Pentagon report to Congress, released before the latest court ruling, that said another Amazon win in court could significantly draw out the timeline for the program's implementation. "The prospect of such a lengthy litigation process might bring the future of the JEDI Cloud procurement into question," the Jan. 28 report said. Ms. Hicks and other Pentagon officials say there is a pressing need to implement a cloud program that serves most of its branches and departments. The JEDI contract, valued at up to $10 billion over 10 years, aims to allow the Pentagon to consolidate its current patchwork of data systems, give defense personnel better access to real-time information and put the Defense Department on a stronger footing to develop artificial-intelligence capabilities that are seen as vital in the future.

A carbon-free future "will require many millions of batteries, both to drive electric vehicles and to store wind and solar power on the grid," reports IEEE Spectrum. Unfortunately, today's battery chemistries "mostly rely on lithium — a metal that could soon face a global supply crunch." Recently, Rystad Energy projected a "serious lithium supply deficit" in 2027 as mining capacity lags behind the EV boom. The mismatch could effectively delay the production of around 3.3 million battery-powered passenger cars that year, according to the research firm. Without new mining projects, delays could swell to the equivalent of 20 million cars in 2030. Battery-powered buses, trucks, ships, and grid storage systems will also feel the squeeze... [T]he solution isn't as simple as mining more hard rock — called spodumene — or tapping more underground brine deposits to extract lithium. That's because most of the better, easier-to-exploit reserves are already spoken for in Australia (for hard rock) and in Chile and Argentina (for brine). To drastically scale capacity, producers will also need to exploit the world's "marginal" resources, which are costlier and more energy-intensive to develop than conventional counterparts...

Concerns about supply constraints are driving innovation in the lithium industry. A handful of projects in North America and Europe are piloting and testing "direct lithium extraction," an umbrella term for technologies that, generally speaking, use electricity and chemical processes to isolate and extract concentrated lithium... In southwestern Germany, Vulcan Energy is extracting lithium from geothermal springs that bubble thousands of meters below the Rhine river. The startup began operating its first pilot plant in mid-April. Vulcan said it could be extracting 15,000 metric tons of lithium hydroxide — a compound used in battery cathodes — per year. In southern California, Controlled Thermal Resources is developing a geothermal power plant and lithium extraction facility at the Salton Sea. The company said a pilot facility will start producing 20,000 metric tons per year of lithium hydroxide, also by 2024.

Another way to boost lithium supplies is to recover the metal from spent batteries, of which there is already ample supply. Today, less than 5 percent of all spent lithium-ion batteries are recycled, in large part because the packs are difficult and expensive to dismantle. Many batteries now end up in landfills, leaching chemicals into the environment and wasting usable materials. But Sophie Lu, the head of metals and mining for BloombergNEF, said the industry is likely to ramp up recycling after 2028, when the supply deficit kicks in. Developers are already starting to build new facilities, including a $175 million plant in Rochester, N.Y. When completed, it will be North America's largest recycling plant for lithium-ion batteries.
The Economic Times also argues that electric cars and renewable energy "may not be as green as they appear. Production of raw materials like lithium, cobalt and nickel that are essential to these technologies are often ruinous to land, water, wildlife and people.

"That environmental toll has often been overlooked in part because there is a race underway among the United States, China, Europe and other major powers. Echoing past contests and wars over gold and oil, governments are fighting for supremacy over minerals that could help countries achieve economic and technological dominance for decades to come."

America's leading social media companies "pledged to put warning labels on COVID-19 and COVID vaccines posts to stop the spread of falsehoods, conspiracy theories and hoaxes that are fueling vaccine hesitancy in the USA," reports USA Today.

"With the exception of Facebook, nearly all of them are losing the war against COVID disinformation." That's the conclusion of a new report shared exclusively with USA TODAY. As the pace of the nation's immunizations slows and public health agencies struggle to get shots in arms, Advance Democracy found that debunked claims sowing unfounded fears about the vaccines are circulating largely unfettered on Twitter and TikTok, including posts and videos that falsely allege the federal government is covering up deaths caused by the vaccines or that it is safer to get COVID-19 than to get the vaccine.

Twitter began labeling tweets that include misleading or false information about COVID-19 vaccines in March. It also started using a "strike system" to eventually remove accounts that repeatedly violate its rules. Yet none of the top tweets on Twitter using popular anti-vaccine hashtags like #vaccineskill, #novaccine, #depopulation and #plandemic had labels as of May 3, according to Advance Democracy, a research organization that studies disinformation and extremism. What's more, when USA TODAY searched these hashtags on Twitter, unlabeled posts were served up along with advertisements for major consumer brands including Cheetos, Volvo, CVS, even Star Wars...

After coming under fire for its slow response to COVID-19 misinformation, Facebook has made significant progress in labeling COVID-19 posts, according to Daniel Jones, president of Advance Democracy... As of May 3, all of the top 10 posts discussing COVID-19 vaccines that used the #vaccineskill hashtag were labeled, compared to only two of the top 10 on March 28, Advance Democracy found... Facebook told USA TODAY it has removed more than 16 million pieces of content on Facebook and Instagram for violating its COVID and vaccine policies since the beginning of the pandemic....

As of May 3, TikTok failed to consistently apply labels to anti-vaccination hashtags used in videos with millions of views, the report said. Nine of the top 10 videos related to COVID-19 vaccines using the hashtag #NoVaccine did not have a label. Videos with the #NoVaccine label racked up 20.5 million views...

The Advance Democracy research did not look at vaccine-related content on Facebook-owned Instagram or Google's YouTube.
"Promises to address public health misinformation online are only consequential if there is action and follow through..." Jones told USA Today.

"This pandemic is not over, and with the rate of vaccinations on the decline, directing users to reliable information on vaccines is more important than ever," Jones said.

NBC News reports more than 440 Americans have now been charged with storming the U.S. Capitol building on January 6th, with charges now filed against people from 44 of America's 50 states. They describe it as "one of the largest criminal investigations in American history." The largest number come from Texas, Pennsylvania, and Florida, in that order. Men outnumber women among those arrested by 7 to 1, with an average age of 39, according to figures compiled by the Program on Extremism at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. A total of 44 are military veterans.
Hundreds of arrests happened because rioters later bragged online: In nearly 90 percent of the cases, charges have been based at least in part on a person's own social media accounts.

A New York man, Robert Chapman, bragged on the dating app Bumble that he'd been in the Capitol during the riot. The person he was seeking to date responded, "We are not a match," and notified the FBI.
In fact, the investigative agency has now received "hundreds of thousands" of tips from the public, and has even posted photos of people who participated in the riots online asking for the public's help to identify them.

But NBC also reports that technology is being used to identify participants:

• "Investigators have also used facial recognition software, comparing images from surveillance cameras and an outpouring of social media and news agency videos against photo databases of the FBI and at least one other federal agency, Customs and Border Protection, according to court documents."

• Investigators "have also subpoenaed records from companies providing cellphone service, allowing agents to tell whether a specific person's phone was inside the Capitol during the siege."

Slashdot reader ytene writes: As reported by The Intercept, U.S. Customs and Border Protection have just spent $456,063 for a package of technology specifically designed to access smartphone data via a motor vehicle. From the article:

"...part of the draw of vacuuming data out of cars is that so many drivers are oblivious to the fact that their cars are generating so much data in the first place, often including extremely sensitive information inadvertently synced from smartphones."

This data can include "Recent destinations, favorite locations, call logs, contact lists, SMS messages, emails, pictures, videos, social media feeds, and the navigation history of everywhere the vehicle has been, when and where a vehicle's lights are turned on, and which doors are opened and closed at specific locations" as well as "gear shifts, odometer reads, ignition cycles, speed logs, and more. This car-based surveillance, in other words, goes many miles beyond the car itself."

Perhaps the most remarkable claim, however, was, "We had a Ford Explorer we pulled the system out, and we recovered 70 phones that had been connected to it. All of their call logs, their contacts and their SMS."

Mohammad Tajsar, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), is quoted as saying, "Whenever we have surveillance technology that's deeply invasive, we are disturbed," he said. "When it's in the hands of an agency that's consistently refused any kind of attempt at basic accountability, reform, or oversight, then it's Defcon 1."

"It never occurred to me that a Facebook-appointed panel could avoid a clear decision about Donald Trump's heinous online behavior," writes a New York Times technology reporter. "But that is what it's done..."

They call the board's decision "kind of perfect, actually, since it forces everyone's hand — from the Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg to our limp legislators in Congress..."

The editor of the conservative National Review adds: If Facebook had set out to demonstrate that it has awesome power over speech in the United States, including speech at the core of the nation's political debate, and is wielding that power arbitrarily, indeed has no idea what its own rules truly are or should be, it wouldn't have handled the question any differently... The oversight board underlines the astonishing fact that in reaching its most momentous free-speech decision ever in this country, in determining whether a former president of the United States can use its platform or not, Facebook made it up on the fly. "In applying this penalty," the board writes of the suspension, "Facebook did not follow a clear, published procedure." This is like the U.S. Supreme Court handing down decisions in the absence of a written Constitution, or a home-plate umpire calling balls and strikes without an agreed-upon strike zone...
John Samples, a member of the Oversight Board, has even said explicitly that their decision was not about former president Trump — but about Facebook itself. The Washington Post reports: Samples said the board found that Facebook enforced a rule that didn't exist at the time. Trump was suspended indefinitely, rather than permanently or for a specific period of time, as defined by the company's own rules. "In a sense we were being tough with them," Samples said.

Other members said the board's call should reassure anyone concerned that Facebook wields too much control over online speech. "Anyone who's concerned about Mark Zuckerberg's power and his company's power over our speech online should actually praise this decision," Julie Owono, executive director of Internet Sans Frontières, said at a virtual event hosted by the Stanford Cyber Policy Center. "The board refused to support an arbitrary suspension..."

The flurry of media appearances marked a critical moment in the board's existence, as it tries to prove its legitimacy, define its powers and establish its relationship with Facebook.
NPR notes that former Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, a board co-chair, even called Facebook "a bit lazy" for failing to set a specific penalty in the first place... "What we are telling Facebook is that they can't invent penalties as they go along. They have to stick to their own rules," Thorning-Schmidt said in an interview with Axios. The board's criticism didn't stop at Facebook's imposing what it called a "vague, standardless penalty." It slammed the company for trying to outsource its final verdict on Trump. "Facebook has a responsibility to its users and to its community and to the broader public to make its own decisions," Jamal Greene, another board co-chair and constitutional law professor at Columbia, said Thursday during an Aspen Institute event. "The board's job is to make sure that Facebook is doing its job," he said.

Tensions between the board's view of the scope of its role and Facebook's were also evident in the board's revelation that the company wouldn't answer seven of the 46 questions it asked about the Trump case. The questions Facebook refused to answer included how its own design and algorithms might have amplified the reach of Trump's posts and contributed to the Capitol assault. "The ones that the company refused to answer to are precisely related to what happened before Jan. 6," Julie Owono, an oversight board member and executive director of the digital rights group Internet Sans Frontières, said at the Aspen Institute event.

"Our decision says that you cannot make such an important decision, such a serious decision for freedom of expression, freedom of speech, without the adequate context."