> Reuters spoke to seven former NewsBreak employees, including five who said most of the engineering work behind the app's algorithm is carried out in its China-based offices.
> NewsBreak is a privately held start-up, whose primary backers are private equity firms San Francisco-based Francisco Partners, and Beijing-based IDG Capital, NewsBreak told Reuters.
> In February, IDG Capital was added to a list of dozens of Chinese companies the Pentagon said were allegedly working with Beijing's military.
> A 2022 company roster reviewed by Reuters showed that 100 of NewsBreak's 137 engineers at the time were based in China.
> Pearlstine, the former NewsBreak consultant, said NewsBreak's ability to demonstrate it is a U.S. company was critical. "The long term health of NewsBreak was dependent on its being perceived as a California company and that the more the leadership was in Mountain View, the better it would be for the company," he said.
information publishing has a brand name, you the consumer can use it or not. The deeper issue may be a sense of helpless enslavement to your tracking-device phone, not a particular news source. This story "hurts" more since the obvious decline in news products since the Internet age -- also a larger story than one cheapo news outfit IMHO
The weird part is that everyone has an opinion about everything but we do a poor job gathering that data, gathering references and debating the different perspectives. Finding a middle ground or doing anything practical are alien topics in 2024. Im not suggesting we go back to the duel to the death but it was damn practical :)
Allowing your primary geo-strategic competitor to run disinformation ops within your borders does not increase free speech.
At some point we need to stop being simple-minded and naive about this.
It might be too late - and especially, it might have always been.
The Spanish-American happened during direct first-decedents of the Founding Fathers, and happened because of yellow journalism -- a.k.a false or exaggerated news reporting -- and we conducted a whole war as a result of it. And when the smoke cleared out, it was decided that war is an acceptable outcome and result of the right that Congress cannot abridge freedom of speech OR press.
The first amendment will likely be our greatest strength and flaw, and I'm not surprised if the final nail in the coffin was caused by its upholding.
I agree that sounds like the right thing to do, however it would become a howitzer-sized footgun wielded for ideological purposes. I don’t at all trust enough of our leaders to not break the country, then “fix” it, break again, thrashing. 14th amendment right out the window on day two :)
