Disney put the brakes on going back to the movies. Here’s why

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For many months now, the much-anticipated Marvel movie Black Widow has sat boldly on the movie release calendar. Slated to come out in theaters on May 7, the film was a sign that Disney, the studio releasing the film, felt confident that the ebbing state of the pandemic meant that fans would swarm to see the film in-person, driving up box-office receipts. More than any other film set for release this year, Black Widow was a harbinger of better times ahead for the movie business, which has been severely crippled by COVID-19.   On Tuesday, Disney dashed those hopes.   The studio abruptly announced on March 23 that it was not only moving Black Widow back to July 9, but that it will be simultaneously releasing the film on its streaming service, Disney Plus, for an additional $30 for subscribers, as it’s done with films such as Mulan and Raya and the Last Dragon . Disney also said that Cruella , which stars Emma Stone as Cruella de Vil, will also get the day-and-date theatrical-streaming treatment, though the film will   remain on its original release date of May 28.   Other changes included pushing the next Pixar film, Luca , straight to streaming on June 18, and delaying films including the Ryan Reynolds comedy Free Guy and another Marvel film, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings .   The news was a major blow to the exhibition business (to put it mildly), as well as a sign that the world’s emergence from COVID-19 is slow, laborious, and prone to unforeseen shifts—such as the new strains of COVID-19 that are ravishing Europe at the moment, sending countries back into lockdown. This gradual, up-and-down emergence from the pandemic, as opposed to the quick, clean pivot everyone would love, is evident in current movie theater attendance. While recent releases like Tom and Jerry and Croods 2 have proven that there’s pent-up demand to get back into theaters, in the United States the reality is that only 52% of theaters are currently open. Those that are operating are doing so at between 25% and 50% capacity. Anecdotally, that means that parents who couldn’t wait to break out of the house and go see Raya and the Last Dragon with their kids last weekend in cities like Los Angeles, where vaccinations are moving along at a steady clip, found themselves in empty-feeling theaters that were nonetheless sold out. That’s great for audiences, safety-wise. But not so great for Disney looking at all that lost revenue. The fact that Raya was also on Disney Plus was a consolation for the studio, as it now will be with Black Widow . Read More …

Meet the developer suing Apple for failing to clean up the App Store

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Kosta Eleftheriou, an iOS app developer, says there’s a simple way to investigate whether an iPhone app might be a scam. The first step is to ignore the app’s average star rating and featured reviews, which he says are too easy for developers to artificially inflate. Instead, you should look at the full list of written reviews, sort them by “Most Recent,” and start searching for patterns. Glowing reviews filled with bad grammar and nonsensical sentences are a bad sign, but the real tells are the one-star reviews. If you spot users complaining about astronomical in-app purchase prices or features that don’t work as advertised, the app is probably much worse than its stellar score lets on. “You’ve got to make sure that you do a little bit of work,” Eleftheriou says. “You want to investigate.” Eleftheriou has done plenty of his own App Store sleuthing in recent months. After discovering that a shoddy imitation of his popular FlickType keyboard app was charging customers hundreds of dollars per year in subscription fees, he launched his own crusade against App Store scams in general. On Twitter, he regularly flags apps that appear to be purchasing fake reviews and tricking users into making expensive in-app purchases, and he’s called out Apple for not doing enough to stop them. Up to now, I've been in the “Apple *wants* to do the right thing” camp. Read More …

In a world of screens, Sherry Turkle wants to make eye contact

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Sherry Turkle would prefer not to tweet. “My publisher said, ‘Look, you have to tweet, you have to force yourself, you have to learn how to do that!’ ” Her publisher being the one that just released The Empathy Diaries , a gripping, elegant memoir in which the psychologist and scholar and critic of technology finally puts herself under the microscope. The megaphone of social media is more complicated. “I’m really not very good at it, so I just keep saying things like ‘surreal that . . .!’ ‘Thrilled to see my exciting . . .’ I never say that. I feel like such a jerk. And then I started an Instagram account. And I said, ‘I can’t do this. . . . I mean, I barely can keep up with my email.’ And considering all the people we have to be, it was just one extra person that I couldn’t attend to right now.” Though, she admits, “Once the pandemic is over, I may change my mind.” Minds and selves and how they change have long been fascinations for Turkle, the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé professor of the social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. So this pandemic time, as awful and deadly and isolating as it is, is also interesting. It’s also a time when the digital technology that she’s studied for so long has become increasingly entwined with our minds and bodies—and just at the moment when we were asking some of the urgent questions that Turkle’s been asking for years now. Like, How do our objects objectify us? Sherry Turkle with her mother, 1953. [Photo: courtesy of Sherry Turkle] In The Empathy Diaries , Turkle describes a long personal relationship with what anthropologist Victor Turner calls “liminal moments,” transitions and inflection points that can also be thresholds to new ways of thinking. Born in postwar Brooklyn to a working-class Jewish family, she read and wrote her way to Radcliffe—which she attended when it was folded into all-male Harvard—and then studied in Paris in 1968, when student protests were giving way to new ideas about the mind. Read More …

17 moments in the long, turbulent history of vaccine skepticism

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This story is part of Doubting the Dose, a series that examines anti-vaccine sentiment and the role of misinformation in supercharging it.  Read more here . Quick—when did the epidemic of misinformation about vaccines begin? Was it when Jenny McCarthy took to The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2007 to claim that a vaccine caused her son’s autism? Or maybe when the anti-vax movement discovered that social networks such as Facebook and Twitter were a powerful way to amp their message and recruit new members to the cause? Try a little earlier than that—by more than two centuries. Shortly after Edward Jenner pioneered vaccination at the end of the 1700s, the movement against it began. Even earlier, vaccination’s precursor—known at the time as inoculation or variolation—inspired similar fear and misconceptions. Some of the specific arguments made against vaccines have evolved over the years. The means used to amplify them—from pamphlets to online videos—have changed even more. Read More …

A Trump social network could get sued out of existence

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Donald Trump is “holding high-powered meetings” to start his own social network in the next two to three months, according to the ex-president’s adviser Jason Miller, who appeared on the Fox News show Media Buzz on Sunday. The former president was, of course, booted from Twitter and suspended from YouTube and Facebook (pending review), after spewing misinformation about the 2020 election and, arguably, inciting a riot at the Capitol on January 6. Sunday night, many on the right were joyous about the idea of a Trump social networking site. “BarYohai,” a commenter on FoxNews.com, summed up the sentiment nicely : This is how the free market works. People “vote” with their wallets. Trump’s social media platform will be widely successful and, additionally, it will create an incentive for people to close their Twitter (and perhaps even Facebook) accounts. Amazon and other self-appointed “speech police” will also feel the economic pain as dissatisfied customers seek substitutes for, and then “cancel” the “cancel culture” businesses. But running a social network is hard, as Trump may soon find out if Miller is right. People post untrue, defamatory, threatening, and conspiratorial things on social networks, requiring a major investment in content moderation staff and systems. It might get even harder this year if Congress decides to scale back or repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields social networks from civil suits arising from hosting (or removing) user content. Actually, repealing Section 230 was one of Trump’s go-to threats against the Big Tech companies that run social networks, especially Twitter. Days after Twitter began applying truth labels to his tweets, Trump released an executive order directing Congress to remove the 230 protections. #BREAKING : President Trump signs executive order strip liability protection from companies that censure content: “Companies that engage in censoring or any political conduct will not be able to keep their liability shield.” https://t.co/D5ooUw1fNz pic.twitter.com/FHs7kUvJH1 — The Hill (@thehill) May 28, 2020 Many of Trump’s executive orders had little effect, but that one spurred some of his GOP devotees in Congress, such as Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, to introduce bills restricting the Section 230 protections. Hawley’s 2019 Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act reserves Section 230 protections only for content removals the social network can prove were “politically neutral.” A House bill from Arizona Republican Paul Gosar proposed revoking Section 230’s legal exemptions for social networks that remove content they deem “objectionable.” Other bills condition the legal protections on more transparent content monitoring and faster removal of toxic content. Reforming Section 230 is one of the few issues in Congress that’s garnered support from both Democrats and Republicans, if for different reasons Read More …