We understand that everybody is overwhelmed with the information, recommendations and content that blasts out from social media every day. So we want to distil the best of the web by recommending just three links every week that you absolutely must see. No fluff, no fuss, just three exceptional reads. Here are this week’s recommendations:
1. Putin’s plan is failing in ways he could not have imagined (Simon Schama / FT)
Countless small acts of defiance, a daily astonishment — doubtless to the Kremlin as to the rest of the admiring world — are all over the internet: villagers draped in Ukrainian flags, impeding tanks and armoured cars, leaving the soldiers who man them bewildered about what to do next with the crowd whose grateful acclaim they had been told to expect. Hatred rains down on their head rather than nosegays. Troops who have no difficulty firing missiles on faraway, unseen targets, pull up short before gunning down grandmothers and teenagers. Notwithstanding the grotesque disparity in military resources between the invaders and the invaded, there have been pitched battles where the ostensibly larger force has come off worse
2. Inside Pornhub’s decade-old moderation problem (Nathan Munn / The Verge)
I often encountered videos that were uploaded again and again, no matter how many times I removed them. One day, a woman emailed me, calmly explained that her ex-boyfriend had uploaded a video of them having sex, and asked me to remove it. I deleted the clip. Later that week, it was re-uploaded. The woman wrote again, I removed it, and this continued for months; I must have pulled the same video down a dozen times. This was before I had ever heard the term “revenge porn.”
Requests like this were not uncommon. Once, a woman wrote to say there was a video of her on Tube8 that showed her being sexually assaulted after someone spiked her drink at a party. The video had tens of thousands of views, so I had to review it before making the call to remove it. In the clip, the woman is clearly high, laughing and head lolling, having sex on a bed surrounded by fully dressed people holding drinks and watching as colored lights flashed and music blared in the background. I took it down, but it was uploaded again repeatedly in the following months. Each time, the mortified woman flagged it, and each time, I removed it; both of us were aware that there was nothing we could do to stop the clip from resurfacing.
3. Inside a refugee centre as 1.3 million flee Russian invasion (Channel 4 News)
Image credit: Timon Studler