I think it was an episode of the Reply All podcast that opened my eyes to the fact that not listening to microphones and still placing creepily relevant ads is actually the worse possibility.

I have ten minutes to rage-write this post before I join a meeting, so it may not be particularly nuanced—though I’d love to revisit these examples in the future. I recently got to listen to Cory Doctorow read the first hour or so of his forthcoming Enshittification, and I was struck by two things in the first couple of minutes. First, by the way that he tied enshittification to platforms, and by the way he loosely defined platforms as intermediaries. I think there’s something important in both of those.

Love this framing of using Meta as “making donations to Mark Zuckerberg.” It nicely describes the idea of digital labor that’s been on my mind for a couple of years now.

Directly out of Musk’s playbook. All the more reason to ditch Meta for the fediverse.

I especially appreciate this article in the wake of Meta’s recent announcements. There are cases in which content moderation is inconsistent or overreaching, and there are cases in which less moderation fixes the problem. However, it’s the arbitrary distinctions and self-serving nature of the changes that make the “free expression” argument so flimsy.

See, this is the kind of content moderation we ought to worry about (and why “keep the kids safe” narratives can go horribly wrong).

Worth reading (and bookmarking). I’ve been hesitant to make the “no, actually, Big Tech is biased against liberals” argument, but this seems a compelling datum for that conclusion…

As I hinted at in a recent linkpost, something really interesting happened this week that serves as a sort of microcosm of my research interests related to online Mormonism and religious authority. Here’s a rundown of what happened, as reported by the Salt Lake Tribune (and republished here via MSN).

First, a leader of the official Latter-day Saint women’s organization gave a sermon last Sunday, one quote from which was uploaded to the official Latter-day Saint Instagram account:

Bookmarking for future research. What a fascinating (if frustrating) interplay of social media platforms and religious authority.

I’m in no way Team Meta, but this may not be a terrible thing?

Yesterday afternoon, I had the pleasure of talking with Arianna Prothero at EducationWeek about Seattle Public Schools’ suing Snap, Alphabet, Meta, and ByteDance, and she ended up quoting me—and colleagues like Jeff Carpenter and Josh Rosenberg—in her article.

I appreciate that all three of us were quoted in the article, because Jeff and Josh both made points that I didn’t articulate as well in my conversation with Arianna. For example, Jeff’s comments summed up a lot of the complexities that have gone through my head: