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.

This was one of the dumbest parts of all Meta’s announcements and now it’s… basically nothing, too?

Not the headline I would have chosen, but very interesting argument here.

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

Meta’s cynicism and groveling is pretty appalling.

Some more good writing on a bad situation.

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.

Moderating employees but not users seems telling to me.

Personally, I’ve come around to the idea that fewer restrictions, “Community Notes”-style responses, and lots of personal control over what one sees could work better as content moderation. It’s interesting to see Bluesky take some of these approaches, for example! Here, though, this seems like it’s bending the knee to the Trump administration, and I can’t imagine any of this being done in good faith. What a disappointment Meta continues to be.

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

This is one of these stories where I’ve been waiting to get Masnick’s take on it, and he does not disappoint.

I really enjoy metahumor, and Finnemore’s talent for it is on full display in this series—even to the extent of calling himself out on overreliance on it. Doesn’t bother me, though!

Ugh, so creepy.

I think folks are right to distrust Meta, but Threads with ActivityPub seems to me to be clearly better than Threads without.

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

I think this is a much bigger deal than any purported security risk.

Lots to appreciate here.

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:

Very interesting read.