Good—if depressing—article.

Putting together a reading list for a class on social media research reminds me how much writing on this serves as an unintentional history. I don’t know if any of this chapter on FB and Twitter APIs is still relevant, but that alone may be worth reading it for…

This is an important take, and I appreciate that the article concludes with a reminder that indie is the answer as we move forward with the social web.

On Thursday morning, I presented some work I’ve been doing with Dan Krutka at a session of the Association of Educational Communications and Technology. Here’s the title and abstract of our presentation: Teachers on Far-Right Social Media: The Dark Side of Affinity Spaces for Informal Learning We present the results of our studying a teachers’ group on a far-right social media platform. The identity of the platform and the persistence of far-right agenda setting overwhelmed any educational intentions of the group, which therefore had little to offer teachers looking to improve their craft.

So many important points in this piece.

I’ve tried to scale back my media consumption recently. My RSS client feels empty, and it’s weird not to check social media as much. Every time I think about stepping it back up, though, it just stresses me out.

This is… I don’t know what this is. Besides a whole bunch of nonsense.

Fascinating read—and one that reminds me that academic journal software doesn’t always render emoji either, which is a problem for social media research.

Yes, yes, and yes. I don’t know what the future of the social web will look like, but blogs are what it should look like.

This looks great!

Maybe it’s because of my area of research, but I think the headline here is misleading. Being a teacher on TikTok is one thing, and I’m not opposed to that. Putting your students on TikTok is entirely different, and I struggle to see that being ethically justified. Josh’s research is absolutely the right reference point here.

Thanks to the magic of the internet, I often listen to Francophone radio stations while working (most often French and Swiss—Radio-Canada doesn’t support streaming outside its own apps and sites). This is a great way to keep up with my French, and because there seems to be a minigenre of Francophone songs critiquing social media (Stromae’s Carmen comes to mind, but there’s at least one other whose name I can’t remember right now), it sometimes ends up being professionally relevant as well.

I read Feed in high school and found it interesting, but when I read it again in 2019, it was amazing. This review gets at why the book is so good—and important. Maybe it’s time for me to visit it again.

Gun control is good, but surveillance isn’t. I don’t think this is the answer.

This kind of social media surveillance has been bothering me for years. I’m happy it’s getting some attention, even if the impetus for that attention is such a tragedy. This is edtech and our discipline needs to treat it as such. link to ‘Software to detect school threats online is costly but mostly ineffective.’

Content moderation is a good thing, and ‘free speech’ should not be our primary concern when it comes to social media platforms.

Like in many PhD programs, my comprehensive exams included an element that was intended to help me prepare for my dissertation proposal, dissertation, and dissertation defense. Building off of my research interests and experiences up to that point, my advisor wrote me a lengthy question asking me to define and describe simulation games—the intent, of course, being that at least some of this could be worked into a literature review for a dissertation.

Lots of interesting ideas in this interview. I particularly like libraries running Mastodon instances.

Last week, I got the chance to chat with Salt Lake Tribune religion reporter Peggy Fletcher Stack about Latter-day Saint missionaries use of social media videos, and I was pleased to see the article published on Sunday. I hadn’t been paying attention to online missionary videos, but the subject fit nicely with the reading I’ve been doing on platform and platform values recently: Both kinds of accounts “are drawing from the internet/influencer cultures of these platforms,” [Greenhalgh] says.

Between Enilda here and Josh Rosenberg’s recent decision to do something similar, I feel that I have a lot to learn from and think about.

Admire what Josh is doing here. I’ve been rethinking my own social media presence recently and want to take some cues here.

Insightful piece on trolling and feeding trolls.

Very uncomfortable with this. Tweet wasn’t great, but not sure if it’s criminal. I’m sympathetic to the idea that we underpolice social media, but this is a fantastic example of why so many (including me) are worried about attempts to police it more.

This is a fascinating article on prepper communities on reddit. Great example of the importance of a gender lens.

This idea increasingly resonates with me.

Size and scale remain problems for Facebook and other social media platforms.

Interesting argument. I will say that having a running Keybase chat with distant friends has been terribly helpful during the pandemic.

Do not mess with open licensing.

Interesting proposal for a difficult issue.

Preparing a talk on social media and ethics for tomorrow night, and I believe I’ve found a way to sneak in a reference to one of my favorite bands.

Does anyone know of research on social media surveillance by school districts? Some local news stories have me thinking of a potential future project…