This is… I don’t know what this is. Besides a whole bunch of nonsense. link to ‘Twitter Demands Academics Who Won’t Pay $42k/Month Delete Any Twitter Data They Currently Have | Techdirt’

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. link to ‘The poop emoji: a legal history - The Verge’

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. link to ‘Bring back personal blogging - The Verge’

This looks great! link to ‘Welcome to Smalltown, a Civic Space Online - Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure’

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. link to ‘The Tricky Ethics of Being a Teacher on TikTok | WIRED’

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. link to ‘M.T. Anderson’s ‘Feed’ Remains Frustratingly Prescient | WIRED’

Gun control is good, but surveillance isn’t. I don’t think this is the answer. link to ‘New York gun applicants will have to submit their social accounts for review : NPR’

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. link to ‘Racist and Violent Ideas Jump From Web’s Fringes to Mainstream Sites - The New York Times’

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. link to ‘Why we need a public internet and how to get one - The Verge’

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. link to ‘Sometimes in order to reconnect, you have to disconnect – Design Goodiness’

Admire what Josh is doing here. I’ve been rethinking my own social media presence recently and want to take some cues here. link to ‘A social media reset | Joshua M. Rosenberg, Ph.D.’

Insightful piece on trolling and feeding trolls. link to ‘GOP Social Media Experiments Fail (In Part) Because They Break The Troll/Amplification Cycle | Techdirt’

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. link to ‘Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK for posting ‘offensive’ tweet - The Verge’

This is a fascinating article on prepper communities on reddit. Great example of the importance of a gender lens. link to ‘Women are splitting off from Reddit’s preppers sub.’

This idea increasingly resonates with me. link to ‘To Make Social Media Work Better, Make It Fail Better | Electronic Frontier Foundation’

Size and scale remain problems for Facebook and other social media platforms. link to ‘Researchers explain why they believe Facebook mishandles political ads : NPR’

Interesting argument. I will say that having a running Keybase chat with distant friends has been terribly helpful during the pandemic. link to ‘The Secret to a Better Internet? Post Less, Chat More. - The New York Times’

Do not mess with open licensing. link to ‘Trump’s site Truth Social broke software rules, says copyleft group - The Verge’

Interesting proposal for a difficult issue. link to ‘The Giftschrank offers a path for social media companies on content moderation transparency.’

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…