Musk continues his trolling. This is a dumb proposal, and Twitter shouldn’t accept it. link to ‘Elon Musk challenges Twitter CEO to a ‘public debate’ about bots - The Verge’

I always appreciate Masnick’s going into the legal details that are above my head. Techdirt has proven to be one of the most helpful sources for understanding this fiasco. link to ‘Musk’s Attempt To Get Out Of The Twitter Deal Proceeding Exactly As Predicted; What Happens Next? | Techdirt’

Best line: “Musk seemed to relish the ability to make wishful product plans about free speech and corporate independence more than he wanted to develop a coherent business plan for Twitter.” link to ‘Elon Musk officially tries to bail on buying Twitter - The Verge’

What an enormous mess this is turning into. link to ‘Twitter Is Ready for a Potential Legal Battle With Elon Musk - The New York Times’

I’m happy to report that a paper of mine (in collaboration with David E. Williams at the University of Saskatchewan) has just been published in The Internet and Higher Education. We topic modeled 77,514 tweets from 59 academically-themed but anonymous or pseudonymous Twitter accounts. This resulted in five broad topics, and we followed up with a qualitative analysis of the 100 most-representative tweets from each of those topics to generate some narrower codes.

What a mess. Glad to be pivoting toward my blog and Mastodon. link to ‘Elon Musk Threatens to End Twitter Deal Without Information on Spam Accounts - The New York Times’

Last week, I was interviewed by a reporter at WEKU about social media and content moderation in the context of the horrific recent shooting in Buffalo, and I was pleased to see the interview appear on the WEKU website this morning. I wish that the headline didn’t frame this as a question of “free speech”—and that I’d perhaps been more forceful in emphasizing that these really aren’t questions of free speech so much as content moderation.

Just used the phrase ‘hashtag ontology’ in a draft manuscript, and I think that will keep me happy the rest of the day.

What a troll. Even if the deal falls through, the way in which a sole rich dude can mess around with Twitter is souring me on the platform. link to ‘Elon Musk Says Twitter Deal ‘Cannot Move Forward’ in Current State - The New York Times’

If QAnon is excited, the rest of us should be worried—though I think there is a possibility that Musk realizes just how bad his ideas re: limiting moderation are and fails to deliver. link to ‘QAnon Thinks Elon Musk Is Going to Let Them Back On Twitter’

Is this just mastodon.social? Seems like it, but that’s not the only instance getting a bump, and sloppy reporting to ignore how federated instances work—that’s one of the reasons we’re all moving there. link to ‘30,000 New Users Signed Up for Mastodon After Elon Musk Bought Twitter’

Et bien oui, ça me paraît très évident. link to ‘En rachetant Twitter, “Elon Musk a un projet politique derrière la tête”, estime un journaliste qui a enquêté sur l’homme le plus riche du monde’

Say it together now: Content moderation and free speech are different things. link to ‘Conservatives celebrate Musk’s deal to buy Twitter. - The New York Times’

The quotes in here underline how often ‘free speech’ is used to mean ‘problematic right-wing talking points.’ link to ‘Trump says he won’t leave Truth Social, despite Musk’s Twitter takeover - The Verge’

EFF cares about and actually understands free speech and content moderation, so their voice is especially important today. link to ‘Twitter Has a New Owner. Here’s What He Should Do. | Electronic Frontier Foundation’

Not excited about this, but the good news is that I’ve already been thinking about revamping my web presence, and this is a push to do something about it. link to ‘Twitter accepts buyout, giving Elon Musk total control of the company - The Verge’

Yet another reason to revisit my social media presence. link to ‘Twitter in talks with Musk over bid to buy platform, according to reports : NPR’

Bad faith edits were the main reason why I’ve never jumped on the “edit button” train, so I think this is a good way to handle this. link to ‘Twitter’s upcoming edit feature may keep track of tweet history - The Verge’

Content moderation is a necessity, and Musk’s take here is wildly irresponsible. link to ‘Elon Musk, After Toying With Twitter, Now Wants It All - The New York Times’

À propos of nothing in particular, I’m looking into how to set up a Mastodon instance, and it’s not as hard or expensive as I thought.

This story just keeps getting worse. link to ‘Twitter and Elon Musk Are Now at War’

Please be skeptical of anyone who describes platform content moderation as censorship.

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’

Not a great look. link to ‘Twitter reportedly suspended accounts by mistake after extremists abused new private media policy - The Verge’

File this under bad solutions to worse problems. link to ‘Twitter policy aimed at improving privacy sparks concerns over misuse : NPR’

Working some this week on doubling down on RSS. Switching apps, trimming feeds, continuing to use it as my Twitter and newsletter interface, and trying to get more into Micro.blog and reddit by integrating them into my RSS “readflow”.

I have now successfully migrated all of my “following” to Feedbin’s Twitter-to-RSS service. Weird way to keep up with tweets (and costs me a monthly fee), but I’m really enjoying it so far.

When Twitter first gut-punched third-party apps by limiting their API, I was afraid not being able to check “likes” through Tweetbot would make it unusable. Now, that’s actually the appeal.

Currently in the middle of the long process of purging old tweets from my Twitter account, so my profile page looks weird, as though I haven’t tweeted regularly since 2017.

It’s amazing how much French I’m learning translating students’ tweets to English for a research project. Language is so rich, and limiting it to 280 characters arguably makes it more so.

This post is a test of Twitter integration with my new Hugo blog (via Siri Shortcuts).