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…

24 hours on Elon’s Twitter feed is a great idea for a story, and I’m glad someone did it!

I dedicated most of my early career to Twitter and probably owe my tenure to the ease of collecting Twitter data once upon a time. Were it not for some timely decisions to diversify what platforms I was looking at, the API cutoff documented in this book would have really messed me up.

Because of how important Twitter was to me professionally, I followed a lot of this news as it was happening. Somehow, though, remembering all of these facts and events as I read them all in one place felt overwhelming. Had Musk really created that much chaos in such a relatively short period of time?

I’m currently reading Extremely Hardcore and can’t wait to read Character Limit. The Twitter purchase alone ought to dismiss any serious ideas that Musk could do this kind of work.

introduction and history

I’ve experimented for a while with consuming a range of media through an RSS reader. I don’t remember how long I subscribed to Feedbin, but being able to follow both Twitter accounts and email newsletters in the same app as my RSS subscriptions was a real game-changer. Eventually, I jumped ship for NetNewsWire—I don’t remember all the reasons behind the switch, but knowing that I could keep subscribing to Twitter and start following some subreddits was definitely a major factor.

Wish it were for more principled reasons, but I’ll take it.

What a disaster.

This is just a few words to say that this post that I wrote back in December 2022 has suddenly become relevant.

In short, some of my recent work has been on an online Mormon community that has some overlaps with the far-right. In between my collection of the data and eventual publication of our various articles, my co-author and I have noted some prominent accounts’ being suspended from Twitter. Because we work hard to not use identifiable quotes in our writing, and because of Elon Musk’s decision to unsuspend nearly all suspended accounts after taking the platform over, I’ve been checking accounts I knew to previously be suspended as we work on a new manuscript. Today, for the first time, I’ve found one account that has indeed been unsuspended.

I have zero personal interest in joining Bluesky, but I’m happy that you can follow accounts via RSS and even happier that whatever bug was stopping my RSS reader from pulling posts has been resolved. Glad to be following some people I haven’t seen since Twitter.

I was recently talking to some friends about how I’ve been working to make my Hugo blog the center of my online presence. In particular, even though I didn’t know the term at first, I’ve been trying since 2019 to follow the POSSE strategy of “Publish (to) Own Site, Send Elsewhere” (note that, in the grand tradition of many tech acronyms, everyone agrees what the acronym means, but there are multiple ways of understanding what it stands for exactly).

“Mentioning names both is and isn’t allowed. It’s a quantum superposition of content moderation that only collapses when observed by Musk himself.” 😂😂😂

Free speech absolutism wins again.

There are a couple of weeks before the deadline to submit abstracts for the Mormon Social Science Association’s sessions at the 2024 meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, so I’ve been filling some nooks and crannies of my busy work week by looking at some Twitter data. Last year, I published with my colleague Amy Chapman a qualitative look at the #DezNat Twitter hashtag, which blends Mormon orthodoxy with far-right and anti-feminist thinking.

Musk’s pettiness knows no bounds.

I was already fed up with Twitter before election season started. C’mon, Musk.

Gift link.

I don’t get what’s missing from a world without generative AI—and examples like this don’t make me any more convinced.

Musk ne s’intéresse à la liberté d’expression que quand il peut en profiter.

Kind of hilarious, actually, but in the depressing way that most Twitter news is these days.

Is this the same feature Elon says will be sufficient for keeping Alex Jones in check?

This… this is even worse than just giving him an account back. Ugh.

Musk keeps digging his hole deeper and deeper.

What a joke.

Masnick’s frustration here is fun to read.

I’ve been waiting for Masnick’s response to this, and it’s good.

What the hell, Musk.