For over three years now, I’ve been getting increasingly involved with research projects that involve the online far right in one way or another. One of the most interesting ways that I’ve developed as a researcher during this time is having to think through in greater detail my commitments to research ethics. Because my research typically focuses on public social media data, I am rarely required to obtain informed consent from those whom I study.

Infertility sucks, and stories like this make me even more upset about Musk’s callous and chaotic Twitter takeover.

I’m glad I began reading Techdirt before this whole mess started… Masnick’s persective has been a helpful guide.

Is he serious? Does he really think this is a good idea? Also, I love the increasing sass that The Verge and other outlets are putting into their comments about Twitter no longer having a communications team to respond to requests for comment.

This seems petty, immature, and misguided.

I didn’t expect 1,200 resignations!

Oh good, so on top of the unexpected chaos, the expected chaos is also still happening.

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the 2022 meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion to present research with Amy Chapman on how the reactionary DezNat movement on Mormon Twitter conceptualizes and claims—but ultimately problematizes—religious authority in the online sphere. We presented in one of the sessions sponsored by the Mormon Social Science Association and were lucky enough to have some good conversations and receive some helpful feedback.

This doesn’t surprise me at all. So much of the current Twitter chaos is predictable.

What an absolute mess this whole thing has been.

Move fast and break things, indeed. Checks as verification and checks as business model are inherently at odds with each other, and I get the vibe that Musk (team business model) is unhappy with internal pushback from team verification.

They’re so obvious as to almost not be worth pointing out, but two points: First, this is why making verification a paid feature is dumb; and second, penalizing parody because your business model is dumb is not what free speech absolutism looks like.

Choosing not to do business with someone isn’t an assault on free speech—it’s the very definition of the marketplace of ideas.

The best figure I’ve ever included in a scholarly publication was a screenshot of a joke I made in a tweet and was especially proud of. The screenshot happened to demonstrate a Twitter feature I was trying to explain, which seemed justification enough.

Content moderation is a good thing, and not all viewpoints deserve a seat at a table.

Interesting read here from Masnick. I’m not familiar with everything he writes about here, but I always appreciate his perspective.

This is a good response to Musk’s complaining about bots.

A good case for why the edit button probably isn’t as good as everyone thinks.

Musk continues his trolling. This is a dumb proposal, and Twitter shouldn’t accept it.

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.

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.”

What an enormous mess this is turning into.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Et bien oui, ça me paraît très évident.

Say it together now: Content moderation and free speech are different things.

The quotes in here underline how often ‘free speech’ is used to mean ‘problematic right-wing talking points.’

EFF cares about and actually understands free speech and content moderation, so their voice is especially important today.

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.

Yet another reason to revisit my social media presence.

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.