I was not familiar with the term “glass cliff,” so this was an insightful read.

This article has been available online for nearly two years, but since I don’t have any previous posts about it, I’m happy to announce that a study of mine with Dan Krutka has just been assigned to an issue at the Journal of Research on Technology in Education. A number of years ago, Twitter released some large datasets of tweets associated with accounts created as part of various governments’ information operation efforts. Neither misinformation nor information operations are a specialty of mine, but I was interested in seeing if these datasets overlapped with work that I was involved in. So, one day, I downloaded the datasets, loaded them all into R, and searched for some terms germane to my research. That’s how, a couple of years ago, I produced a paper on government-sponsored accounts’ invocations of Mormonism as part of efforts to sow discord in the United States.

Bellingcat does good work; Twitter continues to be a joke.

I know I can always count on Masnick to write this article when a story like this comes up.

I feel like I say this whenever I post a link to a Twitter story, but I honestly can’t believe how dumb this stuff gets sometimes. Also, is Musk going to give someone else control of @ldschurch?

I’m tired of reading Twitter news, but I’m professionally obligated to do so, no matter how dumb it gets.

Starting to get notices about my Twitter API access being suspended. So long, Twitter research: You were an important part of my career, and I’ll miss you.

To paraphrase Mike Masnick, the defining motto of the Musk era seems to be ‘it can always get more stupid.’

How does this acquisition continue to get dumber and dumber?

The pettiness continues.

Some good commentary here. Musk loves certain buzzwords and flashy stunts, but they’re often in tension with the other decisions he makes.

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.

This is another dumb move by Musk. Masnick is excellent at calling him out on hypocrisy.

RIP my Twitter research. Glad I have other irons in the fire…

Twitter just gets worse and worse. What a joke.

This is just so petty. I don’t know how his leadership at Twitter is defensible anymore.

Every time I think this acquisition can’t get dumber, it does.

Some good coverage of the consequences of API restrictions for researchers—though I think we still need clarification from Twitter about whether the academic dev status is being handled separately from primary dev status.

I presume this decisuon also cuts off academics; this is going to have a huge impact on research, and not in a good way. I’m glad I’ve pivoted to other platforms, but this is still infuriating.

Welp, all the more reason to leave birdsite behind.

Ah, the kind of answer that only raises more questions.

Repeat after me: Content moderation is a good thing.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve noticed a lot of conversations about Mastodon’s lack of a feature equivalent to Twitter’s “quote tweets.” To be honest, I don’t really care about the lack of a “quote toot” feature, and I’ve done my best to steer clear of these conversations (though I did note while writing this post that it caught the eye of Mastodon’s founder in a big way). I gather that these conversations been around for a while, but I get the sense from my own feeds that there’s been a notable recent uptick. That uptick has meant that it’s been difficult to avoid them crossing my feed, and so even without trying, I’ve had a few thoughts about “quote toots” that I think might be worth sharing.

Although it’s been a real delight to see so many people joining Mastodon over the past few weeks, I’ve found that there’s also a disadvantage that I hadn’t expected: I’m spending a lot more time scrolling through Mastodon these days than I ever have since setting up my Mastodon accounts.

When I began setting up Mastodon accounts and shifting away from Twitter back in April, I felt like I had made a big leap forward in terms of my online consumption. One thing that I’d always struggled with on Twitter was the feeling that I needed to see every single post from every single account. I’d eventually helped with that by consuming Twitter via RSS and narrowing my followed accounts down to the ones that I really, really wanted to follow. By virtue of converting Twitter to RSS, I was still consuming all the posts from those accounts, but it also forced me to only pick those accounts that wouldn’t overwhelm my RSS reader with posts I didn’t really care about.

What a weird week it has been in Twitterland.