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. The combination of these computationally-derived topics and the human-generated codes gave us a peek into what pseudonymous academic accounts tweet about. The paper is freely available at this link through August 2nd, 2022 if you’re interested in grabbing a copy.

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. I’m also a bit disappointed that our conversation about 4chan in the early part of the interview got cut; I get why (probably not as interesting to the average viewer than some of my more generally-reaching comments), but I also think it’s important to understand that there are these dark places out there on the internet and that they are leading to tragedies like Buffalo.

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.