onfocus

"Salma al-Shehab, a Saudi student living in the UK and attending Leeds University, was sentenced to 34 years in prison for having a Twitter account and following and retweeting dissidents and activists. She was arrested and convicted after returning home for a holiday."

Saudi Arabia partnered with Elon Musk to become the 2nd largest investor in Twitter. It doesn’t look like Musk is building a free speech platform.

"The law allows financial penalties of $10,000 per violation, which can be tripled when violations are deemed intentional. The Attorney General’s Office asserted Facebook has committed several hundred violations since 2018."

This is a new one: a corporation intentionally breaking the law over and over again might have consequences?

"The rise of services that connect strangers through private messaging has strained the conventional “see something, say something” mantra repeated in the decades since the Columbine High School massacre and other attacks, according to social media researchers. And when strangers do suspect something is wrong, they may feel they have limited ways to respond beyond filing a user report into a corporate abyss."

Centralized social media without strong moderation was a big mistake. The advertising industry needs to force reforms but I’m not optimistic.

"Robbins, who said she lives in California and only ever interacted with Ramos online, told CNN she reported him to Yubo several times and blocked his account, but continued seeing him in livestreams making lewd comments."

We need both online and physical world consequences for threatening behavior online. Services allowing people to repeatedly make threats of physical harm is unethical but it is the status quo for online media.

"The larger point, though, is that network activity plus some corroborating evidence based on the content of the speech should allow plaintiffs to succeed in many cases where an attacker was playing out the paranoid fantasies of a larger radical network that was effectively under the control of a few key individuals."

Interesting proposal that could bring accountability to ringleaders who spread dangerous rhetoric online. If someone spreads violent paranoid fantasies and their followers act on it in the real world there’s really no consequences right now.

"They discussed how various platforms, from Twitter to TikTok and Telegram, are moderating the content coming out of Russia and Ukraine right now; the costs and benefits of Western companies pulling operations out of Russia during a period of increasing crackdown; and how the events of the last few weeks might shape our thinking about the nature and power of information operations."

Good discussion of the state of global social media moderation during an information war.

"Beginning Saturday morning, NetBlocks saw failed or heavily throttled connections across every major Russian telecom provider, including Rostelecom, MTS, Beeline, and MegaFon. Russians are still able to access Twitter through VPN services, but direct connections are restricted."

Twitter should stop carrying Russian media outlets.

Post-election, the company dissolved a unit on civic integrity where she had been working, which Haugen said was the moment she realized “I don’t trust that they’re willing to actually invest what needs to be invested to keep Facebook from being dangerous.”

Dissolving society for profit.

”Amplification of moral outrage is a clear consequence of social media’s business model, which optimizes for user engagement,” Crockett said…She added, “Our data show that social media platforms do not merely reflect what is happening in society. Platforms create incentives that change how users react to political events over time.”

The "we are merely passive mirrors showing society as it is" argument is BS. I recommend that people switch to blogging which has next to zero engagement. This void encourages you to maintain existing levels of outrage. But seriously, a primary by-product of Facebook and Twitter are trolls.

"The study “helps add to the growing body of evidence that, despite a variety of mitigation efforts, misinformation has found a comfortable home — and an engaged audience — on Facebook,” said Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University, who reviewed the study’s findings."

huh, people love to hear things that confirm something they want to believe. That’s extremely profitable!

"I asked about the possibility—floated by many critics of the account—that by sharing extremist rhetoric to a broad audience with little other information, PatriotTakes is effectively re-platforming people who have been removed from the public square for a reason. The account’s owner was uninterested in discussing it."

If an account reposts racist and fascist garbage does the intention (pointing and laughing or "monitoring") really matter? The account is amplifying and spreading racist and fascist garbage.

"More than anything else, Tumblr in 2020 is a self-sustaining ecosystem. It’s a semi-sealed and increasingly fertile terrarium, a nigh-impossible perpetual-motion machine of a platform going productively psychotic in its isolation."

Nice look at the recent history and current state of Tumblr.