Toots for ethanz@social.coop account

Written by Ethan Zuckerman on 2025-02-03 at 20:36

danah boyd on attack on the US administrative state: 

https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2025/02/03/what-game-are-we-playing.html

"This is not brush burning. This is arson."

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Written by Ethan Zuckerman on 2025-01-31 at 16:26

We want to use data from social media platforms to understand their effects on democracy. AI companies use data from social media platforms to build giant, resource-guzzling bullshit generatorss When platforms block the second, they end up blocking the first: https://www.techpolicy.press/ai-companies-threaten-independent-social-media-research/

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Written by Ethan Zuckerman on 2025-01-25 at 15:40

More than a dozen years, I wrote an essay about white plastic chairs and their ubiquity: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2011/04/06/those-white-plastic-chairs-the-monobloc-and-the-context-free-object/ And now, I find myself talking to the Washington Post about Bad Bunny's new album, and my late mentor, Bernard Woma: https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/2025/01/25/bad-bunny-monobloc-plastic-chair-album-cover/A great piece but they didn't quite get my Bernard story right. Bernard (Ghanaian) loved to talk about how strange food in America was. He was particularly fond of joking that Dr. Pepper should be called "Dr. Sugar" because it wasn't peppery at all

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Written by Ethan Zuckerman on 2025-01-25 at 15:40

May he rest in peace, and may white plastic chairs bring back memories of absent friends.

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Written by Ethan Zuckerman on 2025-01-25 at 15:30

Loving the fact that Teen Vogue continues to be one of the most clear-eyed, straightforward places to find smart Marxist commentary. (And I mean that in the best possible way.): https://www.teenvogue.com/story/billionaires-should-not-exist

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Written by Ethan Zuckerman on 2025-01-21 at 18:12

Howdy, Texas! I'll be in Austin on Thursday, giving a talk about unpermissioned research on digital media, a topic that's more important than ever with Twitter, Meta and TikTok's embrace of Maga. Sign up and come say hi. bit.ly/4hfRuIg

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Shared by Ethan Zuckerman on 2025-01-20 at 15:39 (original by Kevin McShane)

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Written by Ethan Zuckerman on 2025-01-20 at 14:26

With Trump's inaugural podium filled with social media barons, it seems like a good time to review the Spanish American War and how new media - the penny press - led us into conflict: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/media/69071/zuckerberg-its-time-to-face-the-facts

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Written by Ethan Zuckerman on 2025-01-20 at 12:50

Nothing to see here. Just completely normal financial markets working efficiently to put capital where it is most useful.

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Written by Ethan Zuckerman on 2025-01-18 at 18:00

To be slightly blunter than The Atlantic allowed me to be: the tiktok ban is a protectionist subsidy to Meta and Google worth hundreds of billions of dollars: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/internet-censorship-tiktok-ban/681361/

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Written by Ethan Zuckerman on 2025-01-18 at 17:53

Grateful that The Atlantic will still read unsolicited manuscripts from me, given that I tend to send them my angriest pieces: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/internet-censorship-tiktok-ban/681361/

I have a hard time believing how far the US has fallen as a defender of speech online in the past two decades.

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Written by Ethan Zuckerman on 2025-01-14 at 19:24

"The future is sustainability. The future is density. The future is managed retreat away ...

For Americans, the hardest part of what is coming is going to be giving up on the grand American myth of infinite material abundance."

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/uninsurable-futures

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Written by Ethan Zuckerman on 2025-01-14 at 18:41

Social Web Foundation  (I am an advisor) warns that having an unfactchecked Threads on the fediverse is a recipe for misery and mischief: https://socialwebfoundation.org/2025/01/12/content-policy-on-the-social-web/

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Written by Ethan Zuckerman on 2025-01-14 at 18:39

The greatest harms we'll see from Meta's abandoning of fact checking is to the Global South - important piece from Jonathan Ong and Tom Divon: https://www.techpolicy.press/tech-bro-power-play-zuckerberg-vs-global-tech-justice/

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Written by Ethan Zuckerman on 2025-01-14 at 18:28

"From WEIRD to Wide", my talk at CSCW 2024 about "quotidian" YouTube and TikTok video, and the need to study content creation in Global Majority countries: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2025/01/13/from-weird-to-wide-my-keynote-at-cscw-2024-in-costa-rica/

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Written by Ethan Zuckerman on 2025-01-09 at 20:13

There's lots of hot takes on Zuckerberg's content moderation decision, and then there's Julia Angwin's, who uses it to explain that Meta is no longer growing through innovation and is reduced to political groveling. https://buttondown.com/JuliaAngwin/archive/heavy-lies-mark-zuckerbergs-crown/

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Written by Ethan Zuckerman on 2025-01-08 at 16:54

Meta embraces the "fuck it" phase of content moderation, in which investigative journalism is censored but sexually explicit ads are just fine: https://www.404media.co/facebook-is-censoring-404-media-stories-about-facebooks-censorship/

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Written by Ethan Zuckerman on 2024-12-31 at 20:01

I remember when using cellphone contacts to evaluate creditworthiness was all the rage at the MIT Media Lab. Who could possibly have guessed that lenders would use that info to shame borrowers to their friends to pressure them to pay? https://globalvoices.org/2024/12/20/kenyan-money-lending-apps-invade-borrowers-privacy-to-recover-debts/

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Written by Ethan Zuckerman on 2024-12-23 at 14:41

This interview with Senator Chris Murphy is the first Democrat, post-Trump victory, who I've heard offer a promising path forward: admitting that the current system is broken and advocating for fixing it. But it comes with a grave warning about normalizing autocracy: https://newrepublic.com/article/189552/transcript-chris-murphys-ominous-new-warning-trump-nails

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Written by Ethan Zuckerman on 2024-12-22 at 23:07

(Particularly odd - I didn't teach or advocate for media literacy, but it's a solution most of the students have converged on. Not surprising on a class on media and democracy, but weird to see, especially since I'm very skeptical about how much media literacy can do... )

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