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• Does Twitter Have Any Employees Left Who Remember That The Company Is Under A Strict Consent Decree With The FTC? | Techdirt — Yesterday I tweeted out a question about whether or not there was anyone left at Twitter who remembered that the company was under a pretty strict FTC consent decree
• Twitter stories at Techdirt.
• A fake tweet sparked panic at Eli Lilly and may have cost Twitter millions — The nine-word tweet was sent Thursday afternoon from an account using the name and logo of the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Co., and it immediately attracted a giant response: “We are excited to announce insulin is free now.”
• Day #43 - Mastodon Verification, with Wordpress! - 90 Days of Mayhem!
• Debirdify — This website allows you to search the people you follow on Twitter for possible Mastodon/Fediverse accounts. To use it, you need to click the button below and allow it to communicate with Twitter on your behalf. This is ‘read-only’: we cannot modify anything (write Tweets etc).
• Fedi.Directory — A small human-curated selection of interesting accounts to help you get started, or just to spice up your timeline.

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• Things To Never Say To Someone Who Owns A Tesla — Unless you’d like to get run over by a rich, angry tech bro with a chip on their shoulder, you might want to tread lightly when asking a Tesla driver about their car. Here are things you should never say to someone who owns a Tesla.
• Reality 2.0 Episode 109: From Twitter to the Fediverse with Mastodon — Katherine Druckman talks to Shawn Powers and Kyle Rankin about moving from Twitter to the Fediverse using Mastodon, including how to choose a server and find your niche.
• Reality 2.0 Episode 110: More on Mastodon — Katherine Druckman, Doc Searls, and Shawn Powers have far too much fun continuing the conversation about Mastodon and the fediverse, with a dose of photography.
• Twitter is about to be Musked - Burningbird — The Musk buyout of Twitter is all but done, and even before the blo…ink dried on the contracts, the scent of Musk permeates the social service.

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• Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid - The Atlantic — What would it have been like to live in Babel in the days after its destruction? In the Book of Genesis, we are told that the descendants of Noah built a great city in the land of Shinar. They built a tower “with its top in the heavens” to “make a name” for themselves. God was offended by the hubris of humanity and said: Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech. The text does not say that God destroyed the tower, but in many popular renderings of the story he does, so let’s hold that dramatic image in our minds: people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension.
• Democracy in the Next Cycle of History | Jonathan Haidt - YouTube — Jonathan Haidt sees that we have entered a social-psychological phase change that was initiated in 02009 when social media platforms introduced several fateful innovations that changed the course of our society and disintegrated our consensus on reality. In this conversation with Long Now co-founders Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly, Haidt presses on questions of technological optimism, morality vs ethics, teen mental health, possible platform tweaks that could reduce the damage and just how long this next cycle of history could last. Prompted by Haidt's piece on Why The Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid, this discussion offers a behind the scenes look at the thinking going into Haidt's next book; release slated for the fall of 02023.

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• I’m Not a Reporter. But I’m Verified as One on Twitter | WIRED — I NEVER CALLED myself a journalist until Twitter made me. I’m an attorney, activist, and faculty member, but it was only by using the “journalist” label that I was able to get one of the most coveted assets in social media, the blue “verified” checkmark. My months-long effort to get verified revealed a system that is stacked against grassroots activists, particularly BIPOC communities.
• Twitter verification requirements - how to get the blue check — The blue Verified badge  on Twitter lets people know that an account of public interest is authentic. To receive the blue badge, your account must be authentic, notable, and active.
• Goodbye, Fleets — We built Fleets as a lower-pressure, ephemeral way for people to share their fleeting thoughts. We hoped Fleets would help more people feel comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter. But, in the time since we introduced Fleets to everyone, we haven’t seen an increase in the number of new people joining the conversation with Fleets like we hoped. Because of this, on August 3, Fleets will no longer be available on Twitter.
• Black teen barred from skating rink by inaccurate facial recognition - The Verge — A facial recognition algorithm used by a local roller skating rink in Detroit wouldn’t let teen Lamya Robinson onto the premises, and accused her of previously getting into a fight at the establishment.
• Algorithmic bias - Wikipedia — Algorithmic bias describes systematic and repeatable errors in a computer system that create unfair outcomes, such as privileging one arbitrary group of users over others. Bias can emerge due to many factors, including but not limited to the design of the algorithm or the unintended or unanticipated use or decisions relating to the way data is coded, collected, selected or used to train the algorithm. Algorithmic bias is found across platforms, including but not limited to search engine results and social media platforms, and can have impacts ranging from inadvertent privacy violations to reinforcing social biases of race, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. The study of algorithmic bias is most concerned with algorithms that reflect "systematic and unfair" discrimination. This bias has only recently been addressed in legal frameworks, such as the 2018 European Union's General Data Protection Regulation. More comprehensive regulation is needed as emerging technologies become increasingly advanced and opaque.
• Face-Detection Cameras: Glitches Spur Charges of Racism - TIME — When Joz Wang and her brother bought their mom a Nikon Coolpix S630 digital camera for Mother's Day last year, they discovered what seemed to be a malfunction. Every time they took a portrait of each other smiling, a message flashed across the screen asking, "Did someone blink?" No one had. "I thought the camera was broken!" Wang, 33, recalls. But when her brother posed with his eyes open so wide that he looked "bug-eyed," the messages stopped.
• Meet the Censored: Matt Orfalea - by Matt Taibbi - TK News by Matt Taibbi — Yes, the government is helping crack down on text messages and Facebook posts, but not to worry. At least your private thoughts are safe, right? Not so fast, found filmmaker Matt Orfalea
• Texas’ social media censorship bill pushes unconstitutional limits on free speech — Amid ongoing allegations that social media platforms are censoring conservatives, regulating Big Tech has become one of the hottest issues across the country. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott has called a special legislative session in part to debate and pass content moderation legislation.
• I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score. Now You Can Get Yours, Too. - The New York Times — Little-known companies are amassing your data — like food orders and Airbnb messages — and selling the analysis to clients. Here’s how to get a copy of what they have on you.

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• Zuckerberg and Dorsey Face Harsh Questioning From Lawmakers - The New York Times — Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Jack Dorsey of Twitter testified about their platforms, misinformation and the 2020 election.
• Evan Greer on Twitter: "most of the Capitol rioters had smartphones. were Apple and AT&T partially responsible for the violence? Please answer yes or no." / Twitter — most of the Capitol rioters had smartphones. were Apple and AT&T partially responsible for the violence? Please answer yes or no.
• Pluralistic: 25 Mar 2021 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow — A monopolist's first preference is always "don't regulate me." But coming in at a close second is "regulate me in ways that only I can comply with, so that no one is allowed to compete with me."
• Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Pichai addressed online extremism and misinformation before House committee - The Washington Post — Lawmakers wanted answers on the role Google, Facebook and Twitter played in the attacks on the Capitol and viral covid-19 misinformation
• Reality 2.0 Episode 54: Digital Rights are Human Rights — Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Evan Greer, Deputy Director of digital rights activism group Fight for the Future about Section 230, privacy, politics, de-platforming, and internet policy.
• Reality 2.0 Episode 62: How Did Disinformation Become the Truth? — Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Prof. Chris Bronk, Ph.D. and Petros Koutoupis about disinformation and cyber security, and how they impact our lives, as well as IoT vulnerabilities and voice recognition technology.
• Zeynep Tufekci - Wikipedia
• Ten Questions the Press Should Have Asked President Biden - Insight — Yesterday, President Joe Biden held his first press conference. There were questions on Biden’s plans for the 2024 election (four years away!), the filibuster (over which he has no control), and Donald Trump (could we hear even less about him?), but not a single question on the pandemic. Not one.
• Laurie Garrett - Wikipedia

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• “Misinformation” vs. “Disinformation”: Get Informed On The Difference - Dictionary.com — Disinformation means “false information, as about a country’s military strength or plans, disseminated by a government or intelligence agency in a hostile act of tactical political subversion.” It is also used more generally to mean “deliberately misleading or biased information; manipulated narrative or facts; propaganda.” So, disinformation is knowingly spreading misinformation. Our first definition of this word gives one major reason why a person or group might want to spread wrong information, but there are many other nefarious motivations lurking behind the creation of disinformation.
• Amazon.com: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (9781541758001): Zuboff, Shoshana: Books — In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.
• Tom Clancy, author of the Jack Ryan Novels - Tom Clancy
• Amazon.com : john le carré
• Amazon.com: Active Measures (9781250787408): Rid, Thomas: Books
• Internet-based chastity belts hijacked by malicious hackers | Boing Boing — Oh man. A bluetooth-controlled chastity belt was the recent victim of a hacker attack. The Cellmate Chastity Cage, made by Chinese company Qiui, was designed so that users are able to lock and unlock their sex partner's penis prison remotely. Users caught in the attack were threatened with having their genitals locked in permanently unless they paid a 0.02 bitcoin (about $270) ransom.

Show notes:

[02:06]: Twitter outsourcing content moderation with expirimental Birdwatch feature.

[13:32]: Signal's founder has pushed back against internal efforts to have some sort of mechanism to prevent misuse of the platform.

[26:25]: Redditors take on hedge funds and the stock market with Game Stop and others. Robinhood and Discord respond.

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• Twitter introduces 'Birdwatch' to fight misinformation | Engadget — “Birdwatch allows people to identify information in Tweets they believe is misleading and write notes that provide informative context,” Twitter writes in a blog post. “We believe this approach has the potential to respond quickly when misleading information spreads, adding context that people trust and find valuable.”
• Warning Signal: the messaging app’s new features are causing internal turmoil - The Verge — Employees worry that, should Signal fail to build policies and enforcement mechanisms to identify and remove bad actors, the fallout could bring more negative attention to encryption technologies from regulators at a time when their existence is threatened around the world.
• The Worst Job in Technology: Staring at Human Depravity to Keep It Off Facebook - WSJ — Deciding what does and doesn’t belong online is one of the fastest-growing jobs in the technology world—and perhaps the most grueling. The equivalent of 65 years of video are uploaded to YouTube each day. Facebook receives more than a million user reports of potentially objectionable content a day.
• Mind Your Own Business! - YouTube — Gladys Kravitz.
• Amazon.com: Shephard's Drone: A Novel (9780960051908): Frischmann, Brett: Books
• Amazon.com: The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (9781984897787): Hyde, Lewis: Books
• Amazon.com: COMMON AS AIR (9780374532796): Hyde, Lewis: Books
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power: Zuboff, Shoshana: 9781610395694: Amazon.com: Books
• Opinion | Facebook and the Surveillance Society: The Other Coup - The New York Times — We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both.
• GameStop, Reddit and Robinhood: A full recap of the historic retail trading mania on Wall Street — GameStop mania took Wall Street by storm, thanks to a legion of retail traders glued to the WallStreetBets message board on Reddit.
• Discord bans the r/WallStreetBets server, but new ones have sprung to life - The Verge — Discord says it did not ban the WallStreetBets server for financial fraud — rather, it was banned because it continued to allow “hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings.” The Verge gained access to the server and can confirm the claim that users of the channel were spamming hateful language, including racial slurs.

Show notes:
(49s):
“I think the first one, maybe the that's that we could cover is, well, let's see, how do I put this without causing too much controversy? That's just the idea of siloed social, silos of any kind, but in particular social media and perceived censorship as it, as it applies to social media. That's a, that's a hot topic right now.”

(1m 59s):
“Do you not know about parlor? No. Oh, this is going to be a great episode!”

(3m 54s):
“And so, as a result, a lot of people who are concerned about censorship on Twitter and Facebook have moved over there. And, and in particular on the conservative side, just because like with any social network, there's a network effect.”

(5m 11s):
“It also reminds me of the early days of Google plus”

(8m 53s):
“I think we're moving from one moderator to, I mean, This happens on, on Mastodon quite a bit where you will have, because it's so federated and because all of the instances can in theory, talk to each other, sometimes you'll have a falling out because many Mastodon instances are more or less governed by the winds of a sysadmin who decided to spin it up.”

(10m 55s):
“It looks different to everybody. We all have our own, our own feeds are on, you know, our own preferences, our own, you know, whenever it is, I mean, it's, it's, it's shaped shifts for each of us, depending on what we've looked at and who we follow and all the rest of it. And it's by design. So there's no uniform vision to it.”

(11m 35s):
“I think you said it, Catherine did, a lot of people were sort of creeped out by Facebook, but it's only because of read a bunch of stuff about, Hey, you're not private there. And then the movie they watched that movie, you know...now they're scared of Facebook. They're not entirely sure why.”

(12m 34s):
“We don't need platforms for all this stuff. You can do this stuff without platforms.”

(15m 24s):
“So that's an interesting segue into one of the other topics that we've been talking about and that's, it's being owned by platforms instead of the other way around. And I think, you know, we all have in common that we are, we have a bit of a DIY and obviously open source mentality”

(18m 11s):
“Apple announced a new Big Sur release. And around the time that they announced the update that the update was available. So presumably people were downloading it, et cetera. People started noticing on their Macs that they were having trouble launching programs. They would try to launch an application. And sometimes it would take, you know, a minute after saying to launch before the application showed up on their local machine.”

(23m 15s):
“it really raises the issues of ownership. You know?”

(24m 42s):
“And it sounds like in many cases, you don't, if you have a Mac, you don't necessarily own that”

(24m 59s):
“I don't know if there are degrees of severity of one's lack of control over your digital products in your life.”

(28m 20s):
“And, you know, and I thought the chance that Google is going to get rid of those is pretty high Google's record of holding onto a service that people don't pay for is pretty lousy.”

(29m 40s):
“You have a bundle of rights. And, and I think that we haven't worked out yet online.”

(32m 29s):
“And this ephemeral service, which is now tied to a tangible thing, that tangible thing, which before would have different rules applied to it, like say a thermostat or whatever it is, where when the, the cloud service goes away, the company goes away.”

(33m 17s):
“For example, like this, this thing that happened this week that we already talked about with Apple, I think a lot of people didn't think about how applications launching was tethered to the cloud in any way”

(33m 48s):
“It's like the, the internet is a network of leashes and, like dog leashes with colors on them.”

(35m 48s):
“And I think it was 1890 and it was about the time they decided the right of privacy was the right to be let alone.”

(36m 52s):
“something that we've talked about many times, and that is open source, open source licensing, open source culture, open source awareness, even.”

(37m 50s):
“And people now start to question, they go, Hey, wait a second. This, this big platform is making a ton of money off of this code that I wrote, but I'm not.”

(39m 25s):
“And does it matter, does it matter what exactly we're talking about? Like, does it matter if I'm talking about contributing to something like Apache or, you know, Linux kernel, or does it matter if we're talking about some sort of web framework or library that, you know, a Facebook, a Twitter, a tic talk is using to make a lot of money, you know, that may, or even a product you just don't like, does it, does it somehow matter? I mean, obviously from a licensing perspective, it doesn't, but from an ideological perspective, does it matter?”

(41m 18s):
“And what does it even mean to contribute back to the project?”

(42m 18s):
“I think that's where the social contract starts to break down.”

(46m 10s):
“And that's supposed to be a good thing. What you want is to work with the companies that are using your software, and hopefully they will, they will release patches and fixes and improvements to your software. That's the idealized model.”

(48m 19s):
“open source licenses are pretty ubiquitous.”

(48m 33s):
“Well, you're writing code with an IDE that is probably free software. You didn't pay for it under an open-source license maybe on an OS that has similar licensing that you didn't have to work on using other people's libraries that you didn't have to write yourself from scratch all the way down to the OSTP.”

(49m 16s):
“Well, that's free software. And so the WordPress people knock on your door and like, Oh, well, and that's running on Linux. And so Linus is going to show up and what his handout, you know, it, everyone's sort of, for some reason, people think that, well, you're sitting on this entire body of work that people have put so much effort for free into to share with everyone else you're taking the benefit of that.”

(51m 13s):
I guess the ultimate question though, is at what point does, is there enough pushback that it does shift the open source community? ...at what point is it a significant enough disruption that there are enough people that are questioning the open source social contract?”

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• Parler - Wikipedia — Parler is an American microblogging and social networking service launched in August 2018. Parler has a significant user base of Trump supporters, conservatives, and right-wing extremists. Posts on the service often contain far-right content, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories. Parler has been described as an alternative to Twitter, and is popular among people who have been banned from mainstream social networks or oppose their moderation policies.
• davewiner.com
• Scripting News — This is Scripting News. It's Dave Winer's blog.
• Little Snitch - Makes the invisible visible!
• Amazon.com: The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (9781984897787): Hyde, Lewis: Books — Drawing on examples from folklore and literature, history and tribal customs, economics and modern copyright law, Lewis Hyde demonstrates how our society—governed by the marketplace—is poorly equipped to determine the worth of artists’ work. He shows us that another way is possible: the alternative economy of the gift, which allows creations and ideas to circulate freely, rather than hoarding them as commodities.
• Amazon.com: COMMON AS AIR (9780374532796): Hyde, Lewis: Books — Common as Air offers a stirring defense of our cultural commons, that vast store of art and ideas we have inherited from the past and continue to enrich in the present. Suspicious of the current idea that all creative work is "intellectual property," Lewis Hyde turns to America's Founding Fathers―men such as Adams, Madison, and Jefferson―in search of other ways to imagine the fruits of human wit and imagination. What he discovers is a rich tradition in which knowledge was assumed to be a commonwealth, not a private preserve.
• macOS Big Sur launch appears to cause temporary slowdown in even non-Big Sur Macs | Ars Technica — When an Apple device can't connect to the network but you want to launch an app anyway, the notarization validation is supposed to "soft fail"—that is, your Apple device is supposed to recognize you're not online and allow the app to launch anyway. However, due to the nature of whatever happened today, calls to the server appeared to simply hang instead of soft-failing. This is possibly because everyone's device could still do a DNS lookup on ocsp.apple.com without any problems, leading the devices to believe that if they could do a DNS lookup, they should be able to connect to the OCSP service. So they tried—and timed out.
• Apple Users Got Owned – Purism — You’ll often hear hackers say that they “owned” (or sometimes “pwned”) a computer. They don’t mean that they have the computer in their physical possession, what they mean is that they have compromised the computer and have such deep remote control that they can do whatever they want to it. When hackers own a computer they can prevent software from running, install whatever software they choose, and remotely control the hardware–even against the actual owner’s wishes and usually without their knowledge.

Special Guest: Petros Koutoupis.

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• FCC chairman says he'll seek to regulate social media under Trump's executive order - CNN — The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will draft regulations intended for social media companies following a petition earlier this year by the Trump administration, the agency's chairman said Thursday. In a tweet, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai indicated he will move forward with a rulemaking to "clarify" Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934, which currently acts as a legal shield for tech companies' handling of user generated content.
• Executive Order — Here is the full text of President Trump's executive order relating to social media, published by the White House on Thursday May 28, 2020.
• Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act | Electronic Frontier Foundation — Tucked inside the Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996 is one of the most valuable tools for protecting freedom of expression and innovation on the Internet: Section 230.
• Official Title 47 Section 230 PDF document — 230(c) - (1) Treatment of publisher or speaker No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
• 47 U.S. Code § 230 - Protection for private blocking and screening of offensive material — Reference from Cornell Law.
• Opinion | Tech Companies Are Destroying Democracy and the Free Press - The New York Times — Ad revenue that used to support journalism is now captured by Google and Facebook, and some of that money supports and spreads fake news.
• BIG by Matt Stoller
• Tim Hwang - Subprime Attention Crisis — Tim Hwang is a writer and researcher based in New York. He is the author of Subprime Attention Crisis, a book about the bubble of online advertising. He is currently a research fellow at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) at Georgetown University.
• Defending the Caveman | A Broadway Comedy We Can All Relate To
• IU Inc. » Archive » IU Media School professor’s paper was influential in FCC net neutrality decision