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Overview: Social Web

Relevant resources

Am I on the right Mastodon instance?
mathewlowry.medium.com
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My second post following my personal #twittermigration: "the other users on your instance create its collective intelligence — the nearest thing you have to a content discovery algorithm".Not that I like algorithms, but "Apart from hashtags, ,,, your server’s Local and Federated timelines [are your] primary discovery channels when y…

The Age of Social Media Is Ending
www.theatlantic.com
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"It’s never felt more plausible that the age of social media might end—and soon."Provocative article, looking at the past 20 years as social networking evolved into social media - as I put it back in 2016, the evolution from social media (social as adjective) to social media, where the emphasis is on the noun."A social network is an…

Twitter alternative: how Mastodon is designed to be “antiviral”
uxdesign.cc
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Mastodon is "subtly designed to reduce the huge, viral surges of attention we see on Twitter" and others, which have "deformed people’s behavior... coaxed people to constantly try to hack the attentional marketplace... incessantly making posts ... operatically theatrical... enrage ... [other] high-voltage reaction".Hence “antiv…

Welcome to hell, Elon - The Verge
www.theverge.com
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Awesome hot take open letter to Elon Musk: "You fucked up real good, kiddo... no possible way to grow ... without ... compromises that will ultimately destroy your reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to your other companies... the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems... absolute monarchs u…

How to Leave Dying Social Media Platforms
doctorow.medium.com
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Those who've read Doctorow's books and blogs on the collective action problem stopping people leave the established social media walled gardens may not find anything new, except for the quite brilliant link he makes with "the 1971 film adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof ... the Anatevkans can’t just pack up and leave: they are being …

Elon Musk's Twitter impersonators: Trekonomics author Manu Saadia on making a fake Musk account for the lols.
slate.com
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A very funny round up from week 2 of the twitter migration: "It hasn’t even been two weeks since Elon Musk officially took over Twitter, and things look like they’re going about as well as a Cybertruck demonstration... one response to Musk’s tenure has seemed to really get under his skin: the verified impersonators."Funny, but the number…

Hope for a Post-Musk Net. A federated future and suggestions ...
medium.com
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JJ "explore some of the opportunities afforded by the likes of Bluesky, Scuttlebutt, the Fediverse, and Indieweb — not to mention good, old, reliable RSS".Most of the mastodon tips I knew, except: "enable the advanced web interface (it’s like Tweetdeck)" - I didn't know that existed so moved to Tusky and spent my first wee…

Debirdify
pruvisto.org

search the people you follow, are followed by, blocked & muted on Twitter, as well as the lists you maintain and follow, for possible Mastodon/Fediverse accounts. Provides graphs of which instances they're on, too, so useful for identifying which server to join.

Open-sourcing Twitter's algorithms is more complex than Musk implies
thenextweb.com
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"it's a start... Musk argued that disclosing what amplifies or downranks tweets would reduce the risk of “behind the scenes manipulation.” [but] algorithms alone offer limited insights" because it's not just an algorithm that defines what you see: it's a huge dataset - "content that enters the platform, each user’s p…

Mastodon Twitter Crossposter
crossposter.masto.donte.com.br

allows you to connect a Mastodon account and a Twitter account and enable cross-posting between them. You can choose some options, such as if you want to post boosts, unlisted toots or replies.

The New Era of Social Media Isn’t About Feeds | by Will Oremus | OneZero
onezero.medium.com
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"Clubhouse and Twitter’s “Super Follows” offer a new kind of engagement".Makes a good case against the algorithmic feed, which condition us to follow and post repeatedly and create a feed full of attention-grabbing content. That feed's "great at keeping us hooked, scrolling & coming back... and great for advertisers... but …

Confronting Disinformation Spreaders on Twitter Only Makes It Worse, MIT Scientists Say
www.vice.com

A "perverse downstream consequence for debunking... being corrected by another user for posting false political news increases subsequent sharing of low quality, partisan, and toxic content".Looks like evidence for the backfire effect: "Direct correction ... backfires by making people feel defensive or focusing their attention on so…

Platforms, Creative Communities, and the Need for a Radical Reimagining - The Reboot
thereboot.com
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Great piece on the implications for creators of the shift to algorithmically managed content platforms."Vine was an entirely new cultural platform ... Twitter had unwittingly enabled the creation of a true subculture... [but] didn’t know how to make money from it... in contrast... TikTok has prospered because it generally seems to understa…

How Facebook and Twitter Handled Their First Major Election Day Tests | by Sarah Emerson | Nov, 2020 | OneZero
onezero.medium.com
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Several of the president’s tweets overlaid with disclaimers ... invoking Twitter's Civic Integrity Policy, which prevents users from manipulating elections. Trump’s tweets also effectively throttled by preventing other users from amplifying them. Facebook’s measures were less accusatory, attaching an informational label.Neither stopped Trump …

Thread Helper
threadhelper.com
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"A serendipity engine on the Twitter sidebar".A "second brain" provides easy access to all the resources you've ever Liked or ideas you've ever Thought. @ExGenesis' Threadhelper brings a subset of this (just Tweets) right into the twitter UX - it looks brilliant.Check out the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?…

Opinion | Facebook and Twitter Are Still Tinkering With Democracy - The New York Times
www.nytimes.com
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Another analysis - with a lot of useful links - of the way social platforms managed the NYPost story, and what it tells us "about the status of social media companies’ reform efforts, and [how]... they are still failing to safeguard the democratic process?"First some facts:The NYPost article's "sourcing was so dubious that at l…

Social Media and the Hunter Biden Report - The New York Times
www.nytimes.com
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The platforms started doing what people concerned about disinformation have been asking for, and immediately came under fire from people concerned about censorship.When The New York Post published a story supposedly incriminating Hunter Biden "YouTube largely did nothing, Facebook deprioritized the Post story (slowing spread until 3rd party f…

Facebook and Twitter struggle to crack down on QAnon - Vox
www.vox.com
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“It’s so easy to feel you’re special or in on something.” - James Wolfe, 45, who was "introduced [to Qanon] by a friend to the idea in late 2017... [when he] was recently unemployed and recovering from a serious physical injury", and quickly "started spending as much as eight hours a day" before recovering "from QAnon aft…

Twitter Will Turn Off Some Features to Fight Election Misinformation - The New York Times
www.nytimes.com
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Most of the changes will start on Oct. 20, incl.:extra friction on retweeting, encouraging quote RTs adding the users' own thoughtspre-sharing warnings about flagged contentlabelling early election result claims disabling the algorithmic timelineAlso increasing factchecking and additional context on trending tweets.

Twitter is testing how its misinformation labels can be more obvious, direct | Reuters
www.reuters.com

"it would be useful to see if an account is a repeat offender or has been repeatedly labeled".Research undermining the backfire effect is now leading Twitter to a "more obvious" label design, and are exploring virality prediction to help speed up labelling. Difficult to assess effectiveness - insufficient public data.

Twitter bots are impersonating Black Americans to sow disinformation
www.msnbc.com
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fake Twitter accounts removed: impersonated black men who left the Dems because of BLM to support Trump ... some had tweets with over 10,000 RTs...bots risk drowning out an authentic black political dialogue... shutting them down risks collateral damage (ie shutting down actual people, not fake accounts)...Great metaphor: "we would have a lot…

Dataminr Helped Police Use Tweets To Surveil BLM Protests
theintercept.com
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LEVERAGING CLOSE TIES to Twitter... Dataminr helped law enforcement digitally monitor the [BLM] protests ... with the latest whereabouts and actions of demonstrators... essentially surveillance by U.S. law enforcement entities, contradicting its earlier assurances... siphoning vast amounts of social media data ... converting it into tidy police …

THE NINE TYPES OF REPLY GUYS
threadreaderapp.com
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a woman & a man in science... catalog those replies, to save us all the trouble of writing new responses every time. Presenting THE NINE TYPES OF REPLY GUYS

14/06/2020
White nationalist group posing as antifa called for violence on Twitter
www.nbcnews.com
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Twitter account claiming to belong to a national “antifa” organization and pushing violent rhetoric related to ongoing protests has been linked to the white nationalist group Identity Evropa... hashtags that trended worldwide ... to insinuate that protesters have been silenced ... "coordinated attempts to disrupt the public conversation"…

Defying Trump, Twitter Doubles Down on Labeling Tweets - The New York Times
www.nytimes.com
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Trump signed an executive order ... easier for federal regulators to argue that companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter were suppressing free speech when they suspended users or deleted posts... Twitter has doubled down... added fact-checking labels to ... spokesman for China’s foreign ministry ... tweets that falsely claimed a photo... was …

Nearly half 'reopen America' Twitter accounts are bots: report - Business Insider
www.businessinsider.com
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the level of bot involvement in discussions about things like US elections or natural disasters is typically 10% to 20%... among tweets about "reopening America," 66% came from accounts that were possibly humans using bot assistants... 34% came from bots...

Twitter Labels Trump's Tweets for First Time - The New York Times
www.nytimes.com

Twitter added information to refute the inaccuracies in President Trump’s tweets for the first time... urged people to “get the facts”... a CNN story ... and ... bullet points that Twitter had compiled rebutting the inaccuracies... Twitter determined that those unsubstantiated assertions could lead to voter confusion and that they merited a correc…

Tech Giants Prepared for 2016-Style Meddling. But the Threat Has Changed. - The New York Times
www.nytimes.com
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big tech companies have spent the past three years working to avoid a repeat of 2016... struggling to handle the new challenges of 2020...foreign governments ... are now using ... bots that are nearly impossible to distinguish from hyperpartisan Americans... partisan groups in the United States have borrowed Russia’s 2016 playbook ... tough calls …

How to investigate health misinformation (and anything else) using Twitter’s API
firstdraftnews.org
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step-by-step guide to collect and analyse data from Twitter, about anything from coronavirus rumours to anti-vax claims... understanding how certain hashtags, links or claims are travelling on Twitter could prove crucial to limiting the spread of damaging misinformation... First Draft has prepared a sample script ...

Study finds quarter of climate change tweets from bots - BBC News
www.bbc.com
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tweets posted by bots created the impression there was a high level of climate change denial... 6.5 million tweets from ... Trump's June 2017 announcement that he was removing the United States from the Paris climate accord... Posts in support of action to protect the environment were far less likely to come from bots... only 5%...the number …

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