It seems that after Public Knowledge came out, guns blazing, and just plain making things up about copyright extensions in the new round of NAFTA negotiations, they and their supporters tried to tiptoe these statements back on Twitter by blaming the USTR for its lack of clarity. While I have little doubt that such vagueness is present—certainly if the USTR’s ...
It may be hip these day to talk about platform responsibility, but just a couple years ago, there were no mainstream conversations about how the operations and policies of online service providers might be enabling misinformation, hate speech, propaganda, etc. And while mea culpas from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey make headlines, and Google tries to pitch the ...
In a new, must-read article at MIT Technology review, Professor Zeynep Tufekci at the the University of North Carolina describes How social media took us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump. Beginning with the euphoric naivete of just a few years ago that universally assumed Facebook and Twitter would save democracy, Tufekci details the mechanisms by which social media became a ...
A new, in-depth post by Mike Masnick at Techdirt correctly describes many of the challenges inherent to platform moderation of content. It was enough of a departure from his usual “anything goes” stance that he wrote a preamble acknowledging that he was likely to piss off a few readers. And it is, admittedly, a little bit fun to watch some ...
The underlying premise of this blog—indeed its title—is a rejection of the tech-utopian pursuit of more as a virtue unto itself. It is true that the presumed benefit of more access to more content happens to be one of the commonly-alleged rationales for mass copyright infringement, but the destructive power of more goes far beyond the interests of authors of ...
