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 ...
As the world mourns the passing of Aretha Franklin, we need no further discussion about the value of recording artists. The anthem of a generation, Franklin’s first hit, “Respect” was not written by her but by Otis Redding, who first recorded the song in 1965. But in 1967, Aretha made that song what it is—“owned it” as we say today—along ...
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 ...
Last week, CreativeFuture CEO Ruth Vitale wrote a post wondering whether she had stepped into a parallel universe upon reading a June 27 missive by the EFF’s Mitch Stoltz. Related to my last post on the theme of tech-utopians doing policy pirouettes in the current climate we call the “techlash,” Stoltz declared Big Tech too big, with “extraordinary power to ...
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 ...
