One of my first mantras when I started this blog was I hate Twitter, but that was shorthand for the broader view that social media is a trainwreck. Of course, the existential difficulty presented by these platforms is that while they can be highly toxic, as long as the market remains, one must have a presence if one has a ...
So, I don’t engage very often via Twitter, but once in a while, I respond to something that catches my attention and then usually regret spending time responding to the responses. Last week, I noticed that Pirate Party MEP Julia Reda—the face, voice, and tweetdeck of anti-Article 13 activism in the EU—posted an odd tweet, and I replied … Because, ...
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 ...
On Wednesday, a federal court for the Southern District of New York held that President Trump violated the First Amendment when he and his Social Media Director Daniel Scavino blocked users on Twitter because they were critical of the President and/or his policies via the @RealDonaldTrump account. The story caught my attention—not only as a citizen who wants a president ...
Yesterday afternoon the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing entitled: “Extremist Content and Russian Disinformation Online: Working with Tech to Find Solutions.” Representing the social media companies were Colin Stretch, General Counsel at Facebook; Sean Edgett, Acting General Counsel at Twitter; and Richard Salgado, Director of Law Enforcement And Information Security at Google. The news to come out of this ...
