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Platforming, Deplatforming & Replatforming
Following extremists around the Internet

Extremists around the world are increas­ing­ly being thrown off of social media. And so…the big ques­tion that I’m going to try to answer is, is this effec­tive? Is it good? Is it good for the plat­forms? Who does it ben­e­fit? Is it good for the plat­forms, is it good for the extrem­ists, is it good for the Internet, is it good for soci­ety at large? 

Reducing Side-Effects of Copyright Bots on Twitter

Underlying this project is a pret­ty sim­ple and we think pow­er­ful idea that pro­vides a solu­tion to a com­plex chal­lenge that’s fac­ing online com­mu­ni­ties like Twitter, like Reddit, with­in the CivilServant uni­verse. That chal­lenge is the increas­ing automa­tion of the enforce­ment of legal rules and norms online.

The Oppenheimer Moment

Where did this evil stuff come from? Are we evil? I’m per­fect­ly will­ing to stip­u­late you are not evil. Neither is your boss evil. Nor is Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. And yet the results of our work, our best most altru­is­tic work, often turns evil when it’s deployed in the larg­er world. We go to work every day, gen­uine­ly expect­ing to make the world a bet­ter place with our pow­er­ful tech­nol­o­gy. But some­how, evil is sneak­ing in despite our good intentions.

…And the Disability Revolution Will be Tweeted

I do dis­abil­i­ty and sex­u­al­i­ty edu­ca­tion. And activism and advo­ca­cy around sex­u­al­i­ty and dis­abil­i­ty issues, and repro­duc­tive health issues. And I want to teach the world that peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties have the right and abil­i­ty to give and receive pleasure.

Interventions for Individuals to Fight Spin

I will tell to you a few things about the first Twitter bomb that with my col­league we found a cou­ple years ago. And there it was a case in which some­body was attack­ing the can­di­date Martha Coakley in the last Massachusetts elec­tions. We found out that actu­al­ly it was easy to detect this kind of attack.

Filippo Menczer on Truthy Tweeting

I’m here to tell you lit­tle bit about a few exam­ples of truthy memes that we’ve uncov­ered with the sys­tem that we have online. It’s a web site where we track memes com­ing out of Twitter and we try to see if we could spot some sig­na­tures based on the net­works of who retweets what, basi­cal­ly, and who men­tions whom. 

Money, Power, and the Networked Public Sphere

Bill Keller ends his sto­ry in the end in The New York Times Magazine as, If Assange were an under­stat­ed pro­fes­so­r­i­al type rather than a char­ac­ter from a miss­ing Stieg Larsson nov­el, and if WikiLeaks were not suf­fused with such glib antipa­thy toward the US, would the reac­tion to the leaks be quite so ferocious?”

Good ques­tion. Who’s respon­si­ble? Half an arti­cle before, Keller says, I came to think of Julian Assange as a char­ac­ter from a Stieg Larsson movie.

Jonny Sun and Jonathan Zittrain on Joke Tweets, Memes, and Being an Alien Online

I think I kind of have float­ed through the world feel­ing like an out­sider and feel­ing a bit like an alien, I guess. And along the way I’ve met so many oth­er peo­ple who have felt like that too, and I think this is a cel­e­bra­tion of that kind of diver­si­ty and of that kind of outsiderdom.

The Algorithmic Spiral of Silence

A cou­ple of major plat­forms like Facebook and Twitter, YouTube, have become in many places around the world a de fac­to pub­lic sphere. Especially in coun­tries that have less than free Internet, less than free mass media. And these coun­tries have tran­si­tioned from a very con­trolled pub­lic sphere to a commercially-run one like Facebook.

Beyond Legal Talismans

Once we under­stand that legal tal­is­mans are pro­tec­tive invo­ca­tions, we have to be crit­i­cal of them. Even the ones we like. The short­hand is not com­pre­hen­si­ble to users. And the short­hand is not com­pre­hen­si­ble to peo­ple more generally. 

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