[Air-L] Elon Musk & free speech

Stuart Shulman stuart.shulman at gmail.com
Wed Dec 7 07:19:51 PST 2022


Speech was pretty darn free (but not always in a good way) long before Elon
arrived and the leadership of "Trust & Safety" exited the scene. This is
one in a series of data-driven videos on how Twitter was and still is used
to promote violence. When people say "weaponization" of social platforms,
they mean stuff like this:

"Politicians Who Mandate Covid Vaccines will be Put on Trial"
https://vimeo.com/660464095

I like the European insistence on content moderation. Full disclosure: I
still get periodic reports from Twitter about accounts that I report for
hate speech. One arrived today. They are too rare given the volume of
reports I have made. I have an unfunded and unbuilt research proposal to
use gamification to report certain behavior to platforms. Since the
proponents of hate long ago adopted game theory, the defenders of justice,
progress, and equality ought to build a better game. Who wants to play this
all important World Cup of belief systems online?

Dr. Stuart ShulmanU.S. Soccer Federation C-Licensed Coach



On Wed, Dec 7, 2022 at 9:20 AM Joseph Reagle via Air-L <
air-l at listserv.aoir.org> wrote:

> I'd liken such positive experiences on Mastodon to the *intimate
> serendipity* people experienced in blogging in 2003 and on Twitter in 2006.
> The typical follow-on is *filtered sludge*. What's interesting to me about
> Mastodon's design is that they set out to address filtered-sludge from the
> start -- rather than ad hoc response driven by commercial interests.
>
> I chuckled that I used the example of Trent Reznor -- an early Twitter
> enthusiast and then disappointed critic -- when I saw that he "officially"
> left Twitter two weeks ago.
>
>
> https://readingthecomments.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/dtys4tyk#twitter-and-the-search-for-intimate-serendipity
>
>      When I went to blogging get-togethers in 2003, it was with a dozen of
>      like-minded enthusiasts: I met interesting people and we had good
>      conversations. Over a decade later, going to a meeting for people who
>      post comments to the Web seems passé. (Today almost any gathering
> could
>      qualify as such a meeting.) After a network of people (online or
>      otherwise) becomes popular, people want to bring their friends. At
> first,
>      this is great. The value of a network increases significantly with
> each
>      new node. A network of five phones permits ten connections; doubling
> the
>      phones to ten permits forty-five possible connections. As Dunbar
> notes,
>      however, at some point the scale of networks overwhelms the
> participants.
>      First, we ask, “Who brought that guy to the party?” Second, the
> network
>      becomes a target for those who wish to exploit it via spam and
>      manipulation.
>
>
> On 12/6/22 21:23, Paul Levinson via Air-L wrote:
> > I've been on Mastodon about six weeks now, and I'm really enjoying it.
> For
> > me, it's akin to what I liked about Facebook and Twitter in their early
> > years -- meeting people I hadn't been in touch with for years.
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