[Air-L] Twitter Journalist Suspensions

[Steph Kent]

Hi all,

I support Emma's direction and Sarah's framing of the question.

"How do we, as scholars and humans, leverage the affordances of existing
online technology, not only to support our academic endeavors but (if I
read most of this group correctly) to advance the values of humanity and
technology in a positive direction?"

As to whether "the resistance is poorly organized right now" -- I'm not
sure that's true? I think most academics avoid being involved with any
substantive resistance beyond the performative and/or rhetorical. If AOIR
was going to stake out a stance involving cooperation and collaboration
with people doing real resistance then maybe we could contribute to
something actually meaningful.

There are dissenting voices in this group who bring different perspectives,
so we'd have to figure out how to navigate those tensions in a manner
beyond silencing. Every group that desires to impact society has to
eventually figure out how to do this, sometimes people discover they can't
stay and/or find their own new venues. I'm in favor of a 'big tent' because
then we more closely approximate social dynamics in our 'micro' context.

One thing that would be cool, in my view, is to create a conversation in
Mastodon and perhaps a few other alternatives that proactively engages
across instances, that intentionally aims to foster a pluralistic and
plurilingual conversation that uses the diversity of perspectives to
generate principles of interaction that could become templates for
law-making and other institutional-scale processes to reshape society from
the tail-end of industrialization and all that's come with it (most
specifically, extreme injustice and extractive exploitation of planetary
"resources") to a transformed economy motivated by and centered around
mutual aid.

Our in/actions feed hierarchy or equitability.  Deciding where we want to
lend our weight isn't going to get any easier, although it may continue to
come into sharper and sharper focus.

best regards,
steph



On Fri, Dec 16, 2022 at 1:10 PM Robert W Gehl via Air-L <
air-l at listserv.aoir.org> wrote:

> I just tried again, hoping the ban was lifted after negative coverage.
>
> No such luck:
> https://nextcloud.robertwgehl.org/index.php/s/pAB23rP4JkCKj7J
>
> That screenshot is 12.55 Eastern US time zone.
>
> For the record, Scholar.social doesn't host any "Elonjet" content and
> actually silences the instance that does.
>
> - Rob
>
> On 2022-12-16 12:50, Fred Fuchs wrote:
> > On 12/16/2022 7:29 AM, Robert W Gehl via Air-L wrote:
> >> In addition to the 11 journalists being booted from Twitter, a
> >> related development: Twitter is blocking links to Mastodon and other
> >> fediverse sites. This morning, I attempted to post a link to my
> >> Mastodon profile (https://scholar.social/@robertwgehl). It was
> >> blocked due to it being "harmful content."
> >
> > 1. After testing, this block doesn't appear comprehensive across all
> > of Twitter. It's possible to add a Mastodon link as the name of one's
> > Twitter account.
> >
> > 2. We only tested this with examples like "mastodon.social/@(Mastodon
> > account name)."
> >
> > 3. A warning though, adding a link to any incarnation of Elonjet on
> > other platforms might lead to Twitter account suspension given the
> > currently established precedent.
> >
> > Fred
> > --
> > Fred Fuchs - Founder, CEO, & Producer
> > FireSabre Consulting LLC
> > Content Services for Virtual Worlds
> >
> >
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