[Air-L] Migration to Mastodon

[Shulman, Stu]

Andrew,

I am solely responsible for the interpretation that firing the small
academic Twitter team (along with other service and content oriented teams)
is a precursor to ending the academic program. There is no reporting I have
seen to that effect. It was based on private conversations. I would be
pleased to be 100% wrong; the program has been amazing and I love working
with academics on the data. However, the program has specific compute costs
associated with it. Currently academics with credentials can pull undeleted
and unprotected Tweets from the complete history of Twitter for free. That
query and the data pull itself are not frictionless. Searching many
billions of Tweets and then retrieving the matches when there are 60+
fields of text and metadata and hundreds of millions of rows of data per
day, over more than a decade of Twitter online, is costly. I run one rack,
with one server, and one disk array, holding about one half billion Tweets,
and the electricity bill is a real cost of making our tools free for
academics. When Musk is done kicking people off Twitter for not labeling
their jokes as parody (so much for free speech leadership) he may look at
the cost of the free data access for academics, or anyone else, and choose
to curtail or monetize it. Will the Twitter Search API remain free and or
operational? Nobody knows. From what I have heard from folks still inside
and recently departed, some of the critical functions of the platform are
currently under- or unstaffed, not just the academic program. Certain key
people who are bearers of institutional knowledge about what keeps Twitter
servers running, insanely complicated and in parts aging tech, are now
focused on planning a group trip to Disney with the buyout cash, which, not
to go too far astray, appears to be one of the largest money laundering
operations in history. My point was if you have the academic credentials,
have not used them to the full extent, and you have a PhD thesis or
scholarly publication dependent on that access, the program is unstaffed,
the group in charge of Twitter is fretting about losing $4M US/day,
advertisers are bailing out, and we are entering what some political
science and history professors call a historically contingent moment with
potential for a major ideological realignment or worse. Democracy in the US
is under specific and well documented threats and some rightly say social
media is an enabling factor for authoritarianism and dystopian politics. If
we go into 6 weeks of civil unrest over election denial and another bigger
and better violent insurrection is organized on Twitter, does anyone think
Elon Musk will want academics or journalists fully empowered to document
the role of weaponized Twitter functionalities in that? I am an election
worker. People are making violent threats on Twitter about election
workers. The folks in charge of regulating that "free speech" are now gone
or have diminished resources. Public statements from the Trust & Safety
team aside, on Twitter, you can call for the assasination of political
leaders all over the world, the killing of vaccine advocates, mob violence
against election workers, blatantly false election denial, and some other
entirely anarchic, anti-Semitic, and racist stuff, and that was all before
Elon fired everyone who was responsible for keeping a lid on such things.
Twitter is a loaded weapon. There is no Board of Directors. Literally
anything could happen with no check or balance. I remain of the view that
Monday will be one of the strangest days in the history of the Internet.
Truly, I hope I am wrong about all of it.

Stu


On Mon, Nov 7, 2022 at 3:17 AM Andrew Lowenthal via Air-L <
air-l at listserv.aoir.org> wrote:

> Wonderful to see so many people (re)embracing open source/non-corporate
> social media etc. Ultimately alternatives that don't place us at the
> whim of one oligarch or the other are the best solution.
>
> One question however - the thrust of the Musk criticism is that he will
> be too libertarian. With that in mind, where does the assumption come
> from that he will shut off access to academic twitter? Has there been a
> statement? It would seem to go against his anti-censorship ethos. Or is
> it more that it would not be in his interest to serve an overwhelmingly
> left-wing academia?
>
> Anything tangible as to known intentions of already concluded Twitter
> actions would be helpful.
>
> Thanks,
> Andrew
>
>
> On 11/7/22 01:28, Paul Levinson via Air-L wrote:
> > Just followed ISOC on Mastodon -- thanks!
> >
> > -- PL
> >
> >
> > On Sun, Nov 6, 2022 at 7:19 PM Joly MacFie <joly at punkcast.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Not that you don't see enough of them already, but ISOC LIVE announces
> go
> >> out at @jolynyc at mastodon.social
> >>
> >> I'm interested to see if EM messes with Twitter live (ex-Periscope)
> which
> >> I quite like.
> >>
> >> Joly
> >> --
> >> --------------------------------------
> >> Joly MacFie  +12185659365
> >> --------------------------------------
> >> -
> >>
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-- 
Dr. Stuart W. Shulman
Founder and CEO, Texifter
Editor Emeritus, *Journal of Information Technology & Politics*