[Air-L] Migration to Mastodon

[sahana udupa]

Thanks for a great thread,
Robert's optimism is encouraging, while we also need to watch out for how
federated social media networks pan out in different contexts.
Arguing against EU's enthusiasm for small platforms, I had said: Although
the EU proposal to require very large platforms (Facebook, Twitter, and
YouTube) to open up to competitors with mandatory interoperability is
relevant in the pursuit of anticompetition policy objectives, this is not
an obvious solution to the problem of extreme speech. This proposal assumes
that regulating large platforms and fostering smaller players would create
a scenario where “users could freely choose which social media community
they would like to be part of—for example depending on their content
moderation preferences and privacy needs—while still being able to connect
with and talk to all of their social friends and contacts” (EDRi 2020, 4).
This approach, thick with liberal baggage, underestimates the possibility
that this very “marketplace for ideas” could provide an easy way for hate
mongers—as illustrated by alt-right actors—to hop between platforms and
innovate on content. Even more, as emerging scenarios in India suggest,
politically vested interest groups are likely to invest and drive the
market of multiple smaller players toward partisan and divisive messaging.
https://mediawell.ssrc.org/expert-reflections/small-platforms-and-the-gray-zones-of-deep-extreme-speech/


I have just joined a Mastodon instance; comm and media studies scholars
might also find this opt-in list useful to find fellow scholars:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vFWP_eBXrjeDqDkmT6PEbxnsZ_QFC4OgEgUHTrJWhhQ/edit#heading=h.3kytjljlyh06



Best

Sahana

***

Sahana Udupa | Professor of Media Anthropology | University of Munich

New book: https://nyupress.org/9781479819157/digital-unsettling/


On Thu, Nov 10, 2022 at 6:45 PM Michael Klontzas via Air-L <
air-l at listserv.aoir.org> wrote:

> Emma,
>
> This may not be the case with other tools, but Debirtify only gets read
> access to information that is already publicly available plus any
> private lists. This is confirmed by Twitter on the login/authorisation
> page. Debirtify can't read DMs either. 'Why do you need me to connect to
> my Twitter account?' on their website explains why they need us to log
> in instead of doing what Fritter for Android [1] does.
>
> [1] Fritter can figure out who you follow and show you your tweets
> stream without you having to log in to Twitter or anything else.
>
> Best,
> Michael
>
> On 10/11/2022 14:41, Dr. Emma Briant via Air-L wrote:
> > Thank you so much Robert! It's good to have this clarity over the role
> the
> > admins play, I really had no idea how this worked. I hope they are able
> to
> > advance the encryption for DMs at some point. My main concern was these
> > 'migration from Twitter' websites. Where I can certainly see their
> reasons
> > for needing us to log in with our Twitter accounts it seems quite
> > potentially possible that having this access, could compromise DMs.
> Having
> > had experience of being impacted by a recent hostile cyber attack I
> think I
> > will personally choose not to put my Twitter credentials into a website
> > whose developers I don't know a great deal about. Call me paranoid but I
> > just haven't seen enough that's reassuring about this.
> > Emma
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