[Air-L] Will Academic Twitter Exist Under Elon Musk?

Fri Oct 28 06:28:21 PDT 2022

Great piece, just sent it to all my students! I think (subversively) I'll
tweet it is as well .... while we still can :) Sarah

Sarah Oates
Pronoun: she/her

Professor and Senior Scholar
Philip Merrill College of Journalism
Distinguished Scholar-Teacher
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
Email: soates at umd.edu
Phone: 301 455 2332
www.media-politics.com
Twitter: @media_politics

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On Thu, Oct 27, 2022 at 11:53 PM S.A. Applin via Air-L <
air-l at listserv.aoir.org> wrote:

> Hi Everyone.
>
> I pitched and wrote a piece today and they also just put it up today. I
> couldn’t get all of the issues in such a short article, but I hope you
> enjoy it:
>
>
> https://www.fastcompany.com/90802723/hello-elon-goodbye-the-twitter-we-once-knew
>
> Sally
>
>
> Sally Applin, Ph.D.
> ……….
> Voted one of  Lighthouse 3’s '100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics for 2020"
> ……….
> Research Fellow
> HRAF Advanced Research Centres (EU), Canterbury
> Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing (CSAC)
> ..........
> Research Associate
> Human Relations Area Files (HRAF)
> Yale University
> ..........
> Member, Shortwave Collective
> Member, IoT Council
> ..........
> http://www.posr.org
> http://www.sally.com
> ……...
> ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2443-5530
> ..........
> sally at sally.com | 650.339.5236
>
> I am based in Silicon Valley
>
> "If you think technology will solve your problems, you don’t understand
> technology —
> and you don’t understand your problems.”  - Laurie Anderson, 2020
>
>
>
> > On Oct 21, 2022, at 4:43 AM, Shulman, Stu via Air-L <
> air-l at listserv.aoir.org> wrote:
> >
> > Will academic Twitter exist under Elon Musk? Will there be more or less
> > data? More or less urgent issues to study? Will the "Fail Whale" show up
> > again after 75% of the staff is gone? Who will do content moderation? Is
> > this a FastTrack to the next violent uprising in the US?
> >
> > I am curious what people on this particular list think is about to
> happen.
> > After 12 years featuring the formal study of Twitter data I am completely
> > burned out. Not on the challenges, nor the art and science of the tasks.
> I
> > still love talking to students and faculty who have chosen Twitter as the
> > object of their research. The data has never been more widely available
> and
> > the positive uses of it can be inspiring.
> >
> > It's the voluminous amounts of hate I see in my own research. Also the
> > systemic weaponization of Twitter against democratic systems of
> government
> > globally. As an original Board Member and the Treasurer of a 501 (c)(6)
> > called "The Big Boulder Initiative" I was working as a liaison to
> academia
> > with a group of industry people on the "long term preservation of the
> > social data industry." The industry survived, but the ideals aspired to
> > have not. We offered this 2-minute Lawrence Lessig-inspired vision of the
> > challenges about 7 years ago:
> >
> > "Why Texifter Joined the Big Boulder Initiative"
> > https://vimeo.com/129423037
> >
> > Lessig was right. On the Internet, architecture is the most powerful
> > regulator. The architecture of Twitter, with corporate ads featured on
> > insurrectionist and other problematic timelines, is now a persistent
> threat
> > to democratic systems of government without a single day of Musk
> > governance. The insurrection January 6, 2021 was planned in the open on
> > Twitter. There were advertisements from familiar brands in every
> seditious
> > timeline. Evolving tactics using Twitter trains (tagging 30 like-minded
> > users), notification-rich replies, the ReTweet functionality,
> gamification,
> > domestic and foreign meme warfare, the idolatry of influence via
> > misinformation, bots and trolls, as well as paid amplifiers of all manner
> > and variety. The "digital soldiers" we found in the Canadian election of
> > 2019 (fake Americans who hated Trudeau but liked RT, Russia Today and
> > Southfront) were openly planning a QAnon-inspired "storm" which
> ultimately
> > was the first coup attempt in two centuries of American democracy. I
> > briefed the US/UK Intelligence Community (staff from the Joint Chiefs,
> > JSOC, etc.) February 12, 2020 via the Strategic Multilayer Assessment
> using
> > open source information from Twitter. Things have since gotten much
> worse,
> > not better, since that briefing. These were the slides in early February
> > 2020:
> >
> > https://tinyurl.com/huntingbotsandtrolls
> >
> > Looking at the current threat-relevant data, I have a sick-to-my-stomach
> > feeling about the next 60 days in U.S. history. We may be late to notice
> > the end of small "d" democracy is imminent or inevitable because of the
> > Internet effects we cannot fully see, capture, measure, or control.
> >
> > --
> > Dr. Stuart W. Shulman
> > Founder and CEO, Texifter
> > Editor Emeritus, *Journal of Information Technology & Politics*
> > _______________________________________________
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