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

Fri Oct 28 07:27:01 PDT 2022

Hi, all --

I'm seeing a great deal of new members of the fediverse, particularly 
Mastodon. Welcome! I'm @robertwgehl at scholar.social if you want to connect.

In addition to Mastodon, I also want to suggest Pixelfed. Pixelfed is 
meant to be Instagram-like. If you like sharing photos and videos as 
your main way of engaging, it's a good option.

Like Mastodon, Pixelfed runs on ActivityPub. (AP is a protocol that 
allows all these servers to connect -- it's kinda like SMTP).

Plus, even if you're on a Pixelfed instance, you can *still follow 
people on Mastodon.* They can see your pictures, and you can see their 
text posts.

In fact, from Pixelfed (or Mastodon), you can follow people on other 
ActivityPub-powered servers, from video sharing to book and music 
sharing. And, in case you're wondering "Do I need both Pixelfed *and* 
Mastodon *and* (fill in the blank)?", I'd say no because of the fact 
that you can follow people across them. I predominantly use Mastodon but 
I follow Pixelfed and Misskey users and see their posts (including 
pictures and videos) easily.

Choosing a Pixelfed instance is a bit like choosing a Mastodon one -- 
take a look at the community rules before you sign up.

- Rob

On 10/28/22 08:38, Andy Famiglietti via Air-L wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Looks like the Muskpocalypse has indeed happened. I've headed over to
> Mastodon and the platform seems basically viable so far. The federated
> server design is appealing, as it avoids a single company calling the shots
> and defining a business model. Could be worth a try?
>
> Do we want to set up a shared Google Doc with AOIR folks mastodon handles
> so we can find and follow each other?
>
> -
> Andy Famiglietti
> New Media Scholar, Intermittent Wikipedian, Vaguely Humanoid
>
>
> On Thu, Oct 27, 2022 at 11:57 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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