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

Fri Oct 28 14:35:01 PDT 2022

Thank you!

Appreciate your tweeting it, too!

-Sally
________________________________
From: Sarah Ann Oates <soates at umd.edu>
Sent: Friday, October 28, 2022 6:28 AM
To: sally at sally.com <sally at sally.com>
Cc: Shulman, Stu <stu at texifter.com>; aoir list (air-l at aoir.org) <air-l at aoir.org>
Subject: Re: [Air-L] Will Academic Twitter Exist Under Elon Musk?

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
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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<mailto: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.
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I am based in Silicon Valley

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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<mailto: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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