Reading Time: 4 minutes On Wednesday, October 26, Elon Musk walked into Twitter’s offices in San Francisco with a kitchen sink, for a video captioned “Entering Twitter HQ—let that sink in!” On Thursday, he made his purchase of the company official with a tweet addressed, “Dear Twitter Advertisers”. In this first message as “Chief Twit”, Musk promised a fruitful […]
social media
Posted inSocial Media
Kanye’s Parler, Musk’s Twitter, WeChat’s fake news: Our digital crisis deepens
Reading Time: 4 minutes It’s been a “pick your poison” week for problems with our information networks: from the world’s richest person using Twitter for complex foreign policy, to a prominent US musician laying claim to a far-right social media platform, to the alarm continuing to sound on US midterm misinformation circulating on poorly regulated China-based chat apps. While […]
Posted inSocial Media
Trump was never king of Twitter. This guy was (and is)
Reading Time: 3 minutes Among the more depressing news tidbits I recently ran into informed me that Georgia Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has 1.1 million Twitter followers. 1.1 million! It’s true. I checked. By comparison, I have, uh, 170 followers (.00001545% of Greene’s), which may or may not be a function of never using it. And virtually everything […]
Posted inSocial Media
Twitter’s Elon Musk debacle raises serious questions about digital citizenship
Reading Time: 9 minutes On October 3, Elon Musk tweeted a proposal for “Ukraine-Russia Peace”, with a Yes/No poll that yielded 2.7 million responses (59 percent “No”). Because Musk is the richest person in the world, with a current net worth of around $230 billion USD from Tesla, SpaceX, and recent AI ventures, his views on Russia’s invasion of […]
Posted inTechnology
The internet is lethal. That class I took in 1995 didn’t mention it.
Reading Time: 6 minutes I remember way back in 1995 I took a nontraditional local college class on “the Internet,” then a curious new tech phenomenon emerging from the womb in barely post-fetal form. I had no idea then that this seemingly miraculous invention would become as exponentially huge—and potentially dangerous to the health of Americans and our republic—as […]
Posted inPolitics
Are GOP’s social media villains being coached?
Reading Time: 4 minutes The seemingly instantaneous, coordinated blow-back by Donald Trump supporters on social media whenever they believe the former president has been attacked begs the question: Are they being coached? The matches that ignite these online conflagrations are strident public alarms set off by either Trump’s own protestations or by elected sycophants in MAGA world rushing to […]
Posted inNews
Monkeypox hysteria spreads through social media
Reading Time: < 1 minute Monkeypox cases increased notably over the past week, culminating in the White House declaring a public health emergency on Thursday. Panic and anger have mounted along with it, given limited vaccine availability and continued concerns of homophobic stigma. There are stark differences between the rise of monkeypox and that of COVID-19. Monkeypox is far less […]
Posted inCulture
What Jordan Peterson got right, and what he got horribly wrong
Reading Time: 9 minutes Jordan Peterson is one of the world’s foremost dividers of opinion. And recently he quit Twitter, much to the sadness of his 2.7 million followers, after a foray into the world of sporting swimwear and beauty. Or beauty in swimwear. Or, for him, not beauty in swimwear. The New York Times once described Peterson as “the […]
Posted inSocial Media
Musk will bring Trump back to Twitter, calls the ban ‘foolish in the extreme’
Reading Time: 6 minutes Organisms generally need oxygen to survive and flourish. Certain organisms require more oxygen to reach their peak. In the social media ecosystem, whose habitats include the undrained swamps of the American elite, one apex predator once reigned supreme. And in the misinformation mudslinging and disinformation data-dumping, Trump’s famed Twitter rule came to an abrupt end. […]
Posted inSocial Media
CounterSocial isn’t the ‘new Twitter’: It’s something much better
Reading Time: 13 minutes There’s a popular myth about a frog that stays in a pot of gradually heating water until it boils to death. It’s not true. The original frog takes a bit longer, but it does hop out. And yet, our fatalist belief in the myth of the dead frog makes a lot more sense after my […]