Reading Time: 8 minutes All end-of-year lists are suspect. One must embrace futility when trying to summarize what happened on a planet of eight billion for one spin around the sun. So why do we do write them? At best, to break up our routines of knee-jerk outrage at the latest inane news item, and to think more systematically […]
Posted inSocial Media
Musk’s Twitter polls: the slopey moral shoulders of deferring decisions
Reading Time: 3 minutes The Great Elon Musk Twitter Saga continues. Most recently, Musk reignited the culture wars with his decision to “temporarily suspend” a range of journalists for apparently doxxing his 2-year-old son. Except this is not what they did, and the screenshots of those banned showed it was meant to be permanent. However, though Musk appears to […]
Posted inSocial Media
It’s a great time to quit Twitter
Reading Time: 3 minutes Elon Musk’s capricious decision-making has ruined whatever potential Twitter had. There are other social media sites that aren’t hostage to his whims.
Posted inFree Expression
“I’m a free speech absolutist!”*
Reading Time: 5 minutes Free speech is a thoroughly thorny issue, not just because it is divisive in online and offline debates, but because it is philosophically troublesome and potentially an unsolvable quandary. We all have our own lines about what is and isn’t acceptable. Everyone has a line somewhere. You would be hard-pressed to find someone who thinks […]
Posted inGaming
Using games to defuse frustration in the Dark Ages of Twitter
Reading Time: 9 minutes Sure, it’s gallows humor. But maybe sometimes we need a good laugh when things are on fire all around us.
Posted inSatire
Elon Musk now owns my local lemonade stand. And he’s destroying it.
Reading Time: 2 minutes Hi. My name is Lucy. I’m 10. Me and my best friend Miranda opened up a lemonade stand on our block. It was pretty good. At least that’s what our friends and family said. We’d sell a lot of glasses of lemonade in the summer. Maybe we got a little too popular, because one day, […]
Posted inEconomics, Social Media
How the Twitter blue checkmark debacle went from hilarious to horrifying
Reading Time: 4 minutes Who knew that if, as the newfound CEO of a huge social media company, you got rid of half of your staff, including most of your content moderation team, and many of your team leaders and experts then walked, you would be left with a hot mess? People, including corporations and the people who run […]
Posted inEconomics
The Taking: The obscene spectacle of endless wealth in few hands
Reading Time: 3 minutes Most of us live with restraints on our actions, from limited resources to personal ethics to the force of law. Unlimited resources often do away with the other two. So what keeps billionaires from doing what they want? While much of the world lost money and struggled to access limited resources throughout the pandemic, the […]
Posted inSocial Media
Musk’s free speech claim on Twitter backfires within a week
Reading Time: 3 minutes In April, the richest person in the world made an outrageous offer to buy a popular and complex social media site. What appeared at first to be a disgruntled billionaire throwing a tantrum because he couldn’t tweet what he wanted has somehow snowballed into Elon Musk actually owning Twitter. The self-described “free speech absolutist” believes […]
Posted inSocial Media
Musk, Twitter, and the future of online platforms
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 […]